JournalismPakistan.com |
Published: 27 August 2026 | Dr. Nauman Niaz
The 153 kph reading for Mohammad Qayyum Khan has sparked national excitement, but officials must resist the hype. He needs sustained development, careful workload control and regular domestic matches to build a long-term career rather than chase headlines.
153 کلومیٹر فی گھنٹہ کی رفتار نے قیوم خان کو شہرت دی، مگر حکام کو شور میں آ کر جلد بازی نہیں کرنی چاہیے۔ ان کی ترقی کے لیے مناسب کوچنگ، بوجھ کی نگرانی اور ڈومیسٹک میچز ضروری ہیں۔
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There are numbers that describe a thing, and there are numbers that devour it. In Pakistan cricket, 153 kilometres per hour is already becoming the second kind. It has escaped the speed gun, slipped its decimal shackles and entered folklore before the young man who produced it has properly entered first-class cricket.
It travels faster than the ball itself. It flashes across television tickers, prowls through social media, fattens in the mouths of academy officials and returns, by evening, not as a measurement but as a prophecy. We have found another one, the country tells itself. Another fast bowler quarried from the old, apparently inexhaustible seam beneath the Indus. Another boy carrying thunder in the wrist.
When a number becomes a prophecy
His name is Mohammad Qayyum Khan. For the moment, however, his name is in danger of becoming just the caption beneath the number. This is how Pakistan has always loved pace: not sensibly, not even sportingly, but elementally. A fast bowler arrives among us less as an athlete than as weather. We do not ask first whether the storm will hold its shape across five days, whether its winds will survive the season, whether the roof has been built to withstand it. We stand in the rain, delighted by the violence, and call the lightning ours. Pace supplies what the national imagination perpetually craves: interruption, theatre, revenge upon the orderly. A batsman may build an innings like a civil servant accumulating files. A fast bowler can abolish the office.
So one understands the excitement. A young man approaching 150, perhaps touching 153, is no trivial discovery. Raw pace is scarce even in the age of global academies, strength laboratories and biomechanical refinement. It cannot be entirely coached into existence. Something ancestral or genetic must be present: a nervous system willing to fire at uncommon speed, elastic tissues able to store and release force, a body prepared to hurl itself at the crease with an abandon most bodies wisely resist. Qayyum may indeed possess that rare inheritance. To deny it would be peevish. To celebrate it without examining its cost would be negligent. That distinction is the entire argument.
What the speed gun cannot measure
For cricket has supposedly travelled a great distance from the age of hunches. The modern dressing room hums with measurement. Fast bowlers no longer just hit the deck; they arrive with release heights, seam orientations, force profiles and deceleration curves. Spinners impart recorded revolutions. Batters train against projected trajectories calculated from thousands of deliveries. Workloads are divided into acute and chronic ratios, although the human body remains stubbornly less obedient than the spreadsheet. Every elite system now employs people whose task is to convert movement into evidence and evidence into advantage.
The revolution has been useful. It has corrected old superstitions, exposed invisible inefficiencies and given coaches a vocabulary more exact than “rhythm” whenever rhythm disappears. Yet Pakistan, standing triumphantly beside a speed gun, has committed the oldest error of the unscientific mind: it has measured the easiest thing and mistaken it for the most important one. Speed is output. It is not cost. The gun tells us what happened to the ball. It tells us almost nothing about what happened to the body.
The proper question is not whether Qayyum can bowl at 153 kilometres per hour. The proper question is whether the movement producing 153 can be repeated safely, accurately and effectively when novelty becomes workload, when two overs become twenty, when the body is tired, the surface is dead, and a captain who has run out of ideas asks for one more spell.
That question requires a different map, which includes:
a. Raw pace and full biomechanical assessment
b. Technical correction
c. Progressive Red Ball Workload
d. Durable International Bowler.
Pace does not become a career. It becomes a medical history.
Reading the action, not just the outcome
A modern fast-bowling assessment begins not with a radar gun but with the body made legible. Reflective markers are fixed to anatomical landmarks. Infrared cameras record the action at high speed from several angles. Force plates beneath the run-up and crease measure what the ground sends back through the feet, knees, hips and spine. A three-dimensional model reconstructs the delivery stride frame by frame. Shoulder counter-rotation, pelvic alignment, trunk lean, front-knee bracing, ankle loading, elbow extension and wrist position cease to be impressions. They become relationships.
The point is not to turn a young athlete into a diagram. It is to discover where his pace is being made, where force is being lost, and which tissues are paying more than their share. In an explosive action, forces many times body weight may pass through the front leg in a vanishingly brief interval. Milliseconds matter. Degrees matter. The sequence in which joints rotate matters. A flaw too quick for the naked eye can be repeated hundreds of times in a match and thousands in a season. Injury is often no more mystical than bad calculations performed at speed.
