Shoaib Akhtar strikes the IPL - 4 wickets for 11 runs and the balance of power changes.

For all you folks who bowl slow and will never know, genuine fast bowling, the real stuff, is right up there with the most wonderful sensations you can ever experience in a human lifetime.

You can’t purchase a ticket for it, no expensive equipment will buy you speed, you are either born with the sheer elemental stump-shattering rush or you aren’t and Shoaib Aktar has it coming out of his ears in boxes...

The fast bowler is the most colourful, exciting and adrenaline-floodingly lethal role in cricket. It’s almost as if you’re a Cavalier on a thoroughbred charger slanting into a line of little grey foot-slogging Roundheads. You’re either going to smash them apart or perhaps they’ll survive and absorb the attack, but hey – they’re sure as hell going to remember you.

Have you ever had one of those ‘flying’ dreams, where you’re mostly asleep, but get the sensation you might be floating in the air, then you probably have to grab at the bedclothes to stop yourself falling? Well, a fast bowler running down to the wicket feels like that all the time.

They’re running on a cloud, bouncing in, tunnel-vision focussed and flying toward their frightened quarry. They feel a rush like they’re the swiftest thing alive and all really quick bowlers share the feeling they can knock over any batsman in the world with a single delivery if they’re ‘on song’. If a fast bowler is ‘on song’ they can be absolutely unplayable. If they lose control or lose confidence, they can be dreadful.

Most fast bowlers have an air of arrogance about them, which comes from knowing how many bats and stumps they’ve broken so far this season.

They’re predatory and relish counting their victims in the same way a fighter pilot might paint a tally of kills on the side of his plane. When they can’t get in the groove though, or when they lose pace, quicks can suffer from ‘the yips’, the crippling self-doubt that comes from apparently not being able to do it any more.

Most fast bowlers can’t continue in first class cricket beyond the age of twenty eight. This isn’t just age. The wear and tear on the fast bowler’s body (the wrenching of intercostal muscles, wear to knees, shifting of spinal discs and nerves being trapped between them, maybe even finger damage) eventually takes its toll.

Eventually you can begin your final season (“surely I’ve got one more season in me?”) and might be shocked to find you’ve lost ten miles an hour in pace just across the winter. The choice is then either to become clever and more accurate, to out-think the batsmen instead, or to accept the hint it’s time to quit....