by Tim Wigmore
After thriving in Afghanistan’s domestic cricket and in the U-19 World Cup, Rashid made his one-day international debut against Zimbabwe in late 2015, aged 17. ‘Representing a country, which has faced lots of difficulties – in war, and these things – it really felt something special.’ Immediately his combination of accurate leg spin at high speeds, and an almost indecipherable googly, marked Rashid out as a thrilling player. In 2016 he thrived in the T20 World Cup in India. A year later, Rashid was signed up by the IPL.
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Since its earliest days, cricket has been a sport besotted with hierarchies. From the distinction between ‘Gentlemen’ (wealthy cricketers who played as unpaid amateurs) and ‘Players’ (grubby professionals who played for money) which survived in England until 1962, to the distinction between Full and Associate Members of the ICC, and the existence of Test and one-day international ‘status’ for matches, cricket has always sought to demarcate strictly between those inside its hallowed elite and those locked outside the gates.
The size of its global events embodies cricket’s elitism, conservatism and disregard for those on the outside looking in. The 2019 Cricket World Cup – the men’s World Cup in the 50-over format – contained only ten teams, a reduction of six from 2007. Perversely the reduction, according to numerous ICC sources, was driven by emerging countries having the temerity to win matches they shouldn’t have done, thereby knocking India and Pakistan, and their enormous television audiences, out in the first round of the 2007 World Cup. The men’s T20 World Cup, lauded as the globalisation vehicle, was only scheduled to include 12 teams in its main stage in 2012 – the same as kabaddi, eight fewer than rugby union and 20 fewer than basketball. International cricket, with its strict divisions between teams, and the way in which fixtures and money are tied to a country’s status rather than their on-field results, has been where meritocracy goes to die.
T20 holds out the hope of shattering this elitist cabal. While the pinnacle of 50-over and multi-day cricket remains in the international game, the ecosystem of T20 much more closely resembles that of football and other sports. The format’s World Cup has huge appeal and is the flagship tournament. But besides that event – about a month every two years – the most high-profile T20 is found in domestic leagues.
Such leagues don’t care where cricketers are from, or what status their nation is – only their quality. And so for cricketers from outside cricket’s elite nations, T20 leagues offer the promise of a path from obscurity to playing with and against the world’s best.
A few years earlier, before the T20 boom, Rashid’s journey would have been inconceivable. His talent wouldn’t have mattered when set against the biggest problem: Rashid was from Afghanistan, and cricketers from outside the Full Members were automatically treated as second rate. Their countries were denied fixtures, funding or a fair chance. However talented a player, he would have scant chance of rising above obscurity.
T20 takes a revolutionary approach to determining what a player may be able to achieve: domestic teams judge players on how they play, not where they come from. The format is cricket’s great democratising tool, a unique avenue for players from smaller nations to be elevated to the elite.
At the start of his career, Rashid was still hampered by teams thinking of cricketers through the prism of these old hierarchies. If a cricketer was from outside the old ten Full Members, it followed that they were less good. England, extraordinarily, still bar all players not from Full Member nations from being overseas players.
In the first years of the IPL, the best way to get a contract as an overseas player was to be Australian. It helped that there were so many Australian coaches. From 2008 to 2018, the average Australian coach picked 2.8 Australians among their overseas players each season, according to the T20 analyst Dan Weston; the average coach not from Australia picked half as many Australians. Too often squads in the IPL, and beyond, were determined by who players knew, not what they could do.
‘Somebody has to be the first,’ said Kabir Khan, then the Afghanistan coach, in 2012. ‘Somebody has to be the first to have a contract with a county, or in grade cricket or in the IPL, the Bangladesh league or the Sri Lankan league.
‘If the door is open, you can go through it. At the moment the door is shut, and we want someone to start to open it.’
Four years later, Rashid thrived in the T20 World Cup. Yet still he found it hard to get a chance in T20 leagues around the world.
