Originally published on ESPNcricinfo, with thanks to Osman Samiuddin.
Qamar Ahmed, the cricket journalist and broadcaster, as well as a former first-class cricketer, has passed away in Karachi, Pakistan. He was 88 years old.
Ahmed – or ‘Q’ as he was fondly and widely known to his fellow journalists – was for a long time, arguably Pakistan’s most accomplished and best-known cricket journalist and broadcaster, a career he embarked upon in London after leaving behind a fledgling first-class career in Pakistan in the 1950s. Eventually he would travel the world covering international cricket for a number of newspapers and magazines, and news agencies such as Reuters and AFP. He also worked for the BBC.
Additionally, he also did broadcast work for various TV channels and radio stations, including for TVNZ during the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand – which Pakistan won. He covered every single World Cup until the 2007 one in the Caribbean. By then he had stopped covering ODIs – “pyjama cricket,” as he called it – and focused purely on Tests. The third Test between Pakistan and Sri Lanka in Sharjah in January 2014, marked his 400th Test as a journalist – only a handful have covered more.
His long and well-travelled career meant he was an eyewitness to many of Pakistan cricket’s most seminal moments, including that 1992 World Cup triumph. He was in the hotel rooms of players when the famous pay dispute of 1976-77 happened, paving the way for the professionalisation of Pakistan’s cricketers. He was also present on Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies in 1992-93, when four players – Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Mushtaq Ahmed and Aaqib Javed – were briefly detained for marijuana possession, chronicling it in his book ‘Testing Times’. He was also present during the terror attacks on the Sri Lanka cricket team in Lahore in March 2009. Not just Pakistan’s moments either: Q was witness to Sunil Gavaskar’s 10,000th run, Richard Hadlee’s 400th wicket, Anil Kumble’s 10-for, cricket’s 1000th Test and its 2000th in 2011.
He was also the writer of the autobiographies of Hanif Mohammad and Waqar Hasan. His last book, ‘Far More than A Game’ came out in 2020 and was a memoir of his life in the game. It was a rich life, and it meant he was a lively raconteur around press boxes and cricket circles. The most popular of his stories invariably revolved around some of Pakistan’s biggest stars in the 1970s and 80s, such as Imran Khan and Javed Miandad, both of whom were regular guests at his London home. Many of them are too salacious to publish here but are well-known to journalists who had spent time with Q. Indeed, a visit to Q’s London home was a fixture for touring cricketers (and journalists) of the time, an opportunity to enjoy not only his generous hospitality and company but also – and this was not to be missed – his culinary skills.
These relations were reflective of a different era for the sport and journalism, when there was less distance between journalists and their subjects. Q could count for instance, Mushtaq Mohammad, one of Pakistan’s most influential captains and allrounders, and Zaheer Abbas, one of their greatest batters, among his closest friends. But in truth, there are few cricketers from that time who would not have come across or engaged with Q. Another of his closest friends was the late actor Mohammad Ali, one of the great superstars of the Pakistan film industry . He was also the subject of some of Q’s funniest stories and proof that of a rich life outside the game.
Even though he had stopped covering cricket regularly over the last few years, he remained a fixture in cricket circles. Last October, he attended the UK’s Cricket Media Club lunch (of which he was a member) and was the recipient of a generous and cheery birthday toast. He seemed, as ever, in good health, the result of a disciplined lifestyle and, no doubt, an athletic early career.
Indeed, it was as a left-arm spinner in Pakistan’s fledgling domestic circuit that he first rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. He did well enough across 17 first-class matches to push for a Pakistan spot, most notably for the 1957-58 tour to the Caribbean. Living in Hyderabad, however, meant he was outside the radar of selectors who, in those days, focused on the urban centres of Lahore and Karachi. Still, he does hold the rare distinction of having dismissed all the Mohammad brothers, including Hanif, Sadiq and Mushtaq on their debuts; his friendship with Mushtaq began, no doubt, when they made their first-class debuts in the same game.
One of his favourite stories was that he dismissed Hanif in the game before Hanif made his world record 499. The punchline was that Hanif had made 129 by the time Q got him, and that he holed out to long-on. He was still turning that left arm over in media games until the mid-2000s, and standing as umpire after he stopped playing, his love for the game undimmed until the very end.
A tribute to Qamar Ahmed by Scyld Berry
It can only be a ‘guesstimate’ but Qamar Ahmed, who has died aged 88, probably watched and reported on more international cricket than anybody has ever done.
The key to Qamar’s personality – affable, genial, yet also hard-working and durable – was, it appeared to me, the fact that he was a mohajir: that is, he was one of the millions of Muslims who left everything behind in India, when Britain decided on partition in 1947, and moved to Pakistan. He happily made the most of whatever there was.
Qamar came from good land-owning family in Mughalsarai, in Uttar Pradesh. Hanif Mohammad and his brothers were compelled to take a similar escape route to safety, although the famous brothers had a shorter journey to make, from Junagadh to Pakistan.
Qamar and Hanif became close friends, and he wrote the Little Master’s autobiography. Qamar became close to the other brothers too, on the field of play.
He was widely known as ‘Q’ in the cricket world but I always called him “Moon” from the time we first met on Pakistan’s 1978 tour of England – the translation of Qamar being Moon.
A media game was arranged for the rest day of the Headingley Test that summer, to be played at Harrogate, like the media match the previous year involving Kerry Packer (ownership of half the newspapers in Australia somehow entitled him to play).
Alas it rained and the game was abandoned – but not before Pakistan’s match-winning bowler of the 1950s, Fazal Mahmood, had loosened up on the outfield, fizzing the ball from right or left – offcutters and legcutters – with little visible change of action; and Qamar too warmed up the left-arm spinners he had bowled in Pakistan’s domestic first-class tournament, the Quaid-e- Azam trophy, back in the 1950s.
You can often deduce how a person bowls from the way he or she looks. Qamar bowled left-arm spin at good pace: no “moon-ball” at all.
He took 36 first-class wickets at 29 runs each in the days when he lived in Hyderabad and represented Sind, which was then a backwater compared to the cities of Karachi and Lahore. For some if not all of those games he would have been bowling on matting.
Qamar’s on-field claim to fame was that he dismissed every one of the five Mohammad brothers in first-class cricket: Hanif, in the game before he scored 499, Waqar, Mushtaq, Raees and Sadiq. Better than any mere hat-trick!
Writing for Pakistan papers and commenting for radio, Q subsequently became Pakistan’s main cricket journalist. At home, out of deference, his colleagues would allow him the first question at a press conference.
I used to have an ever-amiable rivalry with “Moon” about who had watched more Test cricket. I reckon I just beat him on Tests, with 500 plus, but he must have watched more international cricket than anybody overall, including the late Richie Benaud. He stopped covering one-day internationals a couple of decades ago – and he had already clocked 800 ODIs!
May the turf of Paradise take bounce and turn for him.
I saw Qamar at the Cricket Media Club Awards last year.A wonderful man who wrote and spoke with such great poise.Rest in Peace such a lovely man and condolences to his family.He will be missed by the game. Omar
Yeah, lovely bloke