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Mudassar Nazar (Known as Golden Arm)
When I came out to bat in my first Test, in Australia, I asked Majid Khan what to do. He said, "Get ready to cut, hook and pull." I thought to myself, "I don't play those three shots at all."
I learned a lot just sitting in the ground and listening to cricketers like Fazal Mahmood. Since age five I wanted to play cricket, and since the time I was 10 there was no doubt in my mind that I would be a Test player.
The ball that I got out to on 199 wasn't much of a ball. Shivlal Yadav was bowling on the off stump and I had been making room to hit him square on the off side. He bowled the same ball when I was on 199 and I thought, "Ah, 200!" and went hard at it instead of timing it and got caught. As I walked off, I saw Sunil Gavaskar shaking his head. He couldn't believe what I had done.
I took a lot of pride in opening for Pakistan and following in my father's footsteps, but really, I wouldn't have got into the Pakistan side if I wasn't an opener. Wasim Raja, who was a brilliant player, struggled to get in because the middle order was so strong.
I was unprepared for my first Test. Sadiq Mohammad had injured his hand in Perth and we learned the night before the Adelaide Test that he couldn't play. Imran Khan, even in those days, had a lot to say. He piped up: "Mudassar is an opener, he can play". The captain, Mushtaq Mohammad, looked at me for the first time on the tour and said, "Oh yeah? Go put your pads on". He told Saleem Altaf to bowl to me in the nets. By this time it was getting dark. Altaf bowled three balls, all of which sailed over my head. But I was happy thinking about becoming a Test player. I didn't worry that I would be facing Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson.
Later in my career when I played down the order in Tests, it was a piece of cake. I couldn't believe how easy Test cricket was when batting at No. 6. The bowlers were tired, the ball was soft. When I played Thomson at No. 6, he was like a medium-pacer to me. That's why I don't believe specialist batsmen who play down the order are great players, unless it's someone like Garry Sobers, who also bowled a lot.
When Imran became captain nobody knew what to expect. He was temperamental when he bowled, hated people misfielding off his bowling, and hated losing. But he quickly set himself apart.
On the 1982 tour of England, he dropped Majid Khan in favour of Mansoor Akhtar, who had been scoring a lot of runs in the county games. Majid was the prince of Pakistan cricket, so dropping him could not have been easy. That's how the Imran Khan era started, by being fair to all members of the team.
That one act had a huge impact, not just on the team but the administrators as well. Suddenly Pakistan cricket became more important than individual players.
I enjoyed batting with Javed Miandad the most. We were both quick between the wickets and I had played with him since our Under-19 days. We had a few partnerships of over a hundred runs. Javed was a fantastic team man. If I had to pick a batsman to bat for my life from any of the players I played with or against, it would be him.
When Javed and I put on 451 runs against India, we didn't know we had equalled the world record for any wicket. When I went into the dressing room after being dismissed, team-mates kept coming up to me to say "bad luck". I couldn't understand why someone would say that to a batsman who just scored 231. Then Intikhab Alam told me we had levelled the world record when I got out.
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