Captain Rashid Khan: Talisman, identity, hope and voice of Afghanistan cricket sparkles in historic entry to World Cup semifinals

It has been a tournament in which cricket’s master of disguise took on at least half a dozen guises: talisman, calm head, voice, identity, hope and googly‑whipping spellcaster.

A month ago, though, he was struggling. In the IPL, his team, Gujarat Titans finished eighth, he struggled for rhythm, snared only 12 wickets in 10 games, bled 8.40 runs an over. But Rashid did not panic. Even if the wickets were not coming, he knew he was rediscovering his tunes. He could feel the energy in his fingers.

“I know I am bowling well when I feel the energy in my fingers,” he tells The Indian Express. His almond eyes gleam with a mystical shine when he talks about his biggest gift, one that, in part, defines the most feared and most sought-after signature in franchise cricket. It’s no mystery, he emphasises. “I happen to have strong fingers,” he almost whispers, almost apologetically. “Gift of nature,” he re-emphasizes.

When he doesn’t get the flow of energy in his fingers, he feels like someone else. “It is something that matters to me more than the numbers on the board. I get a feeling that it’s not me, it’s some other person because it is not coming out of my hand as I want it to, even if I had delivered the goods,” he explains.

This World Cup, the ball has come out of his hands the way the exact way he wants it, every movement synchronized to perfection. He demolished Bangladesh with his staple wrong’uns; he kept Australia guessing with a cocktail of wrong’uns and top-spinner; he traded all three wickets against India with his leg breaks.

You watch him bowl and you realise why he treasures his fingers more than most leg-spinners. “My grip is in the tips of the fingers. It gives me more pace, control and the ball snaps out from the top of my fingers. It’s the reason I am different from other leg-spinners.”

Rashid weaved a web around Bangladesh with his staple wrong’uns on Monday. (ACB)

Rashid is an antithesis. He does the opposite. He bowls both the leg-break and wrong one from the back of his hands. It means the release points are the same and the batsmen can’t decode the variation by watching his wrists alone, which in itself is a difficult art. His wrong ones are quicker than the leg-breaks. The leg-breaks turn less than the wrong ones as well. The classicists swirl the leg-breaks from the side of their elastic palms. There are more wrists and flourish, transforming it to the realm of magic. But Rashid has translated the prosaic finger-spun leg-spin into improvisational verse, his unorthodoxy appreciated every passing day.

It helped that he had little formal training. “Maybe, if I would have changed my action I would have lost my speed and rhythm.” The leg-break, he says, was already there. From the moment he decided to quit bowling fast and try leg-spin, with the taped ball. There is a striking influence of his idol Shahid Afridi, an upgraded version perhaps. He holds the ball on the tip of the first three fingers. The index finger, wrapped beside the seam, and middle finger, placed just above the seam like a molar, and the thumb acting like a backrest. The gap between the index and middle fingers is massive, more like an off-spinner.

Unlike the conventional legspinners, the ball rests mostly on his fingers rather than the inside of the palm. He releases the ball from the top of the middle finger. “It came naturally and then you try your best to practise on it and get better and better when I was a kid. Later I found it was unique, that you are opposite to all the leg-spinners who are traditional. But I realized I need to make it better and better,” he says.

The first resort was the wrong one, now his most dreaded weapon. Paradoxically, his first experiments with it involved a lot of wrists into the release. “But I had little control and used to get hit. I realised I was using more of my wrists. So I tried bowling the wrong-un with the same leg-spin grip. and I worked really hard on it. Practise, practise and a lot of spot bowling, before I perfected it,” he says.

Now, he flaunts three subtler variations of the googly. The staple one that’s used most frequently, then the one delivered from a higher release point “so that there is more bounce” and the one that he releases from the back of the middle finger, which is slower than the other two and breaks more. He has a flipper as well, and a rarely-used seam-up ball that’s released from the side of the hand.

“I use five-six different grips,” he says, his eyes lighting up again, but quickly files the disclaimer: “I don’t bowl with all these grips every day. Certain days I practice with a couple of grips and I bowl that during spot bowling or maybe during a match,” he says. He usually begins with the leg-spin grip, and only if it does not work that he resorts to another grip. “But not usually more than two-three,” he says.

It’s more of an intimidation weapon, much like Shane Warne used to psyche out batsmen claiming he has developed a new variation before a series. “You feel good, like a batsman is having so many shots. So the bowler likes to have so many options to bowl at,” he says.

He elaborates the analogy. “Before, you thought, oh, this batsman is very good on the drive. This batsman is going to cut. Now, everyone is coming and playing 360 shots, playing the reverse sweep or hitting you over extra cover. So you need to bring something new as well, as a bowler. This way, you can make the batsmen thinking and guessing, okay which ball is coming, or which grip he is using. That uncertainty in thinking helps you to get ahead of them.”

Weave in his masterful change of pace, and he becomes an unhittable dimension. Around 50 per cent of his deliveries clock less than 85 kph; then nearly 30 percent nudge in excess of 95 kph. Few spinners operate at such an extreme bandwidth. It makes him difficult to premeditate or uncork the horizontal bat shots. Most end up playing him straight.His economy rate of 6.45 from a gargantuan haul of 419 matches attests to this. He again credits his fingers and shrugs it off as natural.

Helping him gather the momentum into the crease is his brisk run-up, the raging embers of his fast bowling ambitions. “If my run-up is not quick, I won’t be able to get the ball coming out as fast. It gives me momentum through the crease with more energy on the delivery,” he says. One thing flows into the other—the run-up, the arm-speed, the energy in the fingers and the snappy release.

Yet, he is not satisfied that he has crafted adequate variations. “I am still trying something new, something inventive to make my game better and better,” he says. The nets, you would imagine, is a large laboratory where the avant-garde artiste of spin is experimenting with different grips, release points and angles, always fiddling around with his fingers, flapping it with the frenzy of a hummingbird. “You are trying to involve this finger as well and then this finger as well with the same grip and everything. And you try to see a different reaction from the wicket,” he says.

But the enduring effectiveness of his bowling, he says, is his unflagging control. “Tough questions mean keep bowling an area again and again, make batsmen think what I should do. For me, it’s bowling in one area consistently and mixing it up. That is what makes batsmen more careful and me more effective. The more consistent I am with my line and length, I think the more effective I am in the longer run.”

Simple self-assessment but more complex he turns out to be for batsmen. But it’s not just the craft that makes the man, but the energy, joie de vivre, the raw intensity and the sheer determination to expend the last drop of his sweat for the team’s cause.