Kaneria ready to take flight
"As a child Danish just wanted to bowl and bowl and bowl all the time," says his mother. And Pakistan's latest leg-break sensation has not changed since. Osman Samiuddin meets a young man on a tireless mission
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The front lounge chez Kaneria is dominated by two corners. One houses a large television and the other is a homage to their son, a shelf bearing portraits, trophies and a number of match balls. At the other end of the room, almost discreet, is a temple area, a reminder that Danish Parabha Shanker Kaneria is a Hindu, only the second to play cricket for Pakistan, following his cousin Anil Dalpat. "As a child," his mother continues, seeing me glance at cricket balls strewn on the couch, "he just wanted to bowl and bowl and bowl all the time. In the lounge, in his room, he would have a ball permanently in his hand."
"Half Kumble, half Mushtaq," wrote Greg Baum of the Melbourne Age on Kaneria during last year's second Australia-Pakistan Test, inviting deconstruction. Leg-spinners are no longer as rare as they once were. Where once Donald Woods, enchanted by Abdul Qadir's peculiar rhythms in 1982, penned a fanciful ode to "the most subtle and sinister of all cricketing arts" - and at the time a forgotten one - now two of the top five Test wicket-takers in the world are leg-spinners. Qadir, a handy mystical, almost mythical Eastern caricature, made leg-spin acceptable. Shane Warne, bleached blond, with a soap-opera life and no less a caricature, made it fashionable. Anil Kumble, studious and often bespectacled, made it academic. Now stands Danish Kaneria, who is none of them but may be a little bit of all of them at once.
He does not have the aura that was created around Qadir, though in Pakistan his Hindu faith may have the potential for enigma. He possesses the barest hint of Qadir's action and looks clumsier and hunched when he jumps before delivery, because he is considerably taller than Qadir. Kaneria's left arm looks contorted, Qadir says, and can be used more effectively. But he has some of the variation and as imperceptible a googly; it has the stamp of approval from Richie Benaud, who reckons it the best-disguised wrong 'un he has seen.
Furthermore, like Warne, he has accuracy. Where once he delivered a four-ball often enough, he rarely does so now. "I think my greatest strength is my control over line and length," says Kaneria. "Once you have that, then you can try all your variations. It comes only from long hours of net bowling. If you have accuracy as a leg-spinner, you are the real deal."
Although Kaneria confesses to being bewildered by Kumble - "His grip is so strange" - he shares with him some useful traits. Kaneria's high arm action, coupled with his 6ft 2in frame, produces bounce from the most placid pitches and he has the same indefatigable tenacity, an unbending perseverance. Against Sri Lanka at Karachi last October he snared 10 wickets in the match and bowled 60 overs in the second innings. On the fourth day, with Kumar Sangakkara leading a stoic rearguard, Kaneria toiled for most of the day, unchanged between lunch and tea. He did not get the wickets then - those came after tea - but over after over he bounded in, fidgeted, experimented, appealed, frowned, attacked, all with unflinching intensity. At Melbourne and Sydney in the first innings he bowled 40 and 50 overs respectively.
Rashid Latif, who took Kaneria into his academy early in 2000, says he has never seen a cricketer who loves to bowl so much. Kaneria's explanation is simple. "I just love bowling. I love having the ball in my hand all the time," he says, twirling the match ball from Sydney, occasionally giving it a fearsome rip and making a whipping noise with his wrist as he does so. His spinning fingers, the first and third, are not quite right, heavily swollen at the joints. His wife, he says, gets annoyed with him because he might do long-term damage.
Comparisons make him squirm, not out of disrespect but rather a fierce, almost obsessive, desire to be his own man. He has done, and will do, most things in life by himself, he says - not as a boast but as a plea to be seen in his own light. Asked whether he sought out Warne in Australia, he says: "I spoke to him but I didn't ask him for advice or anything. People say I should have asked him but why? I want to make a name for myself and I want to do it myself." And Mushtaq Ahmed, with whom he played, and Qadir, by whom he was inspired? "Look, any cricketer, no matter how senior or experienced, learns only from playing. Every time you play, you learn from it. I can ask someone to teach me something but eventually I have to go out and do it myself on the field, so I may as well be my own teacher.
