The portents were bad when he went down after a fielding mishap, clutching his knee. A few minutes later he was bowling a spell for the ages
Jarrod Kimber in Brisbane15-Dec-2016The ball was slowly trickling to the boundary, but no one went to pick it up. The crowd began jeering the terrible bit of fielding – Mohammad Amir committed worse mistakes on Thursday – but as he dropped to the field, the jeers turned into a concerned collection of whispers.Amir buried his face in the turf as he clutched his knee. He couldn’t keep still through the pain.His knee didn’t slide on the ground, it dug in. His weight went towards the ball, but his knee did not. His first instinct was to go after the ball, but as he moved, grabbing for it in mid-air, he just collapsed.Mark Taylor suggested he had a kneecap problem, those in the pool swam across for a closer look and medics from both teams converged on Amir. Some non-experts noticed swelling, others a cruciate ligament injury, the sort that ended players’ careers every footy season in Australia. It was the kind of pointless speculation you do when there was a star crumpled before you. Simon Jones was mentioned a lot, and no one was talking about magical reverse swing from the 2005 Ashes.A stretcher was called for, but none came. So Amir was helped over the boundary by support staff. People start to talk about why it had to be him. We hadn’t seen him unleashed in the series, or at all since he got back to Tests, and now it looked like he could be out of order.His last 39 balls were dots, which seemed to be part of the Misbah-ul-Haq plan to get to dusk and then hope something happened. But it wasn’t dusk yet, we hadn’t seen what the pink ball could do under dark Gabba skies. We hadn’t seen anything. It got darker in the incredibly long time it seemed to take the ambulance cart to make it out to him.Amir has overcome stupidity, criminal acts, jail time and five years out of professional sport, and now stopping a ball at fine leg had brought him down.On the outfield, there was an enormous divot and, despite the break in play, no one covered it up. Pakistan had a similar-sized hole in their team.The message from the PCB was not to worry; the early signs were good, they said. But how could you not? An entire army of people were down on the boundary helping Amir out. He couldn’t even hobble the 80 metres to the change room.At drinks in the final session, 18 minutes after Amir had fallen, a groundsman went out and filled in his divot. Twelve minutes after that, Amir jogged back onto the field. His recovery had seemingly taken less time than it took for the ambulance cart to reach him. As he ran across the outfield you could almost sense the different sections of the crowd realising it was him. There was a sound wave of people saying, “What’s all this about?”Was he brave, stupid, or soft? Did it even matter? The new ball was due soon and he was obviously going to take it. Maybe, if you squinted with your head on the side, he was limping. But he still took that brand new fluorescent pink ball.
It was the kind of magical spell Test cricket has been waiting to see from Amir for years, and he’d been waiting for it the most.
Amir didn’t trample the turf like Wahab Riaz. He wasn’t a killer semi-trailer like Ryan Harris. He floated across the grass, barely making an impact, and even at the crease there was no violent crash. It was more a little skip and the ball zipped out of his fingers. This man whose kneecap was dislocated, whose anterior cruciate was torn, whose day, Test and series were over, was delivering a ball to Peter Handscomb like nothing was wrong.Until the third step of his follow through. And there was a limp, a worry, but he went back to the top of his mark and floated in a couple more times. Handscomb took a single off the the third ball; it was the first run off him in the last 42, delivered either side of a trip on the ambulance cart.The fourth ball was the Amir that made lovers of fast bowling cry when they first heard the news of his fixing all those years ago. It shaped to drift in, just short of a length, and then decided to go away, at pace. To get near it, you would have to be one of the best batsmen in the world, and Steven Smith was. The ball went through to Sarfraz Ahmed, who threw it to slip as Amir walked back to his mark.Later, after a few replays, it was clear Smith had edged the ball and, instead of enjoying his wicket, Amir finished the over hopping and grabbing at his knee, his trousers still stained from his fall.For the next little bit, he bowled more trademark Amir balls, the kind that made you gasp and despair at their beauty as they beat the bat. One was so good Smith seemed angry at its existence as he tried to recreate the kind of alien movement it got with his hand. There were more than went past Handscomb too; one of them took the edge but fell short of slip.It was the kind of magical spell Test cricket has been waiting to see from Amir for years, and he’d been waiting for it the most. The only problem was, though he might have overcome serious injury, he couldn’t take a wicket. As good as he was, as dangerous as he looked, and as much drama as he had created – none of it mattered when the edges did not carry, or when they weren’t spotted. His Lazarus rise was ultimately pointless.They say you can’t tell much from just seeing the stats, but you could from Amir’s on day one at the Gabba: Three limps, 18 overs, one knee injury, six maidens, one ambulance cart, one wicket, one injury, 33 runs and one miraculous recovery.
