The Heater whose fire never burned brightly enough

Latest on The IPL Benchwarmersis Yusuf Abdulla, the pacer from South Africa who played for Kings XI Punjab in 2009 and 2010. A replacement for Jerome Taylor, he had the purple cap briefly until he had to make way for Brett Lee.

Until the sun set at St George's Park on May 3, 2009, a summery Sunday, there was no doubting that Yusuf Abdulla was proof of what could happen when talent, confidence and hard work collided. Cricket had guided him out of Lenasia, an area of Johannesburg the apartheid regime had designated for South Africans of Asian descent, and Dundee, a coal-mining backwater in KwaZulu-Natal. It helped that he was a rarity in his country: not only a left-arm fast bowler but a left-arm fast bowler who could swing the ball. He had skill. He had swagger. He had the smile of someone who couldn't stop smiling at how good life was.

He also had the ball, and he stood at the top of his run in a Kings XI Punjab shirt. Awaiting him at the far end of the pitch was Kolkata Knight Riders' Brendon McCullum. Chris Gayle languished at the non-striker's end. They were two of the most destructive hitters in the game, but neither had reached 50 in the 13 innings they had had between them in the 2009 IPL. Their trigger fingers itched.

At 1.7 metres Abdulla stands 18 centimetres shorter than Gayle. But his shoulders are at least as wide as the mighty Jamaican's. To them is attached a body that might have been meant for someone significantly taller. So Abdulla needed a bespoke action to compete with the game's best batters. The untechnical eye might have seen a runaway truck rumbling towards the bowling crease. Nevertheless, he managed a significant leap into his delivery stride, slung his arm over his head at somewhat less than the vertical, and followed through like a brick bouncing on the tarmac from the back of that runaway truck. And it worked.

Along with curvaceous swing, Abdulla had proper pace, a confounding slower ball, a chiselling yorker, a knack for locating his deliveries wide enough of the bat not to be mowed through the on-side too often but not wide enough to be called wide, and a head for bowling at the death. He didn't look it, but he was a gun fast bowler.

That day at St George's Park his first over yielded just two runs. He swung the ball both ways and beat a flailing Gayle, who hit the first two deliveries of his second over behind square leg and through mid-off. Both went for four. Gayle defended the third ball, then smoked the next in the air to mid-on - where Yuvraj Singh hung onto the catch. Any day you dismiss the biggest bully batter of the age for a run-a-ball 17 is a good day.

Abdulla was happy at his success. But he wasn't surprised. Neither had he surprised. Two days earlier at Kingsmead he had taken 4/36 against Royal Challengers Bangalore. A week before that, also against RCB in Durban, he had gone for just 31 while removing Jesse Ryder, Kevin Pietersen, Jacques Kallis and Ross Taylor. "I won't forget that," Abdulla told Cricbuzz. "'KP' hasn't. When he came to the Dolphins a couple of years later he told me he remembers me getting him out." It was classic Abdulla: a slower ball faded away from Pietersen, who at first shaped to lash it through the off side, realised he had misjudged the pace and movement, tried to reel in his stroke, and blipped a catch to Karan Goel at short cover.

Not bad for a bowler who, on the strength of limiting the damage to 16 runs in three overs in which he bowled to David Warner, Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey - and had Ponting caught behind - on his T20I debut in Centurion three weeks before the IPL, had been signed as a replacement for Jerome Taylor. Ruled out by injuries sustained in a car accident weeks earlier, Taylor had fetched USD150,000 at the player auction. Abdulla, whose name wasn't anywhere near the auction, came at the bargain price of USD25,000: a sixth of Taylor's fee.

Even then he might not have got a look-in. Another player, deemed 36 times more valuable than Abdulla, would have played in his place had he been fit. In 2008 Punjab's owners paid USD900,000 for Brett Lee's services, but an ankle problem kept him out of the early stages of the 2009 competition.

Not that KXIP were missing him. Nor Taylor. Why not? The colour of the cap Abdulla handed to the umpire before he bowled that day at St George's Park was a clue. It was purple. Gayle's wicket was his 14th in seven matches, and Abdulla - who hit the top of the charts with his first four-for against RCB on May 1 - would remain the IPL's leading bowler until May 6, when he was surpassed by Deccan Chargers' RP Singh, who ended up with the purple cap at the end of the tournament.