A.R. Srikkanth, the meticulous analyst for Kolkata and in other leagues, was the first to sign Rashid up to a major league, recruiting him to the Bangladesh Premier League at the end of 2016. Rashid excelled, conceding only six runs an over.
Watching Rashid’s performance, Srikkanth immediately started messaging Kolkata’s senior figures about Rashid over WhatsApp, arguing that Rashid would augment Kolkata’s spin-heavy strategy. But Gautam Gambhir, KKR’s captain at the time, was unconvinced.
‘Gambhir didn’t know much about Rashid and didn’t quite trust my word at that point of time,’ Srikkanth recalled. This was indicative of the wider perception of players from less-renowned nations, even at a time when Afghanistan had already played in several World Cups. ‘Teams did not take players from less-known countries from a cricketing perspective seriously. Teams and especially captains did not trust these players’ skills.’
A few other Associate players – the Netherlands pair Ryan ten Doeschate and Dirk Nannes, who subsequently represented Australia; and Kenya’s Tanmay Mishra, who played as a local due to his Indian parents – had come before Rashid. But he and Mohammad Nabi could be considered the first cricketers born and raised in an Associate country to get an IPL contract as overseas players. And unlike ten Doeschate and Nannes, the Afghan pair earned their contracts through their performances outside the Full Member sphere.
Before the 2017 IPL auction, Sunrisers Hyderabad wanted to recruit an elite spinner to bowl in the middle overs of the innings. The more they scrutinised the numbers, the more they realised that there was no one better than Rashid.
‘We specifically went for Rashid Khan because we felt that he was going to have a massive influence in the middle overs of the game,’ explained Tom Moody, Sunrisers coach when they signed Rashid. ‘We shortlisted, and then once he was on our shortlist we then dug in deeper, and that’s when the analyst comes in and gives us some real back-end information that we might not know. He also gave me endless footage of certain situations – not only when he bowled well, but when he was challenged, and who challenged him, and how that comes about. So you slice and dice as much as you can to come to what you hope is going to be the right decision.’
Moody looked beyond Rashid’s nationality, and saw only his skills. ‘I watched what Rashid was doing to the likes of Ireland and others, through video, and I still felt what he was capable of doing as a bowler was going to challenge anyone,’ he recalled. ‘People argued at the time, “Yeah, but they’re not doing it against the bigger countries” – and all that type of stuff – and to me that wasn’t a major issue.
‘You saw him bowl and what he was capable of doing and how he was defeating his opponent – whether it was beating him with turn in the air, turn off the wicket, or shape in the air, or batsmen totally misreading him. That was enough for me. Because I’d just seen how T20 had gone up to that point where anyone that could move the ball both ways, and there was a mystery attached to that, became very valuable. The biggest challenge he had to face – I feel, and the only risk we were taking – was how he adapted to the big stage. That, to me, was the only risk. To me, he had the goods. It was just a case of did he have the character. And he had that in spades.’
A few hours before Rashid’s name was called in the 2017 auction, the name of Mohammad Nabi, his Afghan teammate was read out. Nabi, an all-rounder who bowled off spin, was picked up by Moody and Sunrisers – thereby becoming the first-ever player to grow up in an Associate nation signed as an overseas player in the IPL. Rashid attracted a b
idding war between Sunrisers and Mumbai Indians, and was sold to Sunrisers for four crore (£450,000).
‘I always watched IPL on TV, but when you’re coming from a country like Afghanistan, playing in the IPL is more than special,’ Rashid said. ‘It was a special feeling, a proud feeling, for me and my country as well to represent Afghanistan in the IPL – IPL is the biggest league in the world.’
When he arrived in the IPL, Rashid ‘was so nervous’. His coach, Moody, spoke to Rashid before his first game. ‘He told me, “Don’t be stressed about the franchise, don’t be stressed about anything, don’t think about the money that you got, you’re just here, enjoy it – show your skills. Be clear in your mind and go in and enjoy it. We are here to support you, and back you up – you have enough talent to surprise each and every one. One thing that will test you will be how you control your mood, how you control yourself. We are behind you, so go out and enjoy yourself.” That was the message I got from him.’
