All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

258 attack that included a fairly quick 20-year-old fast bowler named Shoaib Akhtar. By the beginning of December Peshawar had performed quite well in the trophy so far, winning two out of five matches. Rawalpindi B on the other hand had made a poor start to their season and were still awaiting a victory. In the event neither team would do well enough in the ten-team league upon which the trophy was now based to qualify for the semi-final stage. (In the final Karachi Blues beat Karachi Whites. However, the trophy might have finished differently. Lahore City had won it two years before and with five wins out of nine matches had done enough to qualify for the semi-finals. However, they conceded their match against Karachi Blues because they claimed that the Karachi players had changed the ball in the drinks interval of Lahore’s second innings. The umpires and referee disagreed but captain Aamer Malik refused requests to continue. Lahore’s punishment was to lose all their points for the season.) Peshawar is situated close to the Afghanistan border, in the former North-West Frontier Province. First-class cricket had been played at the Arbab Niaz Stadium for ten years. It had taken over as Peshawar’s main venue from the Peshawar Club Ground (where Mike Brearley had made, approximately, 312 not out for MCC Under-25s in 1966/67 1 ). A round bowl with a capacity of some 20,000, the ground had hosted the first of its six Test matches three months earlier, and three years later Australian captain Mark Taylor would make a famous Bradman-equalling 334 not out there. There were no current Test players in Rawalpindi’s side, although opener Naved Ashraf who top scored in their first innings would later play twice for Pakistan. Peshawar similarly had one future Test cricketer in their side, captain Arshad Khan, who would play for his country nine times (to add to 58 one-day internationals). However, it was runs that would be Peshawar’s downfall in this match, and Khan was an off-spinner. Their batting might have been strengthened by the inclusion of Wajahatullah Wasti who had been playing earlier in the season, although with limited success. Wasti would go on to have a brief Test career which included two centuries, both made in his second match, against Sri Lanka in 1999. Winning the toss and asking Rawalpindi to bat first Arshad Khan was rewarded with an early wicket, but was then held up by Naved Ashraf’s aggressive 76 and a more sedate 50 from wicketkeeper Iqbal Saleem. All out 230 was a middling sort of score, but it looked better by close of play when two early Akhtar wickets left Peshawar 18 for two. The first batsman to fall was Akhtar Sarfraz. Not yet 19, and playing in his fourth first-class match, his innings of 6 equalled his highest score so far. He would have a curious season. Batting nine times, he made 15 runs in seven of these innings, whilst in the other two, played successively, he made 134 not out, carrying his bat in an innings of 242, and 162 (out of 260). With 13 first-class centuries and four ODI appearances he would go on to have a reasonably successful career. 1 Brearley and Worcestershire’s Alan Ormrod (61 not out) put on 234 for the fifth wicket against North Zone. However there have been suggestions that at some stage the scorers may have got the two batsmen mixed up. Naeem Akhtar