But Abdulla's IPL, even the rest of his career, was curdling even as he and his teammates celebrated Gayle's dismissal. He didn't take another wicket that day. Neither did he claim any in the rest of the campaign, in which he played only two more matches. "Brett Lee came back and when that happened I had to go out of the side," Abdulla said. "When you're paying somebody almost USD1-million..." Was he bitter about not getting more gametime? "You will feel that way when you're sitting on 14 wickets after nine games. But Brett Lee's name itself says a lot, and a lot is expected of him. They were just waiting for him to get ready and back into the team."

Abdulla's only strike in the 2010 IPL came on the opening weekend at Mohali. Dinesh Karthik ballooned a bouncer to long-on, where a tumbling Irfan Pathan collected the catch. Abdulla played just one more match. "Sometimes things happen at the wrong time. You're not really how how and what, and sometimes you assume things. I'm not sure, but maybe at the start of the next season [in South Africa] I over-bowled and I hurt my groin. I didn't think it was too bad, but it ended up being a grade three tear. I decided I should be fine and that I would be able to play in the IPL. You don't want to turn down those chances when you get them, but I just couldn't bowl in the 140s [kilometres per hour] anymore. It was never the same. Somebody blew 'The Heater'. It became more like a freezer."

The what? Ah, yes. About that: "[Former Dolphins coach] Phil Russell asked me to bowl to the South African players in the nets [at Kingsmead ahead of an ODI against Pakistan in 2007]. He said, 'Run in and bowl as quick as you can'. I remember Graeme Smith was not impressed. He had a few words for me. Most of the players did, because I was bowling really quickly. The next day in the changeroom Shaun Pollock and the guys were talking among themselves about how quickly I was running in and how I was bouncing them. 'Polly' said, 'We should call him The Heater.' That's how I got the name - I brought the heat on."

After Abdulla limped home from the 2010 IPL he would play only 42 more matches of any kind in the next six years before he retired in December 2016. "I ended up bowling medium pace. You never understand cricket politics until you're an average player. I've had this chat with Hashim [Amla]. He would say, 'You keep talking about politics in cricket but I never have a problem being selected'. I would say, 'Ja, because you're doing well. You don't have other guys competing for your place'. I really never understood that until I was bowling at 130, 133 [kph]. Because then you get put in a basket of guys who can all do more or less the same job. Then it becomes about your weight, your this, your that - 10,000 issues about everything from everywhere."

But he has happy memories of cricket's craziest carnival, where he shared a dressingroom with Yuvraj Singh, Mahela Jayawardene, Simon Katich, Kumar Sangakkara, Sreesanth and Ravi Bopara: "Most of the guys were very down to earth. When you're not around them you don't really see their other side. You hear some players are arrogant, but sometimes it's just about what has happened on the day - maybe he's just got out and a fan is screaming something at him. Obviously you're not going to see a good side of that player. Players are judged that way and sometimes that's unfair. How they communicate with each other is very different. And it's different when you're in the field compared to when you're at the hotel, where there'll be jokes and laughter. I remember Brett Lee would play the guitar - once he did it all day in a restaurant. I got along very well with Ravi and Irfan, and also with 'Yuvi'."

Still, it wasn't easy going through the motions for six weeks, being half the player he used to be. "You don't get paid your whole fee [USD50,000 in his second year] if you don't stay there," Abdulla said. "So I stayed. It was tough, but that's cricket. You become someone who helps out to make sure the other guys are ready."

How ready had Abdulla been before the tournament? The modern attitude towards player conditioning would be that he wasn't in the kind of shape needed to stand up to the rigours of bowling fast for a living, and that that's why he was injured. "I had passed all my fitness tests," Abdulla protested. "Ahmed [Amla] tells me he thinks I trained too much and I got too thin. I was always bulky, and he felt maybe that caused it."

Who can know? What we do know is that, in the sunshine that lit up St George's Park on a Sunday 11 years ago, a fast bowler with places to go, things to see and wickets to take stood at the top of his run, unafraid of whoever was at the crease. Because he knew who brought the heat.

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