India's all-round, all-purpose match-winner

MS Dhoni hardly ever comments publicly about a cricketer outside of their bowling, batting or fielding skills. He talks about their ability to play shots, or to move the ball, but he does not easily call any cricketer "clever".

So when Dhoni, your captain in 31 Tests and 63 ODIs, says you are the "most clever fast bowler" he knows, there can be no better praise. It is praise that goes beyond stats, which sadly do not do Zaheer Khan justice. It goes beyond calling him the Tendulkar of Indian bowling, which Dhoni did once. This is despite all the frustration Zaheer's fitness battles have caused Dhoni over the years.

In England, in 2011, Zaheer walked off on the first day to herald India's depressing sequence of eight straight away defeats. On his comeback, he was even less fit, and operated with zero responsibility with the bat. His fielding had become abysmal and he had to be dropped. Despite all that, when Dhoni - not given to effusive praise - says Zaheer is the cleverest fast bowler he has known, you know the captain's earlier gratitude exceeds his recent frustration.

Dhoni will never contest that Zaheer made him. A major part of Dhoni's captaincy was devoted to fighting Indian curators who kept rolling out slow and low tracks, when sides stopped fearing travelling to India. This was also the time that Harbhajan Singh was on the decline and Anil Kumble had retired. Zaheer's Trent Bridge 2007 revenge for jelly beans might be his finest moment in Test cricket, but as a complete bowler, he gave his best to Dhoni the captain.

In fact, Dhoni remarks that he hardly had to captain when Zaheer was at his best. Imagine Wasim Akram's mind in a slightly unfit, brittle body. That was Zaheer at his best. He was opening bowler, reverse-swing bowler, strike bowler, containing bowler, bowling captain, and bowling coach, all rolled into one. You could enjoy Zaheer's spells in isolation from the matches in which they occurred. India could be losing, but they way Zaheer delightfully set batsmen up was an essay in itself.

Every body movement, every mental move, was deliberate. Like the finest of predators, he did not move a finger in vain; towards the end he hardly had a follow-through. There was always something up, some purpose to what Zaheer at his best did. Even at press conferences, he did not waste his breath. Once, when asked about new plans for Graeme Smith, Zaheer, smiling, said, "I just have to turn up." It was a measured smile. Not a wide, self-congratulatory smile, but a menacing, narrow one.

Zaheer remembered batsmen's weaknesses for years. He once played Smith three years after he had last played him, but it was as if he had never stopped working at Smith. Or Kumar Sangakkara. Unlike Akram, Zaheer could not swing the ball back into right-hand batsman consistently, but he somehow would manage to get one to move back in, and that was enough for him in a spell. He would sometimes bowl a legcutter to create the illusion of swing, and then prey with the ball going straight on. Smith always had both his edges vulnerable to Zaheer.

Then came the old ball. Once it got heavier on one side Zaheer became lethal. That is how he gave Dhoni control. That is how he won India Tests at home, making up for the lack of a match-winning spinner or desired pitches. It is one thing to be able to look after the ball and get it to reverse but another to know what to do with the reversing ball. Zaheer did the latter with precision.

Zaheer did what not many modern bowlers can claim to have done: master all three balls - SG, Dukes and Kookaburra. Only Dale Steyn has outdone him on that count. James Anderson is perhaps an equal. Mitchell Johnson has struggled with the SG, as did even Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan. Zaheer did it with the SG in India, with the Kookaburra in South Africa and Sri Lanka, and with the Dukes in England.

Still, his biggest contribution perhaps was invisible. He made India's bowling units complete. He set fields for other bowlers. Sreesanth had that lovely seam position, but his seam and swing without Zaheer counted for little. This aspect of Zaheer's contribution made itself apparent in South Africa in 2010-11, when he missed the first Test and India got walloped, looking toothless with the ball after having been bowled out for 136. In the second Test, which India won, Zaheer took just six wickets out of 20, but Harbhajan, who had earlier insisted losing Zaheer in that first Test was not a big loss, said Zaheer had proved him wrong. He helps others take wickets, he said. He is the man.

Ask Shoaib Akhtar where he learnt to take wickets, and he will tell you it was from Akram or Waqar Younis at mid-off or mid-on. Ask Akram and Younis and they will point to Imran. You look at India's fast bowlers today, and you see the bowling coach showing them the techniques, but there is nobody at mid-off showing them how to take wickets. Zaheer bowled off 13 paces when at his best, had zero follow-through, stayed around 130kmph, but knew how to take wickets. There was a Pakistani bowler somewhere inside him.

That he did not play the first Test of a series was a regular theme in Zaheer's career. He was crippled by injuries. It was frustrating. Not least for him. Shoulder, hamstring, back, mysterious injuries whose root cause took a long time finding, Zaheer had to counter all. It did not help that his work ethic was questioned in the first half of his career. Indeed, in 2012, when he went to France to become fitter, he did so only after he was sacked, not during an off season. He is now ending on 92 Tests after having mounted yet another comeback that ended in his being dropped.

The final memories - although not the enduring ones - will be his inability to lead the attack to what seemed like inevitable wins, in Johannesburg and in Wellington. It may not be a perfect ending, but only Zaheer knows what his body went through when it could not match his ambition. He never openly talked about his skill, which was immense. We would have loved to hear, for instance, how he developed the knuckle-ball slower ball that was unleashed on England tied match in the 2011 World Cup. Between Trent Bridge and that World Cup, Zaheer was arguably India's biggest match-winner, but to not talk about how he developed his various skills was un-Pakistani of a very Pakistani Indian bowler.

For an Indian fast bowler to be compared to his Pakistan counterparts is a big compliment. Not even Kapil Dev drew such comparisons. That Zaheer has outdone and outlasted all his Pakistani contemporaries, even Akhtar, should bring ultimate respect.