Mohammad Amir conjures the Wasim Akram dream

The look on Wasim Akram's face when he walked in, maybe half an hour after that ball. Fifty-two next week and his face still retains this one quality that, quintessentially, alerts us to the boy trapped inside a man's body, which he kind of always has been, through the good days and yes the bad ones too. Maybe it's the eyes.

This time he was beaming, his cheeks vanquished in the battle with his mouth and having ceded all ground. You probably heard him on commentary but honestly, he couldn't have looked more satisfied had he bowled the delivery himself.

It was reverse, he confirmed, and that's enough for us no matter what anyone else might say it was. And then, for some reason, he thought it was first useful to spell out what Jonny Bairstow had done wrong.

He had pushed at his defensive shot, hands out. The way to play it, Akram suggested, was how Asad Shafiq might have played it - late, soft hands, hands and bat right under his head.

Calculating, retaining as if in some world somewhere some day he might return, 29 years young, with Bairstow and his hard hands awaiting his fate at the other end. This is, at a guess, how genius works: I did well, but I did so because I know what my opponent did and does wrong. It's relentless how that kind of mind must work.

We are mere mortals and so are inclined to think Bairstow did nothing wrong. It was just the ball. It had to be the ball, 9kph slower than the previous one and swinging twice as much. It was, after all, the ball we've been dreaming Mohammad Amir will bowl for about eight years now, the one we want him to bowl every single time he runs in and doesn't.

Many times we even imagined it was where it wasn't, really, really wishing it into existence. That one, this one, it did come in right, just a little right, a touch? And it couldn't just be one that gained a leg-before either - in the wildest lands of the Pakistani dreamscape the ball from the left-hander to the right-hander from over the wicket must snake in to hit the stumps.

Leg-before or bowled, batsmen see both as equal defeats, but for the bowler the latter is the truest win. So good my friend, that you couldn't even get pad to it; so good that it went past two lines of defence and you know what, it took a bit of your soul with it. What a cute little Anglo-Australian touch it was also, to hit the off-stump bail, because the top of off is their Holy Grail - Pakistani fast bowling loves stumps, preferably middle thanks, ideally broken.

In a way, the problem is how this piece began because for nine years now, Amir has been talked about in reference to somebody else. When he first started everyone wanted him to be new Akram, and not just in the way that everyone wants every left-armer to be the new Akram. We really wanted him to be the new Akram. And when he returned everyone wanted him to be the old Amir. It's unfortunate but that's just the way memory works, constantly creating reference points to make sense of things.

He's not Akram because nobody can be. If anybody can make one delivery do as many things as subtly as Akram did in his dismissal of Rahul Dravid in Chennai, then put the video up and we'll see. (And until then Mitchell Starc and that crack can take a backseat - it wasn't the ball of century, this one or the last).

Amir is also no longer Amir 1.0. What he is is complicated but if it is something like the Amir of the last two Tests, then it's hardly a consolation prize. Mickey Arthur made a point in an interview last year, that Amir was a big match player - the bigger the occasion, the more he rises to it.

"A lot of cricketers in those big, big moments, disappear. Mohammad Amir doesn't. He craves those big moments. And generally, he's pretty successful in them."

Believable? Contrast Amir of the games against India, or on a big stage, with Amir in the UAE or West Indies where if the tools of modern life hadn't recorded it for posterity, you might think it had never happened. Are the dreams you can't remember the morning after even dreams at all?

Helpful surfaces help, no one is denying that, though the arrival of Mohammad Abbas is a reminder that teams must necessarily be built on bowlers who find ways to get through on all kinds of surfaces, and on all kinds of days, dull, thrilling or the pits. But it is appropriate that when Pakistan had gone nearly 20 overs on Saturday afternoon without a wicket, when England's innings could still hope to recover and Pakistan would have started feeling the very first pangs of anxiety, it was Amir who arrived.

It was the over that broke England. It wasn't that you worried England were good enough to keep batting on the third day and build a lead. It was more that Pakistan would slip from the standards they had set through the Test till then.

At Lord's, a full house, and two deliveries that he, not Akram and not the 18-year-old Amir, could be proud of: just as the dream should have it. Wrap it up, lock it and keep it deep inside you for who knows when another moment such as that will come.

And by the way, we haven't even talked about the ball to dismiss Alastair Cook. You should've seen the look on Akram's face after that one.