Ahmed – or ‘Q’ as he was fondly and widely known to his fellow journalists – was for a long time, arguably Pakistan’s most accomplished and best-known cricket journalist and broadcaster, a career he embarked upon in London after leaving behind a fledgling first-class career in Pakistan in the 1950s. Eventually he would travel the world covering international cricket for a number of newspapers and magazines, and news agencies such as Reuters and AFP. He also worked for the BBC.
Even though he had stopped covering cricket regularly over the last few years, he remained a fixture in cricket circles. Last October, he attended the UK’s Cricket Media Club lunch (of which he was a member) and was the recipient of a generous and cheery birthday toast. He seemed, as ever, in good health, the result of a disciplined lifestyle and, no doubt, an athletic early career.
Indeed, it was as a left-arm spinner in Pakistan’s fledgling domestic circuit that he first rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. He did well enough across 17 first-class matches to push for a Pakistan spot, most notably for the 1957-58 tour to the Caribbean. Living in Hyderabad, however, meant he was outside the radar of selectors who, in those days, focused on the urban centres of Lahore and Karachi. Still, he does hold the rare distinction of having dismissed all the Mohammad brothers, including Hanif, Sadiq and Mushtaq on their debuts; his friendship with Mushtaq began, no doubt, when they made their first-class debuts in the same game.
One of his favourite stories was that he dismissed Hanif in the game before Hanif made his world record 499. The punchline was that Hanif had made 129 by the time Q got him, and that he holed out to long-on. He was still turning that left arm over in media games until the mid-2000s, and standing as umpire after he stopped playing, his love for the game undimmed until the very end.