"I haven't ever asked my cousin for anything," he adds. It is not rudeness or even insecurity, rather the affirmation of a young man keen to do things by himself. As a youngster he refused to buy Pakistan team merchandise shirts. "It isn't good. I wanted Pakistan to give me the uniform because I earned it, not because I bought it," he argues. His family says he has always been like this, more so after he went to play in a collegiate tournament in Sahiwal when he was 15. It was the first time he had been away from home and the experience, they say, toughened him up.
In Australia a changed Kaneria emerged, a culmination of sorts. It was one of several pivotal moments in his development. Although he can now say, "Even if I keep getting hit, I don't mind because I will get wickets", it has not always been thus. Kamran Abbasi, in Wisden Asia Cricket, noted that Kaneria's personality - and not his talent - could be his failing. He was "a little too straight, a little too nice," when he needed the aggression, which the best leg-spinners have, of a fast bowler. It was a popular theory. Latif and Qadir both say that too often, early in his career, Kaneria's face would fall if he started getting dominated. He would retreat into his shell. That is partly why, when he feasted on Bangladesh in 2001, he was seen as a soft option, although he disagrees. "Somebody had to take wickets against them," he says. "That was my job and I did it."
In Australia he bared his teeth, stared down batsmen, sledged, swore (losing one match fee for it) and kept coming at them - a fast bowler trapped in a spinner's body. What brought it about? "I wasn't like this two years ago, although I have always had aggression in me. People used to hold me back but I don't listen any more. My team-mates say I'm crazy and the management is always having a go. But, if I don't act it, I feel something is missing. Also, when Australians face young bowlers, they dominate from the start. I wasn't going to let them do that to me. I wanted to take it to them."
The Australians loved it. After sweeping him for four twice in succession at Sydney Justin Langer was bowled round his legs with a googly, as Kaneria persevered. It was a cussedness of which Langer would have been proud and, when he went into the dressing room to call Kaneria a cheeky little so-and-so for even trying it, it was a grudging acknowledgement.
Given the trade Kaneria plies and the peculiar demands it makes on the psyche, that trait is essential. The modus operandi of leg-spinners is almost masochistic. Qadir calls it being thick-skinned: you get hit around but you get used to taking punishment so that you can keep coming back for more and reap the reward. Cowas Mulla, Kaneria's uncle, mentor and the man who contributed most to his rise, calls it being dheet, stubborn bordering on pig-headed. "As a kid I told him to say to batsmen, `Maar beta, maar' [Go on, hit me]." Kaneria had to be dheet to succeed, he had to be blown away, ripped apart and still come back to take his wicket. In Australia he was unflaggingly dheet.
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The time spent at Essex last season has also been crucial. "I loved the experience. I got to bowl very long spells and really start to think about my bowling. I was bowling against all sorts of batsmen on all sorts of pitches and, because I bowled so much, l learnt a lot. Even when I went through bad patches, I was learning every day."
The first ball Kaneria bowled in Test cricket was, audaciously, a googly. It had been preceded by ridiculous levels of hype that no bowler, let alone a 19-year-old, should be subjected to. When Nasser Hussain's England arrived in Pakistan in late 2000, word was out that a new spinning wunderkind was about to be unleashed on a traditionally susceptible opponent. He got a wicket in his third over - with a googly - but, although he did not disgrace himself, he predictably did not live up to the hype. "I was expected to blow them away by myself," he recalls. "It was too much pressure."
