Close of play: Farewell to Qamar Ahmed

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published: 18 June 2026 |  Dr. Nauman Niaz (TI)

Qamar Ahmed, born 1937, was a veteran cricket correspondent who reported from iconic venues worldwide and covered the 1000th and 2000th Tests. A former left-arm spinner for Sind and Hyderabad, he worked until days before his death, leaving a link to cricket's past.

Summary

ISLAMABAD — Some journalists report the game, and some become part of its weather. Qamar Ahmed belonged unmistakably to the latter.

For the better part of seven decades, he moved through the press boxes of the cricketing world as a fixture as constant as the sightscreen, as familiar as the tea interval, and rather more difficult to relocate.

He had covered the game’s 1000th Test and its 2000th; he had filed copy from grounds whose names now sound like incantation, from Bridgetown to Bulawayo, from the SCG to the dusty intimacies of Hyderabad where it had all begun.

When he died, having worked, characteristically, until barely a week before the end, cricket lost not only a correspondent but one of its last living bridges to its own antiquity.

He was born in 1937, into an undivided India that would, within a decade, fracture and remake itself, and into a family for whom cricket was less pastime than birthright. The boy who would one day interrogate Test captains first learned the game as a practitioner of genuine craft. A left-arm spinner of patience and guile, he turned out for Sind and later for Hyderabad, and he possessed, even then, that instinct for the telling detail which would later define his prose.

Captaining Sind, he bowled, it is recorded, against the incomparable Mohammad brothers, and dismissed three of that famous fraternity, Hanif, Mushtaq, and Sadiq, several of them, with a flourish that bordered on impudence, upon their very debuts. It was a feat he wore lightly, as he wore everything, but it conferred upon him a freemasonry with the players that no purely literary apprenticeship could have purchased. He had stood where they stood. He had felt the ball leave the hand and the heart lurch with it. He never forgot it, and they never forgot that he knew.

From cricketer to journalist

Yet the field was not, finally, to be his theatre. He took a master’s degree in English Literature at the University of Sindh, and one suspects the discipline never quite left him, for there was always something faintly Augustan in his cadences, a fondness for the balanced clause and the well-placed semicolon that the modern press box, with its appetite for the staccato, had largely forgotten.

In the 1960s, he made the journey to England that so many of his generation made, half pilgrimage and half gamble, and there, after the customary seasons of obscurity, he found his break with the BBC Urdu Service. From that foothold he built, with nothing but industry and an incorruptible eye, a freelance career of a kind that no longer exists and very probably never will again.

For Qamar Ahmed was, in the truest and least fashionable sense, his own man. He preferred, as he once put it with characteristic economy, to be his own captain. He carried no masthead’s livery and answered to no proprietor’s whim. The Guardian took his words, and so did The Times, the Daily Telegraph, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and his beloved Dawn; radio stations and television networks across the cricketing hemispheres borrowed his voice. He belonged to all of them and to none of them, which is to say he belonged entirely to the game.

There is a particular courage in that arrangement, a willingness to live without the monthly reassurance of a salary, sustained only by the conviction that the next Test would come, and the one after that, and that he would be there to record them. He was there. He was always there.

Record-breaking coverage across generations

The numbers, though he affected indifference to them, deserve their moment, for they are scarcely credible. More than 400 Test matches. Some 730 one-day internationals. Eight World Cups.

He became, at Sharjah in January 2014, only the third man in history after John Woodcock and Richie Benaud to have witnessed and recorded 400 Tests. By one reckoning, he had attended nearly a fifth of all the Test cricket ever played.

To contemplate that number is to understand that he had not so much covered the modern history of the game as physically constituted a part of it; that somewhere in the archive of nearly every great match of the last half-century there sits, folded into the record, the precise and unhurried observation of Qamar Ahmed.

Those who shared the press box with him, and they were legion and spanned generations, spoke of him always with a particular warmth, the warmth reserved for the genuine article. He was “Q” to the cricketers and the writers alike, a single initial that did the work of an entire affectionate biography.

