Perhaps it isn't surprising it was Bob Woolmer who unlocked the idea that Shahid Afridi was a cricketer ahead of his time; Woolmer, after all, was a coach ahead of his time. Before he took over as Pakistan head coach in 2004, Afridi and his team were going through one of those phases that defined his early career, where neither knew how best to make use of him.

One of the first things Woolmer did was to stop censuring Afridi's batting. If Afridi hit two sixes and got out attempting a third, Woolmer would heap praise on the two he connected successfully with and urge him to replicate those, and not worry about the one that got him out. That was in stark contrast to the prevalent thinking about Afridi at the time, that he was a glorified slogger, wasting his wickets and what talent he had.

Woolmer understood Afridi's greatest impact was when he was at his most Afridi - as seen in his introductory hundred. Several innings in the Woolmer era confirmed it, often in the crunchiest of crunch games, against India: a 12-ball 25 in a tight chase in a Champions Trophy game; a couple of Test fifties as opener on the 2005 tour; a 46-ball hundred in Kanpur on the same tour. Woolmer's words were an early articulation of one of the modern bedrocks of T20 - that the wicket is cheap but impact priceless.

Afridi's longevity ensured he played plenty of T20 cricket ultimately, but in reality he was playing them before the format was invented and long before it became the game's dominant format. Predominantly the sense came from his batting. There's no single smoking-gun metric that proves this, though there are a couple that hint at it. Between his debut in 1996 and the end of 2007 (by which time T20s were becoming prominent) for instance, Afridi had hit six ODI fifties from less than 23 balls each, twice as many as the next guy. In the same period, his strike rate was 1.52 times more than the other batters in those matches, the highest ratio (among batters with 1000-plus ODI runs).

Afridi set the template for what a short-format leggie should be, more than a decade before that creature was invented Martyn Hayhow / © AFP/Getty Images

He fulfilled pretty much all the batting roles assigned to a T20 batting order now, from opener to the low-value wicket pushed up, to the pinch-hitter, to the floater, or the basher down the order.

And remember (as if you'd ever forget) his legspin? High pace, not-so-big turn, the googly as default, the straight lines targeting stumps and pads, a couple of wicked variations - his fast ball was a piece of art - and the overall sense of relentless hustle: is this not the basic leggie template for T20 cricket now? He was derided back then for not being enough of a traditional legspinner. But he was a bowler from the white-ball future, for whom defending was attacking, for whom the drying up of runs was the win, and wickets a by-product.

In short, he was the Iron Man Mark I suit of modern day, white-ball legspin, and if he wasn't exactly built from scrap metal in Afghanistan, then in the sense of indestructability, and even the geography, he wasn't far off. It's little surprise he was such a hero to a generation of Afghan kids who grew into prominent T20 pioneers.

Throw in the livewire athleticism within the 30-yard circle, an absolute bullet throw, the superstar status from the moment he arrived, and headstrong sense of his own worth, and there's no doubt that Shahid Afridi was the first great T20 cricketer before T20s had even been invented.

Osman Samiuddin is a senior editor at ESPNcricinfo

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

 

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