The expectations were nonetheless well founded. Everything about Kaneria's rise hinted at something special. He had been inspired as a nine-year old by Qadir's exploits: "I loved the way he made batsmen dance." Mulla reckons Kaneria saw in Qadir's short, stocky figure an ideal role model. "He was very fat and very short," Mulla remembers of his ward. "He always loved bowling but, because he was short, he would struggle to get the ball from one end of a pitch to the other." Thus emerged a natural solution: use a high arm action to give the ball enough flight in order to pitch it further. Mulla's own fear of leg-spinners as a schoolboy cricketer - in the inter-school Ruby Shield in the 1950s, against a legendary leggie Blaze D'Cuna - convinced him to turn Kaneria's wrists to leg-spin. "He bowled such a fantastic parabola naturally that I asked him to spin it and he got some big turn."
At St Patrick's school - nursery to prominent Karachi cricketers, including Javed Miandad - Kaneria played cricket in PE. The school coach noticed him and picked him to play for the school team, despite the principal's objection that he was too young. He would bowl six overs, take wickets and get taken off because he was so unfit. He joined Don Bosco's Club after that and decided to shed some weight. "Mohinder Kumar, a first-class cricketer, ran an academy at Nishtar Park and, after watching me at practice, he asked me to come to his academy to improve my fitness," says Kaneria. There he ran, ran some more and began simultaneously to lose weight and gain height.
A move to a bigger club and platform, Umar CC, followed, as did selection for Karachi U-19. And, though it was "a terrible debut; it was too cold and I dropped a sitter," people persisted. Nasir Wasti, coach of Pakistan National Shipping Corporation, snapped him up. On debut against Habib Bank in 1998-99 he impressed Saleem Malik enough for the bank to sign him soon after. He made his Pakistan U19 debut against South Africa that season and, though he took only nine wickets, he bowled 136 overs in five innings - a portent.
The U19 World Cup at the beginning of 2000, and in particular his dismantling of an Australian side skippered by Michael Clarke - he took 5 for 17 in 10 overs - propelled Kaneria into the national limelight. After a stint at Latif's academy, alongside Asim Kamal and Mohammad Sami, and selection for various national camps, he was bowling a first-ball googly to Marcus Trescothick at Faisalabad. "I had a feeling that season I would play. But they kept picking me in all the warm-up game squads and then not playing me. Then Tauqir Zia called me up and told me, `Don't worry. You will play in the Test. You are our secret weapon'."
Now, 23 Tests and 102 wickets later, Pakistan expects and India awaits. Kaneria seems unfazed at the prospect of India but not dismissive. "I have strategies for the batsmen but there is no point in worrying about them. It's my first time there, the pitches will be different, as will the ball." Of more concern, and no little frustration, is his exclusion from the one-day squad. Latif, who as captain did pick him, says it is a question of giving him what he needs. "We set unusual fields for him. We blocked off all singles for batsmen and let them have gaps on the boundary." Maybe his batting, in the Glenn McGrath league, and his Bambi-esque fielding play against him. Perhaps his penchant for experimentation - "my hands are always itching to try something different to take a wicket" - does not go well with the strictures of ODI cricket. But Kaneria senses it is only a matter of time. "Warne was pretty successful, as was Kumble. I will be back in the side soon."
Pakistani spinners, and not just wrist-spinners, operate under the shadow of Abdul Qadir. It is not as if the country's experience with leg-spin is as nascent as that of other countries - after all, Mushtaq Mohammad and Intikhab Alam before Qadir, and Mushtaq Ahmed after, constitute an accomplished tradition. But Qadir towers above them, not only because of his wickets tally, the highest for a Pakistani spinner, but for the broader ramifications of his emergence. Saqlain and Mushtaq threatened to dislodge his pre-eminence but never quite did. Like Kaneria they came of age on tours to Australia but maybe lacked his heart and spirit. So the legacy Kaneria inherits is rich and unfulfilled. Of course, he does not worry about that: "You can't mess with destiny. As long as I work hard, what happens will happen." He wants, typically, to go beyond the greatest of them all, Warne, and Latif thinks he can. He will not fail for want of trying.
This article was first published in the April issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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