England Test team coach Brendon McCullum feels that the young leg-spinner Rehan Ahmed is a “special talent” and seems “really confident.”
18-year-old legspinning allrounder Rehan Ahmed is in England’s Test squad for their Pakistan tour.
“This morning he was downstairs, doing his skin fold test and I said ‘ah bugger that let’s go and have some breakfast instead,’” Brendon McCullum told The Telegraph in an interview.
“And anyway, I was sitting there at breakfast and I said, ‘What are you into outside of cricket?’ He said ‘cricket’ and I said, ‘What’s your passion? What are the things which really drive you? And he said ‘cricket’. What about school? And he said ‘well, I left school early because they just wanted to tell me what to do. And all I wanted to do was play cricket.’”
Ahmed is known for his big googlies, and legbreaks, that have gone viral in England cricket circuit. Especially the googlies. He is an allrounder and has starred for England U-19s, and for Leicestershire in the recent times. He had also played against India in their tour game against Leicestershire back in June. If selected to play, he could become England’s youngest ever Test debutant.
“So what a fabulous kind of opportunity for someone like him. He’s young and his family is obviously really invested in the game. He seems really confident in himself. I want to get to know him and I want to try and help him out,” said McCullum.
“Here he is. He’s 18 and on an England tour to Pakistan so there’s some real opportunities there and there’ll be some challenges along the way, but it’s our job to figure this out.
“We know that he’s not the finished product. He’s a long way away from that, but he’s got something which is pretty kind of special.
“We’ve got a lot of senior players, a lot of guys who will look after him in the set up.”
Ahmed, who is coached by his father Naeem who shifted to England from Pakistan in his late teens, started off as a seam bowler but it was height that made him abandon it.
“I couldn’t bowl bouncers because I was too small! . “If I was going to bowl seam then I wanted to be fast. I was having a net with a really close friend of mine, Akif Farooq, his dad and my dad. Akif’s dad was a very useful spinner so he told me to try off-spin,” Ahmed once told News.co.uk.
