Return of the Heartbreak Kid: Have You Forgiven Mohammed Amir Yet?

Back where the darkest of his days started, Mohammad Amir has a lot to prove on this tour. Without the ball.

There are a few outliers who have been blessed with a god-given talent that mere mortals could never hope to replicate. Mohammed Amir was one of them.

Now, he seeks to be part of the elite again.

He had the sort of hair you wanted to run your fingers through. Killer smile, killer bowler. “He can be the best in the world,” said every fast-bowling sage, from Imran Khan to Wasim Akram to Michael Holding. We lapped it up.

That easy gallop to the crease, that cocked wrist, that boy-next-door charm that would make your sister weak at the knees. In 2010, Mohammed Amir was not just becoming a world-class cricketer, but he possessed the cherubic rockstar vibe of a Beatles member.

With the ball in his left hand, he had the world at his feet.

He now returns to the scene of Test cricket’s most remarkable, bitter episodes. At Lord’s in 2010, Amir picked up 6/84 in England’s first innings, with one of the finest displays of left-arm swing bowling to have graced the game. He kissed the hallowed turf and perform sajda on picking up five wickets. What a genuine, honest boy.

Yet within 24 hours, allegations of spot-fixing were circulating. Pakistan had a new hero. Within hours, he was on the verge of becoming persona non grata. In a deliciously awkward twist of fate, Amir was awarded Pakistan’s Man of the Series at the end of the Lord’s Test, picking up a customary giant cheque from ECB chairman Giles Clarke. It was a tale beyond comprehension.

Naturally, there is a maelstrom of emotion attached to the incident. We value cricket so dearly solely because of our deep-rooted sentimental attachment to it. To truly enjoy sport, there has to be a loss of one’s inhibitions. There has to be a collective suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy its intrinsically therapeutic value. To enjoy sport, we have to actively turn off the part of our brain that says “it doesn’t matter what happens inside this acre of grass, it’s just a game...after all, the ice caps are melting, I’m behind on my mortgage payments, and I feel a lingering guilt for giving that last Uber driver only four stars even though his car did smell of cat piss.”

The reason that Mohammed Amir, Mohammed Asif and Salman Butt provoked such strong reactions is because they trespassed our emotional safe space. They intruded into the part of our mind that enables us to enjoy cricket: that deep bunker in our mind that serves as our coddled creche, a safe distance from both the banal realities and ugly vagaries of life. Moreover, with Amir, we had high hopes of future spells of heart-fluttering genius, and these were ripped away from us.

Can Amir be forgiven? It will be down to your own personal taste and personal experience as to whether you choose to truly forgive Mohammed Amir and give him a carte blanche in your own mind, or whether you feel that any success he now achieves will be tempered by his previous indiscretions.

The truth is that our imagined reality of this young maestro was steeped in mistrust. Our memories of him are impure, tainted. The nostalgic value of watching Amir scythe those outswingers through England will always be contaminated by the nausea we felt when we first read those infamous News of the World headlines.

Ultimately, Amir will find true redemption with cricket fans when he creates new memories for us that might one day outweigh his epic missteps. From what we’ve seen over the past few months, there is plenty evidence to suggest that Amir remains the real deal.

Many are saying that “a cheat is a cheat” and that Amir should not be allowed to play cricket ever again.

My personal feeling is that if Amir has served the time from both a criminal and cricketing point of view, he deserves to play on. Had he been a 37-year old medium-pace balding trundler from West Indies, Amir would have been banished to a cricketing Hades, and there would be no feeling in his favour. Only Amir will ever know what went through his mind when he bowled those no-balls. Only Amir knows whether he is truly remorseful. He will say the right things in interviews, his “I’m truly sorry, I’ve learned my lesson” soundbites will appease certain people and antagonize others. Indeed, consider that remorse itself is the result of an unfathomably tangled web of deceit, and Amir may still not have come to terms with how he recalls his past actions.

Six years later, the heartbreak kid returns. Quiet, pursed lips, apparently contrite.

New hair. Same smile. Same killer bowler.

Amir’s redemption will only ever be in searing yorkers, shattered stumps and creating new memories to wash over the shame of his past.

Six years later, Amir once again has the ball in his left hand, and the world at his feet.

The author is a doctor in London and tweets @AltCricket.