Look closely at Qayyum and several debts appear to be accumulating. First comes the base. His legs appear to cross over more than the action requires as he gathers into delivery. To the casual eye this may seem no more than personal flourish, one of those private signatures by which fast bowlers make violence look individual. It is not necessarily so innocent.
A crossed-over base narrows the platform from which the delivery is launched. The body must then recover stability while accelerating and rotating. Large muscle groups that ought to share the work may be denied their cleanest positions, and smaller structures are invited to improvise. Knees, ankles and groins become emergency accountants, balancing a transaction they did not design. The faster the bowler, the less forgiving that transaction becomes.
Fast bowling is a chain, but not in the tired sense that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is a chain in motion: energy gathered from the run-up, accepted by the back foot, transferred through hips and trunk, blocked and redirected by the front leg, then expressed through shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers. When the base crosses itself, the chain begins its final sequence in negotiation rather than alignment. Some bodies negotiate brilliantly for a while. None negotiates indefinitely without charge.
The risk in the transition
Then there is the front foot. In the approach to delivery, Qayyum’s toe appears to point towards fine leg or square. Around release, the body must swing dramatically towards point and cover. Whether the precise change proves to be ninety degrees or somewhat less is exactly why proper measurement is required; the visible transition is large enough to demand it.
This is not just a matter of where a shoe points. The foot is the final treaty between a fast bowler and the earth. It lands, braces, and asks the rest of the body to rotate above it while enormous force passes through a very small area. If alignment changes violently under load, the twist must be absorbed somewhere. The knee may take part of it. The hip may take part. The lower back often takes what remains.
In Qayyum’s case, concern gathers around the left knee and the right side of the lumbar spine. The anterior cruciate ligament exists to restrain unwanted translation and rotation within the knee; it is not a decorative cord to be tested every six seconds. The lumbar structures, meanwhile, are already exposed to extension, rotation and side-bending in fast bowling. Add a hurried directional correction below them and the spine is asked to reconcile two intentions at once.
The important distinction is between position and transition. A naturally turned-out foot is not, by itself, a sentence. Athletes possess anatomical variations and learn workable accommodations. What matters is how far the foot travels from its natural alignment, how quickly it does so, and how much load it carries during the change. Static photographs flatter danger. Injury lives in the journey between frames.
The cost of lateral flexion
The most arresting feature may be Qayyum’s lateral trunk flexion at release: the degree to which the upper body falls sideways rather than remaining comparatively stacked over the braced front leg. Every fast bowler bends. The action cannot be sterilised into a laboratory mannequin. Side-bending contributes to release height, arm path and the translation of rotational force. But magnitude and timing matter. Excessive lateral flexion has long concerned biomechanists because it can increase asymmetric loading through the lumbar spine and is associated with the family of stress injuries that stalk young quicks. The pars interarticularis, a small bridge of bone in the vertebra, becomes the place where repetition writes its cruelest footnote.
The tragedy of such injuries is their delayed eloquence. The body may indicate for months before it breaks down. A young bowler can feel fit because muscle protects him, adrenaline edits the pain, and the workload has not yet accumulated. Then one longer spell, one compressed tournament, one ill-managed return from soreness completes a process already under way. The scan appears dramatic. The history was gradual.
There is also a performance argument, for those who care only for the number. Force directed sideways is force not fully transmitted towards the target. If Qayyum is collapsing excessively at release, some of his extraordinary effort may be dissipated through a movement that is both hazardous and inefficient. Correcting it need not make him slower. Properly done, it may allow the same body to bowl as quickly with less waste, perhaps even more quickly with greater control. Protection and performance are not enemies. In good coaching, they are often the same instruction expressed in different languages.
Finally comes the elbow, visibly hyper-extending as the arm whips through. Here judgement must be careful, because anatomy is not misconduct and unusual extension is not automatically pathology. Some athletes naturally possess greater joint laxity. In Qayyum’s case, that extension may contribute to the late whip that helps generate pace. The flaw and the gift may occupy the same inch of movement. But gifts also send invoices.
Why the action must be treated as one system
An elbow repeatedly driven to its end range under the force of express bowling may expose the joint and its surrounding tendons to cumulative irritation. More importantly, hyper-extension can sometimes function as compensation. If the lower body, trunk, and shoulder are not transferring force cleanly, the distal joint finds a final flourish to recover speed. Correct the base, foot and trunk, and the elbow may behave differently without being bullied into a cosmetic repair.
