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Brim Full of Passion: Wasim Khan from the ghetto to pro cricket
Wasim Khan with Alan Wilkinson
Brim Full of Passion has
been named Wisden Book of the Year 2006
Eight-year-old Wasim Khan yanks a board out of the garden fence, nicks his Mum’s only decent knife, and starts whittling. A month later he’s putting his first bat to good use: sending the school’s tennis balls high onto the roof so that he can sneak back over the gate at night and liberate them.
Brim Full of Passion follows this son of Kashmiri immigrants from the grimy streets of Small Heath to leafy Edgbaston, where he breaks in through the fence to watch England play Pakistan. A year later he’s there legitimately, batting for the under-13s.
The dream is simple: Warwickshire, England, the world. After four gruelling years as an apprentice pro he makes the all-conquering Bears team of 1995, and is on the brink of the England ‘A’ squad. But a loss of form, a dodgy selection policy, and the first British-born Asian to make the county grade loses his confidence. A move to Sussex is a disaster: he falls out with captain Chris Adams, can’t get a game, and winds up playing for Derbyshire for nothing. At 30 it’s all over and he's embarking on a new career as a coach. Anything to stay in the game he loves.
Brim Full of Passion takes the reader into dressing-rooms from Edgbaston to Sydney; to the Kashmiri village where Wasim goes to bury his father; onto the field with Mike Atherton and Wasim Akram, deep into the heart of the pro game where players share the joy of success but feed off each other's failures. It charts Wasim’s extraordinary journey from ghetto to county circuit, from one-man coaching outfit with an office in his bedroom to his job as Operations Director with the Cricket Foundation and his role with the £50 million Chance to shine intiative, the most expensively funded sportinginitiative the country has seen.
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Brim
Full of Passion has been named Wisden Book of the
Year 2006
About the
Author
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