Zed takes a raincheck

We were playing this festival one-day game in Jamaica one time in the early 1980s. It was West Indies against a World XI, a bunch of international players that the sponsors had got together. Zaheer Abbas, the stylish Pakistan batsman, was one of the members of the World XI side.

Now Zaheer had a reputation of not liking to field. I remember we were pretty confident that he wasn't going to come back out to field after he batted. So I went up to Andy Roberts and said, "Andy, he's just going to have a bat and go and sit down inside. He's not going to come back out." Andy, cool as ever, looked at me and said, "He's not going to come out to field? Okay, he's going to feel it now."

Andy ran up and let Zaheer have a barrage of short balls - really rattled him. He sent down some really fast deliveries. Zaheer couldn't handle too many of them and got out after a few uncomfortable moments. We could see that he'd had enough.

Sure enough, like we'd predicted, he didn't come out to field. We chatted about it after the game and everyone, including the normally quiet Andy, had a good laugh.