This is why actions cannot be mended as though they were cupboards with several loose screws. Move one angle, and another inherits its work. Straighten the run-up without understanding the pelvis, and rhythm may disappear. Force the front foot into an idealised position, and the knee may receive a load for which the hip has not prepared it. Command the trunk to stay upright, and the arm may search elsewhere for release. The action is one organism. Intervention must be integrated, gradual, and measured against both pain and performance.
Short-form cricket can conceal the risk
The predictable reply is simple: if these dangers are real, why is the boy fit? Why does he bowl so beautifully? Where is the injury? The answer is contained in the question. He looks unbroken because he has not yet been asked to break. Short-form cricket is a magnificent hiding place for biomechanical debt. Two overs can display a gift without revealing its cost. Four overs may be completed before fatigue alters alignment, before the front leg softens, before the trunk falls farther, before the stabilising muscles surrender their small protections. The action leaves the stadium famous and apparently intact.
Red-ball cricket is less polite. It repeats the question until the body answers honestly. A first spell may be sharp. The second asks whether mechanics survive fatigue. The third discovers whether yesterday’s recovery was real. Four or five first-class matches, crowded together, can expose what a handful of televised overs concealed. The problem is not just volume but altered movement under volume. Tired athletes do not reproduce their best actions badly; they produce different actions.
Qayyum has developed repetitions and muscle memory, but perhaps along a groove that contains the seed of breakdown. Even his boots have not yet had time to become witnesses. A worn sole can reveal drag, rotation and asymmetric pressure. Leather and rubber remember what coaches overlook. Yet without sufficient mileage, that quiet testimony has not fully formed.
Pakistan is therefore admiring a machine at maximum revs before opening the bonnet, studying the heat or checking whether the bolts are holding. No serious engineer would call that science. Cricket administrators do because the machine can win them a headline before it asks them for a hospital bed.
A system that replaces rather than preserves
Pakistan’s gift for producing fast bowlers has become an alibi for its failure to preserve them. Because another always appears, the disappearance of the last one is treated as weather rather than governance. A shoulder goes, a back fractures, an elbow refuses to settle; a rehabilitation becomes confused, a return is rushed, a career narrows. Then the selectors look towards the next village, the next tournament, the next startling clip on a telephone. The country mistakes replenishment for development.
Ihsanullah’s ordeal should have ended this complacency. His elbow injury and the controversy around its diagnosis and management were not a private misfortune; they were an institutional warning. Whatever arguments remain about responsibility, timing and treatment, the outcome should have forced Pakistan cricket to build a transparent, multidisciplinary pathway for every high-velocity prospect. Instead, Qayyum has arrived to the old music: proclamation first, investigation later.
The academy praises its number. Journalists amplify it. Experts appear on screens to speak of intimidation, fire and the revival of a tradition. Meanwhile the essential questions remain almost embarrassingly ordinary. Has he undergone a full three-dimensional biomechanical assessment? Have his force profiles been measured? Is there a baseline MRI where clinically justified, or at least a complete musculoskeletal screen? Has anyone modelled how his action changes after six, twelve and eighteen overs? Does he have an individualised strength programme? Is his first-class workload being planned across months rather than announced across microphones?
These are not luxurious questions. They are the minimum admission fee to modern high-performance sport. The real insult is that the equipment exists. The knowledge exists. The international evidence exists. Pakistan is not being asked to discover biomechanics. It is being asked to use it. To possess instruments and refuse their verdict is worse than never having possessed them. Ignorance can plead darkness. Negligence switches off the light.
What a responsible pathway looks like
Concern is worthless unless it can be translated into care. Qayyum does not need panic, public dissection or a committee eager to justify its furniture. He needs a quiet, competent programme with authority over selection pressure.
The steps are plain:
- Establish the baseline. Conduct a full clinical and musculoskeletal examination, record previous pain and injury, assess joint mobility, strength asymmetries and natural foot alignment, and create a permanent medical baseline before workloads rise.
- Capture the complete action. Use high-speed three-dimensional motion analysis and force plates. Measure the crossover, front-foot angle and its transition, pelvic and shoulder rotation, front-knee behaviour, lateral trunk flexion, release mechanics and elbow extension. Record accuracy and ball behaviour alongside body mechanics; a safe action that cannot bowl is not a solution.
- Test fatigue, not theatre. Repeat selected measurements after progressively longer spells. The fourth over of a staged assessment is less informative than the fifteenth. The object is to discover where technique changes as stabilising capacity falls.
