Umar Gul: Sultan of reverse swing

Sporting a fiery pair of trendy sunglasses, the sultan of reverse swing from Pakistan smiles when asked what's the secret to making a ball defy the logic of normal behaviour on finding traction with a wicket.
Umar Gul's reasoning is surprisingly simplistic given the degree of consternation the erratic projectile is likely to cause the padded one on a batting crease.
"Firstly, I think we bowled a little bit of reverse swing because the wicket was dry and, secondly, because the batsmen found the fence a little and the ball was scratched," the 26-year-old revealed yesterday at McLean Park, Napier, before the fourth one-day international was to start against the Black Caps at 2pm today.
Understandably, the right-arm fast/medium bowler refrains from getting into specifics about his trade secrets but did divulge today's expectations on a traditionally benign batting pitch to yield runs, adding there was some bounce for the hapless bowlers.
"The boundary, especially on the square leg side, is small so I hope I'll get some reverse swing again," said the man who can produce reverse swing deliveries that dip to a yorker length.
In 2006, Gul broke Windies batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan's toe in the tour of the Caribbean.
The paceman from Peshawar, like countless others in his country, emulated others in his early teens to start rolling his arm with a tape ball and tennis ball.
The boy, born in a middle-class farming family of eight from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, was soon courting a lot of attention in the dusty streets of his neighbourhood.
By the age of 15 he was ruffling the sensibilities of his conservative community as he and his peers often scampered from a nearby graveyard converted into a cricket pitch.
"We played with tennis balls so I was like a tennis-ball professional player and people were calling me from different places to play," he said, pushing his sunglasses above his forehead.
Three years later he went to college but the foray into professional cricket wasn't a smooth transition for the 1.93m bowler who didn't make his debut for the country's most elite team until 2003.
"My parents didn't support me [in playing cricket] during school and college time because they wanted me to study," he revealed, adding his first passion was studying medicine but after much discussion with an elder brother he got into engineering.
Last October he reportedly married a Dubai-based doctor in his hometown.
Gul misses the academic stimulation but accepts the hectic schedule of a professional cricketer allows little time for anything else in his transient life.
"When they [his parents] knew that I can play better then they supported me a lot," he said, indebted to a couple of cricketing friends who took him to a nearby club to help him hone his skills.
From there he made the national age-group teams and travelled abroad, including New Zealand, to play in elite tournaments.
Fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar and coach Waqar Younis, who forged a fearsome opening partnership with Wasim Akram, were also instrumental in helping him refine his bowling technique.
In June 2009, Gul reportedly returned home from a successful England tour to counter suggestions of ball tampering. He watched Wasim and Waqar's bowling videos and developed the art through relentless repetition, an incensed Gul had contended.
Waqar and Aqib Javed are the two bowling coaches in the tourists' squad.
Gul accepted the seamers won't get much help but bending their backs in the subcontinent on driveway-type wickets could prove to be an invaluable experience today in coming up trumps to nudge ahead in the ODI series level at 1-1 after the second game at Queenstown was rained out.
"Most of our wickets in Pakistan are batting tracks so we know how to get wickets on pitches like this."
He felt a total of 260 to 270 would be enough to secure victory today on a traditonally 300-plus deck.
If they won the toss, the tourists would have no hesitation in batting first before attempting to stifle the Black Caps' run chase.
The top-order batsmen such as Mohammad Hafeez again needed to bat through to the 40-plus overs mark to provide a launching pad for hard hitters, such Afridi and Abdul Razzaq, to put some beef into the tourists' innings.
Gul has played 32 test matches, 75 ODIs and 32 Twenty20 internationals for his country.
He was the king of T20 bowlers, finishing as the leading wicket taker and bowler in the 2007 and 2009 World Championship tournaments.
The young man who made his international debut in April 2003, playing four ODIs against Zimbabwe, Kenya and Sri Lanka, at the Sharjah Cup, became the first bowler to stake a claim on five-wickets bags in all formats of the international game.
Despite his dramatic results with a string of key scalps such as Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and AB de Villiers, Gul wasn't a certainty in the national squad.
It didn't help that early in his career he battled with back injuries but through rehabilitation he eventually found his niche again among the elite.
In February 2008, Gul signed with the T20 Indian Premier League to play for the Kolkata Knight Riders franchise and in December that year he represented the Western Warriors in the Australian domestic 2008-09 Big Bash tournament.
Earlier, captain Afridi and coach Waqar, talking in their vernacular Urdu, emphasising the need for their men to stay strong. "I want them to come out and play positively and freely and hit the balls," said Waqar, not too fussed about winning the toss today.