When Fazalhaq Farooqi was a teenager, his friends used to tease him for being a fast bowler. Spin bowling was such a frenzy in Afghanistan that some would suggest him to bowl left-arm wrist spin because he could play in a lot of franchise leagues that way.
“They were joking, of course, but that was the perception. In their mind, only Afghanistan spinners could play overseas leagues, not batsmen, and definitely not spinners,” Farooqi says in a Sunrisers Hyderabad video. But he listened to his inner voice and became a mould-breaker in Afghan cricket, the first of their genuine fast bowlers.
Left-arm seamers, the exceptional ones, wield an aura, but there are only faint outlines of a halo around Farooqi. He doesn’t quite glide along the green carpet, doesn’t possess a bagful of impish variations, he makes the ball talk plain prose rather than grand verse, but makes batsmen’s life hellish. He bends the ball into the right-hander, not devilishly, but moderately; and shapes the ball away from them. From the same run-up, point of release, same length, same line, and with the same eager expression.
In effect, he has demystified the fabled magic of the left-armer. But underestimating him is a self-inflicted peril. Ask some of the Indian batsmen he tormented in the Super Eight fixture of the T20 World Cup last year. A slower ball deceived Rohit Sharma into pulling prematurely. An away-going cutter induced a miscue from Suryakumar Yadav. A wickedly slow bouncer foxed Ravindra Jadeja.
But Farooqi gloriously undersells himself. During the last T20 World Cup, where he was the joint highest wicket-taker with Arshdeep Singh, he explained his simple craft in simpler terms: “For me, my mentality is simple. Whenever I was playing Under-19s or Under-16s, I thought: I’m not a big man. I’m not someone big and tall and bowling very fast. At that time, I was just thinking of improving my skill to do something different from the others. I was going to learn to bowl swing and that now for me is simple.”
His method is not merely about keeping the ball in the channel and moving it both ways; he has a well-disguised slower ball, some he rolls his fingers over, some others he employs the knuckles. He is adept at shuffling lengths, he goes from full to short without any discernible change in action or release. The slower-ball variations he attributes to the schooling Dwayne Bravo offered him during his stint as a bowling consultant during the World Cup.
Quality performer
These simple virtues he constantly talks about have yielded him 57 wickets in 46 games, an average of 19.42, a strike every 17th ball, and more impressively an economy rate of 6.80, which is pure gold in the T20 format. He is a Powerplay executioner – 33 wickets of his have come in the first six overs, where most modern batsmen are most destructive. The wickets he coerces lay the platform for the gang of spinners, the identity of Afghanistan cricket, to stifle the batsmen.
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Farooqi has the love and admiration of his teammates too. Rashid Khan would say: “Someone like Fazal, coming in and attacking each and every ball, allows us to have a strong base as a bowling unit. And then it does help you in the middle overs as well if you get a couple of wickets… We are lucky to have him in the side [because he] gives us the best start with the new ball and then makes the job a little bit easier in the middle.”
Rashid is sometimes so playful with him that he distracts him during pitch-side interviews, leaving Farooqi in a puddle of chuckles.
With the ball in hand, he exudes peace. He doesn’t bristle with aggression; he barely exchanges stares or words, his eyes are not bloodshot, as those of mean fast bowlers are meant to be. There are no excesses, no wastage of energy. A wicket, a prized one at that, could sometimes instigate vivid celebrations.
Off the field, he says, he likes “aarami” songs, those that help him relax, and not “mast songs”. Love for Sanjay Dutt’s dialogue rendition style is perhaps the only variety of flash he likes.
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The trait of equanimity perhaps owes to the hardships Farooqi endured in childhood, growing up in Baghlan, a city in north-eastern Afghanistan, most famous for sugar and cotton production, and one of the provinces that has historically resisted the Taliban.
During Farooqi’s childhood, even electricity was a luxury, forget cricket. “There was no regular electricity until a few years ago,” he tells the Sunrisers Hyderabad website. “Then another problem was there was no television. If there was one TV in one house, and if electricity was there, all the people used to flock around that television. So there was no place for all of us to sit. And because I was young, they would not allow me to watch TV. If I was peeping through some other window or some other place, I used to get shooed away. I faced a lot of difficulties even watching matches. Until 2017, I could not watch TV easily. All I dreamt was a time when I could sit and watch television peacefully. Now I can watch it,” he says, with a bashful smile.
Role model
It was around the time Afghanistan cricket had begun to make strides on the global circuit, when names like Mohammad Nabi and Rashid Khan, the hardships they endured in their childhood, their escape from the country, and days in refugee camps captured a younger generation of Afghan cricketers. Unlike Nabi and Rashid, and most of the older generation, Farooqi did not learn the game in camps in Pakistan. There are no great escape stories in his narrative.
But he had his own challenges. “Football was a bigger sport in my village, and it’s only when the national team started winning games that we started following cricket. There was no academy where someone could teach us the game. We didn’t have good bats or hard balls. All of us used to play with tennis balls, even if they were worn out. Then much later, the cricket board opened an academy, and we got bats and balls for free. From there, my journey started, then I got into the provincial side, the junior national side, and finally the national team.”
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He is now as indispensable as his country’s spinners. But he is more than that, his country’s first fast-bowling icon, one who could inspire a hundred others for generations. It’s his ambition too.
“Wherever you go, and on social media, people talk a lot about Afghanistan’s spinners. It is because we have good spinners, role models like Rashid and Mujeeb (Ur Rahman). Similarly, I want to inspire the youngsters in the country to become fast bowlers. People should say Afghanistan has not only good spinners but also fast bowlers. For that, I have to achieve something,” he says.
Farooqi is well on his way; he is already one of the finest left-arm seamers in the world. A hazy aura too is forming around him.
