Qasim Umar - Pakistan - Batsman

One of the rare African origin players to represent Pakistan, Qasim Umar was half-Kenyan and was born in that country as well. After his birth, his parents shifted to Pakistan where they settled for the rest of their lives. Primarily an opening batsman, Umar was flexible enough to bat at most positions with elan. He played both Tests and ODIs for Pakistan but loved batting in the longer format more. It was a fairly successful career for Umar and had to end under unfortunate circumstances. Umar's intentions of removing corruption from cricket saw him making some stunning revelations in the mid 1980s. However, neither was any action taken by the ICC or PCB, nor did his career take off after this incident. It won't be wrong to say that politics played a part in his exit from the game.

Umar was not only a good batsman but also an electric fielder. He simply loved fielding and that showed in his catching ability. Despite being a proactive and flexible batsman, he couldn't quite set the ball rolling in ODIs where he ended with disappointing numbers, clearly a wastage of talent. For a brief career in terms of time span, Umar played a lot of Test matches. His ability to bat time despite having a rich array of strokes at his disposal, saw him achieve success. Among his three Test centuries, two of them ended as double hundreds that blunted the opposition to dust. There were times, like the Test against Sri Lanka in 1986, where he notched a run-a-ball fifty to show that he could switch gears when needed. As mentioned earlier, Umar's involvement in match-fixing investigations where he turned witness, backfired in a big way. He was also involved in doping scandals, something that was unheard of in those times.

By Hariprasad Sadanandan