Did Hashim Amla Stay On For A Bit Longer Than He Should Have?

If he loved the game cricket fans returned the affection many times over thanks to his languid grace with the bat and is one of the best-behaved cricketers at a time when the behavior was at an all-time low...

- Partab Ramchand

Did he stay on for a bit longer than he should have? Those cricket followers who have followed Hashim Amla’s career close-ly will have difficulty in answering this question in the negative. One does not wish to be over critical of one of the outstanding batsmen in contemporary cricket and one of the nicest men to have played the game but Amla found it hard to be among the runs for quite a while. Yes, there is always the well-known sporting adage that ``form is temporary, class is permanent’’ and how the connoisseurs of the game wished that Amla could find his old touch, a style so elegant that he charmed the ball out of a fieldsman’s reach bewildering the bowler at the same time by playing the ball so late. Perhaps Amla loved the game he adorned at the international level for 15 years so much that he didn’t want to leave the scene.