Racked by injuries and threatened by the rise of younger pace bowlers, Zaheer Khan has been through a lot in his eight years of international cricket. Outlook magazine's Rohit Mahajan finds out how far he has come along, as Zaheer closes in on his 30th birthday.
When he leaps high in the air and lands on his left foot, Zaheer uncorks a potentially rebellious storm in his body. His left foot experiences pressure equalling six times his body weight; a force ten times his weight rages through his pelvic joints when he flings his shoulders to release the ball from his left hand. He's painfully aware of, and resigned to, the affinity between fast bowling and injuries. "When you bowl fast, you know you are going to get injured at some point of time," Zaheer told Outlook. "You know that you have to sometimes play through pain, sometimes stay away from the game and work hard to get back."
Zaheer has had to do that quite a bit, right from his early days in top-flight cricket. Since he made his debut as a 22-year-old against Bangladesh in November 2000, India have played 88 Tests. Zaheer has missed 32 of them, mostly due to injuries. Heartbreakingly, he's broken down at the edge of historic opportunities. On the 2003 tour of Australia, after taking five wickets in the first innings of the first Test, he pulled a hamstring while bowling in the second and had negligible influence in the only other Test he played, losing the chance to bowl on pitches deemed a fast bowler's paradise. A year later, on the Pakistan tour, he was out again after the first Test—this time with a pulled hamstring muscle.
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