Zaheer Abbas

Zaheer Abbas
ظہیر عباس
Personal information
Full name Syed Zaheer Abbas
Born (1947-07-24) 24 July 1947
Sialkot, Punjab, Pakistan
Batting style Right-handed batsman
Bowling style Right-arm offbreak
Career statistics
Competition Test ODI FC
Matches 78 62 459
Runs scored 5062 2572 34843
Batting average 44.79 47.62 51.54
100s/50s 12/20 7/23 108/158
Top score 274 153 274
Balls bowled 370 280 2582
Wickets 3 7 30
Bowling average 44.00 31.85 38.20
5 wickets in innings – – 1
10 wickets in match – – –
Best bowling 2/21 2/26 5/15
Catches/stumpings 34/- 16/- 278/-
Source: CricketArchive, 6 November 2005

Syed Zaheer Abbas Kirmani (in Punjabi and Urdu: سید ظہیر عباس کرمانی; born 24 July 1947), popularly known as Zaheer Abbas, is a former Pakistani cricketer, regarded as one of the finest batsmen produced by that country. He is among few professional cricketers who used to wear spectacles. In 1982/1983, he became the first batsman to score three consecutive centuries in one-day internationals.[1]

Career

Abbas made his Test match debut in 1969, and in his second Test he scored 274 against England, still the fourth ever highest score by a Pakistani batsman. This was the first of four Test double-centuries that Abbas made; only ten men have scored more.[2] The last was an innings of 215 against India in 1983, the first of three centuries in consecutive Tests, and his hundredth first-class century; Abbas and Geoffrey Boycott are the only two batsmen to have scored their hundredth first-class century in a Test match.[3]

Abbas, fondly called the "Run Machine", also had great success in first-class cricket, and was the first Asian batsman to score one hundred first class centuries.[4] He had a long stint with Gloucestershire county club; joining the county in 1972, he remained there for thirteen years. During that time he scored over a thousand runs in the majority of his thirteen seasons. He also made over two thousand runs in a single season on two occasions for the club (1976 and 1981). During those thirteen years at Gloucestershire, he played 206 First Class games, scoring over 16,000 runs. He averaged 49.79, hitting 49 hundreds and 76 fifties. Abbas is the only player to have scored a century and double century in a first-class match 4 times, finishing each of the 8 innings not out.[5]

Sunil Gavaskar, the former Indian Test captain, once said while commentating that the Indian players would often say to Zaheer, "Zaheer Ab-bas karo", which means "Zaheer, stop it now" in Urdu and Hindi, referring to Abbas' free scoring.

Abbas had two stints as captain of the national team in 1981 and 1984. He retired from international cricket in 1985, and has officiated as a match referee in one Test and three ODI matches. He has also worked as the manager of the national team. In 2015 he became ICC president, the third cricketer after Colin Cowdrey and Clyde Walcott, to hold the post.[6]

Zaheer Abbas's career performance graph.

Style

At his best, Zaheer was a fluent, gifted strokemaker.

Imran Khan once noted that if he and Javed Miandad were to bat together at their best, Zaheer would easily overtake the latter. It was not uncommon for him to return with a strike rate of over 80 in big hundreds even in test matches as the Indians in 1982–83 came to know.

Bowlers aimed to bring the ball in to him to get him out since against outswing, 'he was the best', as Kapil Dev noted when asked about the best batsmen he had bowled to after he had become the highest wicket-taker in 1994. These attributes made him unconquerable on English wickets where medium-pace and finger-spin was the staple on soft, wickets with little bounce.

He was consistent, without being spectacular in Australia where fast wickets aided his natural gift for timing and his height enabled him more leverage on the front foot than some others in addition to his natural ability to cut and pull.

For all his strengths though, Zaheer was not a man of crises unlike his contemporaries, Asif Iqbal and Majid Khan and later Javed Miandad. None of his 12 hundreds came under testing situations and apart from his 80 at Guyana against the West Indies in 1977, even his fifties were generally fair-weather efforts. His reputation was forged by his four double-hundreds, including two big ones in England, and two high-scoring series against India at home, apart from which he was generally inconsistent, except when playing county cricket, a fact surprisingly lost on some of the most seasoned Pakistani experts including Qamar Ahmed who found his consistency at Test level 'phenomenal'.

With fewer bouncers, flatter wickets and a requirement to score quickly, he was more at ease in limited-overs cricket than perhaps any other batsman in the history other than Viv Richards with a record that was ahead of its era: His career was over by 1985 by which time, he had racked up over 2500 runs in just 60-odd games with 7 hundreds and a strike rate of 84 (over 5 runs an over) in an era when 4 runs an over was considered exceptional batting. He was at his peak during the 1982–83 season (already mentioned above) when he hit four one-day international hundreds, regularly reaching the three-figure mark off 70 to 80 balls effortlessly. His versatility lay in adapting his game according to the situation as Australians once found out when he calmly and quietly compiled a swift 84 off 100 odd balls without a boundary.

Career highlights

Test centuries

Zaheer Abbas's Test Centuries
No. Runs Match Against City/Country Venue Year
1. 274 2  England Birmingham, England Edgbaston 1971
2. 240 15  England London, England The Oval 1974
3. 101 21  Australia Adelaide, Australia Adelaide Oval 1976
4. 176 27  India Faislabad, Pakistan Iqbal Stadium 1978
5. 235* 28  India Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1978
6. 135 31  New Zealand Auckland, New Zealand Eden Park 1979
7. 134 46  Sri Lanka Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1982
8. 126 51  Australia Faislabad, Pakistan Iqbal Stadium 1982
9. 215 53  India Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1982
10. 186 54  India Karachi, Pakistan National Stadium 1982
11. 168 55  India Faislabad, Pakistan Iqbal Stadium 1983
12. 168* 70  India Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1984

One Day International centuries

Zaheer Abbas's One Day International Centuries
No. Runs Match Against City/Country Venue Year
1. 108 20  Australia Sydney, Australia Sydney Cricket Ground 1981
2. 123 26  Sri Lanka Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1982
3. 109 31  Australia Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1982
4. 118 34  India Multan, Pakistan Multan Cricket Stadium 1982
5. 105 35  India Lahore, Pakistan Gaddafi Stadium 1982
6. 113 36  India Karachi, Pakistan National Stadium 1983
7. 103* 42  New Zealand Nottingham, England Trent Bridge 1983

References

  1. ↑ Hundreds in consecutive innings espncricinfo.com Retrieved 17 March 2012
  2. ↑ Test Records – Most double hundreds in a career
  3. ↑ Pakistan v India at Lahore, 1982
  4. ↑ Most centuries in First Class cricket
  5. ↑ Lynch, Steven. "How many people have scored a double-century and a hundred in the same first-class match?". Ask Steven - Cricinfo.com. Retrieved 4 June 2012.
  6. ↑ Abbasi, Kamran (August 13, 2015). "In praise of Zed". ESPN Cricinfo. Retrieved August 14, 2015.
Sporting positions
Preceded by
Javed Miandad		 Pakistan Cricket Captain
1981–1982 		Succeeded by
Imran Khan
Preceded by
Sarfraz Nawaz		 Pakistan Cricket Captain
1984–1985 		Succeeded by
Imran Khan
Preceded by
Mustafa Kamal		 President of the ICC
2015-Present 		Succeeded by
Present
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