Rashid got a wicket with his fourth ball on his IPL debut. Ten days later, he played against Kolkata – whose analyst had wanted to sign him but whose captain had not. The first ball that Rashid bowled to Gambhir, the batsman attempted a cut and misread the turn – playing for spin that wasn’t there. Gambhir was clean bowled. After he was dismissed, Gambhir turned to Srikkanth in the Kolkata dressing room: ‘Good spotting,’ he said. Rashid ended his first season with 17 wickets, at a better economy rate than the five bowlers with more, and established as one of T20’s most thrilling talents.
By early 2018, Rashid was already officially rated as the number one T20 bowler in the world, and among the most sought-after names in T20 leagues the world over. His real impact went much deeper.
Blast walls are erected to protect people and buildings from the after-effects of explosions. One such wall in Kabul, erected in 2018, was emblazoned with a caption: ‘Faces of new Afghanistan’. The mural features leading Afghans trying to shape a new image for the country – women’s and children’s rights advocates, award-winning journalists and photographers, and female members of an Afghan orchestra who have performed all over the world, defying the threats they receive at home.
Included among this list was Rashid, about to bowl a ball. He was not just a brilliant cricketer, but a cricketer whose impact transcended sport.
‘It makes you feel very, very special to be in that stage in that place and have your photo imprinted with people who have lots of achievements for Afghanistan. It’s really special to be among them. I feel really blessed – you can’t believe to get that sort of achievement in a very short period of time. To be playing four years and getting that sort of success and to a stage like that – it’s more than a dream.’
Just as promised on that mural, Rashid believed that cricketing success is giving a new image to Afghanistan. ‘Sport is the only thing that brings peace to the country,’ he said. ‘So it’s a wonderful feeling to see the youngsters playing cricket.’
Rashid’s schedule took him all over the world; in 2018, he only returned home once. But in his occasional forays back to Afghanistan, he observed how academies and the streets brimmed with children bowling leg spin, inspired by him as Rashid once was by Afridi. ‘I really love to watch.’
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Most T20 bowlers could be placed somewhere on a scale between attacking – taking wickets at a low strike rate – and containing – conceding a low economy rate. Rashid, uniquely, was exceptional on both scales.
Between Rashid’s T20 debut in October 2015 and the start of 2019 he was absurdly dominant, snaring an astonishing 214 wickets. Among bowlers to deliver more than 1,000 balls in this period, only four bowlers had a lower strike rate than Rashid’s 15.3 balls per wicket – and all of them were quicks who bowled at the death where wickets fell more regularly. Not a single bowler had a lower economy rate than Rashid’s 6.04 runs per over. No one came close to matching Rashid’s mastery of attack and defence.
‘I basically just used him at any time I needed a wicket or it was the hardest over in the game and he absolutely loves it,’ said Luke Wright, who captained Rashid in the T20 Blast in 2018, when Sussex reached the final. ‘He joined us as an absolute superstar but his enthusiasm is how you’d expect an academy lad to come through and play. Just absolutely was mad for it, excited to play the games, and diving around in the field. I’d say where do you want to bowl and when do you want to bowl? And he said you tell me – I’ll bowl any over and I’ll bowl from any end. So for a captain that’s amazing. Sometimes you get characters who if you ask to bowl into the wind they don’t want to do it, so when someone like Rashid Khan turns up it’s brilliant.’
At Sussex and elsewhere, Rashid’s brilliance lifted his teammates. ‘It gives you a lot more flexibility. We’d see that some teams just try to see him out and they aren’t worried about runs – they just don’t want to let him get four-for but in doing so when you are just trying to defend he still gets people out. Then when some teams try to target him he is so tough to hit that he takes wickets.
‘It has a knock-on effect on the other bowlers. They then have to go harder at other people and other people get wickets because they have to go harder and try and target them.’