- Correct the chain, not the photograph. Build an intervention led jointly by a fast-bowling coach, biomechanist, sports physician, physiotherapist and strength specialist. Prioritise the changes carrying the clearest risk. Introduce them gradually. Re-measure rather than relying on aesthetic approval.
- Build the body around the action. Develop hip stability, trunk control, posterior-chain strength, calf and ankle capacity, adductor resilience and the ability to accept front-leg forces. Manage the elbow and shoulder as parts of the full kinetic sequence.
- Earn red-ball volume. Progress from controlled spells to longer workloads with mandatory recovery. Do not select him for consecutive demands only because the national team is desperate or a broadcaster has built a campaign around him. Track balls bowled in training as seriously as balls bowled in matches.
- Protect medical authority. The return-to-play decision must belong to qualified clinicians and performance staff, not selectors, agents, journalists or the player in the emotional heat of opportunity. Publish no false deadlines. Promise no miracle recovery.
- Educate the bowler. Qayyum must understand his own action, warning symptoms, and workload plan. Protection imposed without comprehension feels like obstruction. Protection understood becomes professional discipline.
None of this requires extinguishing his pace. The object is not to domesticate the storm. It is to give the storm a climate in which it can return.
Give the bowler time to become more than a number
There is a peculiar cruelty in making a young fast bowler famous for a speed before he has learned the terms of survival. The number becomes his employer. Every appearance must reproduce it. A delivery at 145, perhaps wiser, more accurate and less costly, is received as decline. He begins to chase the gun rather than the batter. Coaches, frightened of being blamed for diminishing him, hesitate to intervene. Selectors rush him because rarity creates its own impatience. Eventually the body enters the argument, and the body always has the final vote.
Mohammad Qayyum Khan deserves better than to become the vessel of Pakistan’s nostalgia. He deserves the chance to be a bowler rather than a velocity. That means swing, seam, control, deception, stamina, tactical intelligence, and the capacity to return for a second spell with his action still belonging to him. It means a career measured not by the fastest ball he once bowled, but by the number of meaningful overs his body allowed him to bowl well.
The speed gun can tell us something thrilling and true. It can tell us how fast the ball travelled today. It cannot tell us whether Qayyum will be bowling in three years, whether his lumbar spine will tolerate a season, whether the left knee will continue to accept the twist, whether the elbow will remain gift rather than grievance. Those answers live in forces and angles, in recovery and fatigue, in the unglamorous patience of people willing to protect a future no headline can yet see.
The real measure of Pakistan’s pace legacy
Pakistan has always found fast bowlers. That is not the miracle we pretend it is. The miracle would be to find one, understand him, preserve him, and let his craft mature beyond the first astonishment. The tragedy would be to possess every instrument required for that work and still choose applause.
So stop advertising the boy as a number. Stop asking the radar gun to perform the duties of a laboratory, a coach and a physician. Measure the action. Correct what must be corrected. Strengthen what must be strengthened. Increase the workload by evidence, not excitement. Give medical judgement the power to say no. Give the bowler enough time to become more interesting than 153. Or gather around the glowing figure, warm your hands over it, and congratulate yourselves on having invented fire. Otherwise, keep living in the Stone Age.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Dr. Nauman Niaz, a postdoctoral scholar (Oxford) and recipient of Pakistan’s Tamgha-i-Imtiaz for sports broadcasting and journalism, has covered 54 international cricket tours and three ICC Cricket World Cups. He has written more than 3,700 articles, authored 19 books, including the official history of Pakistan cricket, Fluctuating Fortunes, and is the Sports Editor at JournalismPakistan.
Key Points
- The 153 kph figure has become a headline before Qayyum has established himself in first-class cricket.
- National excitement risks reducing the player to a single statistic rather than a developing athlete.
- Long-term planning should prioritise coaching, fitness and workload management over instant promotion.
- Regular domestic matches and managed exposure will better sustain a professional career than headline-driven selection.
- Selectors, academies and coaches must coordinate to protect his body and progression through levels.
Key Questions & Answers
Who is Mohammad Qayyum Khan?
Mohammad Qayyum Khan is a young Pakistani fast bowler who attracted attention after a reported 153 kph delivery, but he has yet to establish himself in first-class cricket.
Why is the 153 kph figure important?
The speed reading denotes raw pace and creates excitement, but it is only one metric and does not guarantee long-term success without development and management.
What should Pakistan cricket do now?
Officials should focus on sustained coaching, workload monitoring, proper fitness programmes and consistent domestic opportunities rather than rushing him into the spotlight.
Does high speed alone make a fast bowler successful?
No. Pace helps, but skill, accuracy, fitness, tactical development and experience in domestic and longer formats are crucial for a lasting career.
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