Abdul Qadir's stats look very ordinary, but simply had the fact that he was Pakistan's greatest spinner.
I think it is more than just that.
Leg spinners were a dying breed. A genuine, slow, leg spinner (not medium paced one like O'Reilly and Chadrashekhar) hadn't been seen in the world since Richie Benaud. It is fascinating to see how wrist spinners were dying as a tribe after a great resurgence in the art immediately after WWI
Have a look. The world always had a great leg spinner for 40 years; from 1920 till the beginning of the 1960's.
- Early 1920's : Mailey
- Mid '20's - mid '30's : Grimmett
- 1940's : Doug Wright
- 1950's : Subhash Gupte and Richie Benaud.
Suddenly after Benaud and Gupte, the world seemed to stop producing leg spinners. It was not a coincidence that it coincided with the dullest phase in cricket's history. The Test matches turned into wars of attrition. Batting became dogged, dour and defensive, wickets became dead and deader and the bowling became steady and completely focussed on keeping team totals within manageable proportions. Draws became the order of the day and an assortment of medium paced bowlers and finger spinners became the foot-soldiers of all attacks.
The process had started in the fifties when after Bradman's retirement, England started building its defenses against another 'invasion' and long drawn occupation by any future enemies. The fifties started the process and it culminated in the sixties with the complete transformation of the game from a spectacle to a tedious boring affair. The disease spread throughout the game into the first class level and the crowds started staying away from county games.
This gave rise to the the first reactionary move by the cricketing establishment - the limited overs game - at the beginning of the 1970's. Instead of doing something for the direction the game was taking for almost two decades, the 'clerks' that ran the Imperial Cricket Conference decided that the problem was with the spectator and he needed a 'fix'. A dose of the potent stuff would make it easier for him to live with the tedious experience that his staple diet bestowed upon him.
Of course, it was no cure and as with all drugs, steroids and painkillers, it brought its own side effects; many of them permanent in nature. But as we say in the sub-continent "Neem hakim khatra-e-jaan" (Trans: A quack or half doctor is dangerous to the patient's life). But we digress.
The 'dull dogs' that cricketers were called in the fifties and sixties, had no place in their 'packs' for the adventurous and exciting wrist spinners so we did not see one at the world stage for almost two decades after Gupte and Benaud.
In between we had a large number of great finger spinners starting with Titmus, Illinworth, Gibbs and Prasanna in the sixties to Venkat, Bedi, Underwood and Mallett in the seventies; but no leg spinner. A whole generation of cricket fans had grown up without having seen a world class wrist spinner operating.
And then came Qadir. With his quirky 'hop, step and leap' terminating in a whirl of activity in that windmill like action, he was a phenomenon. On top of that, unlike another quirky wrist spinner of our times from South Africa, he was deadly accurate and had a massive bag of tricks. He took our imaginations by storm. In a world where to be a superstar at cricket you had to be a batsman likeRichard, Gavaskar, Chappell, Zaheer or a fast bowler like Lillee Thomson, Roberts and Holding, he was a super-star leg spinner. Qadir was as big a star in his time as Warne became twenty years later; and he did not need any off field peccadilloes for that
No. Qadir was not just Pakistan's greatest spinner - he was the leg spinner that ended the twenty year drought of slow and flighty wrist spinners at the world stage. Warne was to perform the same feet another twenty years later but Abdul Qadir was the first.
PS : To say that his stats look ordinary is to show a lack of appreciation for a great art. You can not decide on the relative quality of masterpieces of art by their relative sizes.
