Saeed Anwar - criminally underrated?

Saeed Anwar made his one-day debut on the first day of 1989 but it was not until the Benson & Hedges tri-series the following year, on February 13, that Pakistan were sure they wanted him to open. Two days before, in Brisbane, coming in early at one down, Anwar had breezed to a 24-ball 37 against Australia. It made sense to move him up, and how. He made 27 off 30 and then, within the week, 126 off 99 balls and 43 off 36. On the runs chart, he ended the tri-series third. On strike rate - 105.39 across nine games - he was a chart of his own, with more fours and sixes than anyone.

By the time Jayasuriya and Tendulkar happened, Anwar's had been a disrupted career - he only played in 42 of Pakistan's 108 ODIs from his debut to the day Jayasuriya opened. Injury robbed him of the 1992 World Cup, which should have been his coming out. But his body of work by then - six hundreds in 41 innings - was substantial enough to leave little doubt that it began with him.

His Test career, on the other hand, remains entirely overlooked and grossly under-celebrated. And nearly 20 years on, we can only guess at why this is.

It wasn't a long career and these days greatness is pegged to longevity and endurance. Anwar's 55 Tests unintentionally place him in a less abundant and relevant era: Hanif Mohammad, after all, played 55 Tests. The sample is also small enough that it stands vulnerable to being dulled in comparison to ordinariness: Mohammad Hafeez has also played 55 Tests.

See, unlike those two, Anwar wasn't his side's only star. The 188 not out in Kolkata is a good example. Potentially his finest Test innings, a genuine epic, yet it's like the middle-child memory from that game: ignored between two deliveries from Shoaib Akhtar, Tendulkar's run-out, and Moin Khan's rearguard, and jostling instead with Javagal Srinath's 13 wickets for attention.

Not just Pakistan, actually, but the decade had characters spilling out from every XI. All those fast

bowlers, the Waughs, Shane Warne, Tendulkar, Lara; it was easy to slip by unnoticed among this mob. And forget mobs, if you're left-handed and existing in the age of Lara alone, you'd best settle for the shadows.

Post-retirement he has shrunk further away, now but a dot on the game's horizon. It's admirable in the way you can admire someone who resolutely chooses not to hang on to past glories. But because he's not that ex-player, coaching or clogging up newsfeeds all the time, he has been easier to forget.

More than anything, though, the aesthetics of his game have, insidiously, engulfed the Test impact of it; as Warne, in picking him as the best Pakistani batsman he had bowled to, wrote, "[it's the] style you remember, not the figures". It was always easy to forget Anwar was not being pretty for the sake of being pretty but to some bigger, more functional purpose.

Another, and this time Mark Nicholas' commentary is enough. Cursory recognition that it's a good shot before, a second later, the realisation that it's much more: "in fact, it's astonishing timing". In fact, this happened a lot - the timing was such that it could disorient the senses. From early in the 188 not out, note this: straight, not exactly a drive, but a four still. Unlike Lara's flourishes that proudly announced his boss-ness, it often took a second or two to understand what Anwar had done; in fact, like the greatness of his career creeping up on you.

From the same innings comes another reminder of his inventiveness, the last shot he plays before Pakistan's innings ends. Look especially at how late he dabs in this shot, the bouncer well past his left shoulder, bat-face to the skies, pointing towards third man. Not an upper-cut - or "an upper-glide", as Sanjay Manjrekar corrects himself - but an early - perhaps the earliest? - iteration of the ramp against bouncers that proliferates in the modern game. Again, most of the world probably remembers Adam Gilchrist as having first played that shot, on his Ashes debut in 2001.

The range of Anwar's strokes was not only vast but, it seemed, forever expanding. Often, in each substantial innings he was playing a shot you hadn't seen him - or, sometimes, anyone - play before. And… and, we're deep in this rabbit hole, like Warne, not talking about his Test figures.

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