Captain Rashid Khan: Talisman, identity, hope and voice of Afghan cricket shines in historic run to World Cup semi-finals | Cricket News

It was a tournament in which cricket’s master of disguise assumed at least half a dozen guises: talisman, cool head, voice, identity, hope and magician with a rolling whip.

A month ago, however, he was struggling. His team, the Gujarat Titans, finished eighth in the IPL, and he was struggling to find his rhythm, taking just 12 wickets in 10 matches and losing 8.40 runs per over. But Rashid didn’t panic. Even though the wickets weren’t coming, he knew he was getting his rhythm back. He could feel the energy in his fingers.

“I know I’m bowling well when I feel the energy in my fingers,” he tells the Indian Express. His almond-shaped eyes shine mystically when he talks about his greatest gift, which is part of what makes him the most feared and coveted player in franchise cricket. It’s no mystery, he stresses. “I happen to have strong fingers,” he whispers, almost apologetically. “A gift from nature,” he stresses again.

When he doesn’t feel the energy flowing in his fingers, he feels like someone else is doing it. “That’s more important to me than the numbers on the board. I feel like it’s not my fault, it’s someone else’s, because it doesn’t come out of my hand the way I want it to, even if I had delivered,” he explains.

In this World Cup, the ball came out of his hands exactly as he wanted it to, every movement perfectly synchronised. He destroyed Bangladesh with his classic false hits; he kept Australia guessing with a cocktail of false hits and top spinners; he traded all three wickets to India with his leg breaks.

Watching him bowl, you can see why he values ​​his fingers more than most leg-spinners. “I grip with my fingertips. This gives me more pace and control and the ball bounces off the tip of my fingers. That’s what sets me apart from other leg-spinners.”

Rashid and his usual gang of villains spun a web around Bangladesh on Monday. (ACB)

Rashid is an antithesis. He does the opposite. He bowls both the leg break and the wrong ball with the back of his hand. This means the delivery points are the same and batsmen cannot decipher the variation just by watching his wrists, which is a difficult art in itself. His wrong balls are faster than the leg breaks. The leg breaks also spin less than the wrongs. The classics swirl the leg breaks from the side of their elastic palms. There is more wrist movement and flourish, which turns it into the realm of magic. But Rashid has translated the prosaic, finger-spinned leg spin into improvised verse, his unorthodoxy appreciated with each passing day.

It helped that he had hardly any formal training. “Maybe if I had changed my movement, I would have lost my speed and rhythm.” The leg break, he says, was already there. From the moment he decided to quit fast bowling and try leg-spin and the taped ball. He has a strong influence from his idol Shahid Afridi, perhaps an improved version. He holds the ball on the tips of the first three fingers. The index finger is wrapped next to the seam, the middle finger lies like a molar just above the seam, and the thumb acts as a backrest. The gap between the index and middle fingers is huge, more like an off-spinner’s.

Unlike traditional leg spinners, the ball rests mainly on his fingers rather than on the inside of his palm. He releases the ball from the tip of his middle finger. “It came naturally and then you try to practice it as much as you can and get better and better when I was a kid. Later I found it was unique to be the opposite of all the traditional leg spinners. But I realised I had to keep getting better,” he says.

The first resort was the false delivery, now his most feared weapon. Paradoxically, his first attempts at it involved a lot of wrists in the delivery. “But I had little control and was getting hit a lot. I realised I was using more of my wrists. So I tried to throw the false delivery with the same leg-spin grip. And I worked really hard on it. Practice, practice and a lot of spot bowling until I perfected it,” he says.

Now he shows three more subtle variations of the googly. The standard variation that is used most often, then the one from a higher release point “so it gets more bounce,” and the variation he throws from the back of the middle finger, which is slower than the other two and has more breakage. He also has a flipper and a rarely used seam-up ball that is released from the side of the hand.

“I use five to six different grips,” he says, his eyes lighting up again, but he quickly puts aside the caveat: “I don’t bowl with all of these grips every day. Some days I practice with a few grips and bowl those while spot bowling or maybe during a match,” he says. He usually starts with the leg spin grip, and only if that doesn’t work does he resort to another grip. “But usually no more than two to three,” he says.

It’s more of an intimidation weapon, similar to the way Shane Warne used to unsettle batsmen by claiming before a series that he had developed a new variation. “It makes you feel good when a batsman has that many deliveries. So the bowler likes to have that many options to bowl,” he says.

He explains the analogy. “Before, you would think, oh, this batsman is very good at driving. This batsman is going to make a cut. Now everyone is coming and playing 360-degree shots, playing the reverse sweep or hitting over extra cover. So as a bowler, you have to bring something new as well. That way you can make the batsmen think and guess, okay, what ball is coming or what grip he is using. That uncertainty in thinking helps you to stay one step ahead of them.”

Add in his masterful change of pace and he becomes an unstoppable force. Around 50 percent of his shots are under 85 kmph; almost 30 percent exceed 95 kmph. Few spinners work with such an extreme range. This makes it difficult for him to plan or uncork the horizontal shots in advance. Most end up playing directly against him. His economy rate of 6.45 from a gigantic haul of 419 games is testament to this. He again attributes it to his fingers and dismisses it as natural.

His quick run-up, the glowing embers of his ambitions as a fast bowler, helps him bring momentum to the pitch. “If my run-up isn’t quick, I don’t manage to throw the ball out as quickly. It gives me momentum through the pitch and more energy for the throw,” he says. One thing flows into the other – the run-up, the arm speed, the energy in the fingers and the quick release.

Still, he is not satisfied that he has created enough variations. “I’m always trying something new, something inventive, to make my game better and better,” he says. You might think the net is a big laboratory where the avant-garde spin artist experiments with different grips, release points and angles, constantly playing around with his fingers, fluttering them with the fury of a hummingbird. “You try to get this finger involved and then that finger involved with the same grip and everything else. And you try to see a different reaction from the wicket,” he says.

But the sustained effectiveness of his bowling, he says, is his relentless control. “Tough questions mean bowling in one area over and over and making the batsmen think about what I should do. For me it means bowling consistently in one area and varying it. That makes the batsmen more cautious and me more effective. The more consistent I am with my line and length, the more effective I think I am in the long run.”

A simple self-assessment, but for batsmen it is more complex. But it is not just the ability that defines the man, but also the energy, the joy of life, the sheer intensity and the sheer determination to shed every last drop of his sweat for the team’s cause.