Saturday was a good day to watch cricket. And Pakistan’s win over South Africa added just the spice the tournament needed.

Watching Mohammad Irfan bowl took me back five years to the time when he actually played on a cricket tour for our IPL team, the Kolkata Knight Riders. True story!

It was late July in 2010 when I got a call from our bowling coach, Wasim Akram. The Kolkata Knight Riders had just decided to take a group of up and coming junior Indian players to Sri Lanka for a series of matches, and Wasim wanted to know if we could accommodate another player.

“He’s a fast bowler, he’s from Pakistan and he’s seven foot 1 inch tall.”

Seven-one – it just sounded way too much, that was about five inches taller than Joel Garner. I remember asking Wasim if he had seen him personally – he hadn’t – and then thought to myself it was probably a bit like Shahid Afridi’s age, to be taken with a generous pinch of salt! In any case, we would be stupid to not try out a fast bowler recommended by a man who had taken 916 international wickets.

The first sighting

I first met him at our hotel lobby, and when he stood up to greet me, it was clearly not an "Afridi" height. He was every inch the seven footer they claimed he was. And proportional to boot, not the classical Bruce Reid type figure with disproportionately long arms and legs.

Within the first couple of days we figured out two things, first that our man from Gaggu Mandi (his ancestral village in Punjab) had an extremely sensible head on his shoulders. And he was actually quite a decent athlete for his height. Apparently, he used to field at point before the Pakistan academy bowling coach Aaquib Javed advised him not to risk twisting a knee or ankle.

As all players were in twin-sharing rooms, Irfan was paired with Arlem Konwar of Assam, a skilled off-spinner whose knowledge of Hindi and Urdu was as extensive as Irfan’s vocabulary in Assamese. But they hit it off extremely well, though for the life of us we could never figure out how they actually communicated.

Irfan’s first victim was actually one of our staff. Mathew Joy saw Irfan standing in the pool in chest deep water, stepped in and nearly drowned as it was about a foot and a half deeper than he thought.

Winning performances

The rest of his damage was all on the field. He played four matches for us, one of them 50-over and three T20 encounters. The first delivery he bowled was taken over head height by the KKR keeper Sanju Samson, and there was a collective gasp among all of us and the smattering of spectators at the ground.

Even international batsmen like Michael Vandort and Jeevan Mendis struggled to put bat to ball. The only problem we faced were the delays in resetting the sight screens when he came in to bowl. Interestingly, though he got ten wickets in four matches, the real beneficiary was his fast bowling partner, Parvinder Awana, who got a lot of wickets from batsmen just relieved to get away from Irfan and swinging at everything at the other end.

Irfan was the perfect team man, and was a part of almost all group activities. Except one. The day everyone decided to go shopping for clothes at Odel, he politely refused – not too many shops have readymade clothes for seven footers!

At the end of the tour, we offered him a contract subject to the IPL allowing Pakistani players. And he was delighted to sign up. But for a man who had worked in a PVC pipe-making factory for three years, the IPL was destined to remain just that, a pipe dream.

We won all of our six matches on that tour, and it was really the start of KKR’s golden run. And though only one of those players, Debabrata Das, ever played for KKR again, Irfan, Sanju Samson, Awana and the others gave us a momentum that ended in a championship a couple of years later.

By the way, we did measure his height. He was 7 feet 1 inch tall, though the NCA in Lahore had him listed at 6 feet 10 inches originally. This is why I never get Pakistan cricket!

This article originally appeared on Scroll.in

Joy Bhattacharya is a former member of the Kolkata Knight Riders team management.