We’re seated in a little alcove at the back of the team hotel, shaded by artificial palm trees, when Usman Khan sidles up, and pulls up a third chair. Shaheen is just finishing up his interview with ESPNcricinfo, and as soon as we’re done, he takes his leave and returns to his room, expertly fending off a small army of autograph hunters who had gathered while we spoke. But Usman, whom none of those autograph hunters were for, clearly has plenty on his mind, and is eager for someone to have it with.
It becomes patently clear that he isn’t happy. He doesn’t feel like the media have given him a fair go, that people are too soon to write him off. He worries that if he can’t reverse an alarming slide in form, he’ll soon be dropped from the national setup and slip into obscurity. He never quite says it, but you can hear him wonder if quitting the UAE to return to Pakistan off the back of nothing but a PSL purple patch in 2024 was the right thing to do. And he promises that, if he gets an opportunity to go after those in cricket media who have treated him unfairly, he will do so publicly, without mincing his words.
There is a moment in many conversations where the realisation dawns that the delusion at the other end is so complete as to suck any counter-argument into its whirlpool. That epiphanic instance had long since been crossed between us. It was difficult to listen to the player Usman was describing, and somehow reconcile it with the one who put on a green shirt, who looked like he had almost hoodwinked his way into the national team.
In 27 T20I innings since the 2024 T20 World Cup, Usman had crossed 15 just 7 times, averaging under 19. For all of his vaunted power-hitting potential, his strike rate was lower than what anchors now get tossed out for – just under 122.
Yet, suddenly unmoored from the grievances and complications that beleaguer him with the national team, Usman has transfigured, again, into a savage mauler of bowling attacks, someone who can heave Mohammad Amir off the back foot, and scythe Imad Wasim over extra cover. The leaden-footed oafishness has suddenly given way to a more overwhelming kind of power. Unmistakably brutal, still, but unstoppably effective.
In his last five matches for Kingsmen during this unprecedented turnaround they have enjoyed, opposition bowlers have simply found themselves cast in the role of roadkill to the Usman juggernaut. He has scored a hundred and three half-centuries in this time, surging to fourth on the runscorer charts. In that early middle order, just when the powerplay ends, Usman has bludgeoned his way through the consolidation overs, imbuing his side with the kind of irresistible momentum that has seen them win seven of their last eight matches as they take their place in Sunday’s showpiece.
Perhaps this should not be surprising, though to anyone who has watched Usman closely of late, it absolutely is. The Usman of the popular imagination will always find himself in a PSL kit, because there’s little that’s significant in his career not directly linked to it. He got his first real chance at high-level cricket here, when, it’s little remembered, he played for Quetta Gladiators and scored a 50-ball 81 on debut. A year later, he was gone, working as a security guard and storekeeper in the UAE and out of Pakistani minds for the best part of three years.
PSL success in 2024 was so complete it led Pakistan to convince him to leave the relative stability of the UAE, complete with domestic player gigs in the T10 and a path to naturalisation, for the ruthlessness of Pakistan cricket. It locked him out of the UAE altogether, copping a five-year ban for walking away, and for far too long, it looked a spectacular miscalculation.
Even in his beloved PSL, things were bleak just ten days ago. His first seven innings this season produced a meagre 76 runs, and his team seemed destined to end up on the first-round scrapheap. In his eighth game, he nicked off to the keeper first ball, only for no one to hear it. He went on to smash a 47-ball 101, hitting a PSL record 10 sixes in his innings. In his entire 38-match international T20 career, he has cleared the rope just 12 times.
It’s not like Usman’s brilliance is chanceless; even on Friday, he appeared to be on his way off just the fourth ball he faced when Mark Chapman scampered the length of deep extra cover to hang on to a sensational catch, only for contact with the ground to knock it out of his hands. But the devastation he would go on to wreak now feels increasingly inevitable; he would finish unbeaten for 61 off 30, digging his side out of a middle-overs stumble that gave Hunain and Kingsmen’s bowling attack just enough to hold Islamabad United off.
No matter how Sunday goes, it feels certain Usman will be catapulted into Pakistan’s T20 team at some point soon again. Even if no one has any evidence, really, that that will work, and plenty that it will not. Of Usman’s six career T20 hundreds, four have come at the PSL – a record. More than half his T20 half-centuries – 7 of 13 – owe their existence to the league, one where his strike rate sits a shade under 160, nearly 40 points higher than its T20I counterpart. By Sunday, he will have played as many PSL matches as T20Is; he has scored nearly three times the runs, hit five times the sixes, four times the boundaries, and averages over twice as much.
It is at the Gaddafi Stadium today, and across the past ten days, that you suddenly clock which player Usman spoke so fondly of in that little hotel alcove by the artificial palm trees, and why he was so angry at everyone who couldn’t see it. In Usman’s mind’s eye, this is who he always is, and it is the PSL all year round.