Rashid was to T20 bowling what Chris Gayle was to T20 batting: a remarkable outlier, both in his statistics and his technique. Other leg-spinners who have reached the apex of the game through traditional techniques – like Australia’s Adam Zampa and England’s Adil Rashid – have since changed their method to be more like Rashid.
In longer formats of cricket, leg-spinners tried to beat batsmen in the air by tossing the ball up above their eyeline at slow speeds and on full lengths. This attacking philosophy and the unnatural wrist rotations involved in delivery meant that leg-spinners had historically been strike bowlers but also expensive bowlers. The rise of T20 and the growth of power hitting necessitated the evolution of a new breed of leg-spinner. Samuel Badree introduced this new method but Rashid perfected it and was at the forefront of an era dominated by spin bowlers. At one point in 2018 nine of the top ten spots in the ICC T20 international bowling rankings were occupied by wrist spinners. These bowlers generally bowled flatter, faster and shorter, keeping the ball away from the batsman’s arc, and they bowled a high proportion of googlies to complicate attacking batting.
A comparison of Shane Warne – an old-school leg-spinner and its most famous exponent – and Rashid, encapsulates the transformation in leg spin across the last decade.
The Evolution of Leg Spin in T20 Cricket
Shane Warne (2008–13)
Rashid Khan (2015–19)
49 mph
Average Speed
57 mph
4.85 metres
Average Length
5.15 metres
3.93°
Average Spin
2.05°
1.02°
Average Drift
0.55°
30%
Full Length
24%
34%
Good Length
26%
36%
Short Length
50%
4%
Googly
40%
‘We used to always tell spinners to have more patience than the batsman,’ recalled Warne. ‘Bowl ball after ball after ball in the right spot. Just keep bowling it. Now, with so much white-ball cricket you are told never to bowl the same ball twice.’
Most spin bowlers, especially leg-spinners, didn’t really have a run-up – it was more of a slow gather or at most a bustling walk. Rashid, like Afridi, ran up to and through the crease and this speed created momentum for a rapid delivery motion where Rashid’s fast arm speed sent the ball fizzing down the pitch. Warne noted that this fast arm made his action particularly challenging to decipher during day-night matches, when batsmen found it slightly harder to pick out his action closely: indeed, Rashid has a notably better record in day-night matches than day games.
While Rashid’s
pace remained significantly slower than pace bowlers – so he still benefited from keeping pace off the ball, like all spinners – bowling slightly faster gave the batsmen less time to read the line and the length and play the ball. ‘The quick arm action and the speed I’m bowling it makes it tough to work out which way it is going.’
As well as bowling faster than most wrist spinners Rashid also bowled a lot flatter. Firing the ball down out of his hand rather than up. One traditional drill that spin bowlers would use to help with their flight is to bowl a ball over a piece of string suspended about a metre high halfway down the pitch; with Rashid it was more likely that he would look to squeeze the ball beneath the string instead.
Rashid’s fast release speeds and flat trajectory caused the ball to skid off the pitch, which allowed him to bowl shorter lengths and keep balls out of the batsmen’s arcs, making it harder for them to ‘step and hit’.
At Rashid’s speed, line was perhaps more important than length. Rashid bowled a relentlessly tight line to both right-handers and left-handers, giving them no room to free their arms; 53.6% of his dismissals were bowled or lbw, the second-highest percentage of any bowler in T20 to have bowled in more than 100 innings. ‘The more you bowl wicket to wicket, the more it makes it difficult for the batsman,’ Rashid explained. ‘If he makes a little mistake he’s gone. So mostly I’m looking to bowl wicket to wicket.’
What elevated Rashid wasn’t just where he bowled but what he bowled. Rashid’s googly was brilliantly controlled and almost impossible to read from the hand; at such a high speed, it was even more difficult to play it off the pitch. Rashid bowled googlies 40% of the time – ten times as many as Warne in T20, and comfortably the highest proportion of any wrist spinner in the world. ‘When someone is not reading you and someone doesn’t know which way it is going, then if you bowl four or five in an over then that is also fine. If someone is not reading you and someone is not picking it up you should bowl it more.’