His muscular frame speeding up to the wicket, his hair falling all over the place, and releasing those thunderbolts from hell: it was beastly, yet beautiful to behold. Shoaib Akhtar in full flight was one of cricket’s most exhilarating sights in the decades either side of the millennium.
At 46, he is of course no longer the incredibly quick bowler that would get the better of the best batters of the time. Remember those swinging yorkers that cleaned up Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, off successive balls, in the Kolkata Test of 1999?