He had served his apprenticeship beside the giants of the trade: Woodcock himself, Alex Bannister, John Arlott, Tony Cozier, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, and his own countryman Omar Kureishi. From them, he said, he had learned the cardinal virtues of the calling: to be articulate, hardworking, unbiased, devoted, and, above all, knowledgeable.

He honored those virtues to the last. In an age increasingly seduced by the hot take and manufactured controversy, he remained stubbornly, almost defiantly, fair.

Witness to cricket and history

He was, too, a collector of scorecards and statistics, of photographs and anecdotes, of the small sediment of memory that settles around a long life lived in proximity to greatness.

He had met Sir Donald Bradman on a first visit to Australia and counted it among the defining moments of his existence. He had traveled to Soweto and interviewed Nelson Mandela, newly delivered from prison, an audience he attributed, with disarming humility, entirely to cricket’s peculiar passport.

Cricket, he understood, opened doors that diplomacy could not; it had carried a boy from Hyderabad into the presence of the century’s moral colossus, and he never ceased to marvel at the improbability of it.

He was present at Faisalabad in 1987 when Mike Gatting and Shakoor Rana stood finger to finger in their famous altercation, and he reported it as he reported everything else, without rancor, without easy partisanship, and with an eye fixed only upon the truth of what had occurred.

He witnessed the game through eras of unreliable telephones and power failures and later through the digital age, adapting to change without compromising his standards.

A mentor and gentleman of the press box

There are debts of the heart that no document can record, and mine to Qamar Ahmed is among them.

Ours was a connection of a particular and private kind, the sort that forms not in a single meeting but across the slow accumulation of shared afternoons, the international fixtures and the domestic ones, the long days in the commentary box at home and abroad, where I had the fortune to sit beside him and to learn what the craft truly demanded.

He had achievements that any man might have worn as armor; he wore them instead as an open hand, extended always toward those of us coming up behind him. The mentoring I received from him was never formal, never announced. It was simply given, in the manner of a man for whom generosity was not a gesture but a temperament.

I remember the gratitude that filled him when I wrote a piece about his life and career. And here was the measure of the gentleman: when he came to write another of his own books, he telephoned me, this man of 400 Tests, to ask whether he might fold my small tribute into its pages.

It is a courtesy I have not forgotten and shall not.

The final innings

The last time I saw him, he was among the first of the cherished few to arrive at my book launch in Karachi. He came smiling, upright, and entirely undiminished. He wished me the very best.

When he rose to the stage that evening, he spoke with the eloquence that was forever his forte. He was kind enough to mention my own contributions and my passion for collecting cricket history and memorabilia, a passion he understood intimately.

We had that final meeting photographed together in the warm light of an ordinary evening.

I did not know, as the shutter closed, that it was the last.

I tell myself now that it was not the last at all, only the last until we meet again.

The young correspondent settling into some press box yet unbuilt, filing on some technology not yet imagined, will inherit a tradition he helped carry across the better part of a century. He will not know the debt, but the debt will be there nonetheless.

He covered the game’s 1000th Test and its 2000th, and somewhere between those two great mileposts he quietly became indispensable to it.

Now the scorers have closed their books, and the long innings are over.

He made, by the most conservative estimate, a fifth of all Test cricket his personal witness; he gave the rest of us the words by which to remember it.

The sightscreens will be wheeled into position tomorrow, and the day after, at grounds across the world, and the game he loved will go on, as it always does, indifferent and eternal.

But it will go on a little poorer for his absence, and a great deal richer for his having passed through.

Rest, then, Q. The light has gone, and the players are coming off. You stayed at your post until the very close of play, and there is no higher praise to give a man of the press box than that.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Dr. Nauman Niaz, a Post Doctorate (Oxford), PhD (UWA), FRCP (London), FRCP (Edinburgh), FRCP (Ireland), FRCP (Glasgow), CST (Endo, UK), MSc Biomechanics & Kinesiology (UWA), MRCP (UK), MBBS (Pb), is a civil award recipient (Tamgha-i-Imtiaz) in sports broadcasting and journalism. He has covered 54 cricket tours and three ICC World Cups, written more than 3,700 articles, authored 19 books, and serves as the official historian of Pakistan cricket. His television program Game On Hai has been the highest rated and acclaimed.