There was a particular sight that became horribly familiar to batsmen during the 1990s.
The ball was old.
Waqar Younis was running in.
And somewhere around the batsman’s toes, trouble was coming.
Sometimes the stumps were knocked backwards.
Sometimes a desperate bat came down too late.
Sometimes the batsman was trapped leg before wicket before he had properly understood how far the ball had moved.
Waqar did not merely bowl yorkers.
He turned them into a form of attack.
At his quickest, with reverse swing dragging the ball late into the right-hander, he became one of the most dangerous fast bowlers cricket has seen.
Pakistan has produced a remarkable list of quicks, but Waqar occupies his own place among them.
373 Test wickets.
416 ODI wickets.
Nearly 800 international wickets.
And a partnership with Wasim Akram that became one of the defining fast-bowling combinations of an era.
He was known as the Burewala Express.
The nickname suited him.
Waqar Younis bowled as if he were in a hurry to end an innings.
Before the Famous Yorker
Waqar was born on 16 November 1971 in Vehari, Punjab, Pakistan.
His rise was rapid.
Pakistan cricket has always had a gift for discovering fast bowlers who appear without warning, armed with natural pace and very little concern for reputations.
Waqar belonged to that tradition.
By 1989, he had reached international cricket.
His Test debut came against India in Karachi.
That match has an unusual place in cricket history because another teenager was making his Test debut for India.
His name was Sachin Tendulkar.
Two men who would become legends of the sport began their Test careers in the same match.
Waqar immediately looked dangerous.
He was young, genuinely quick and still learning exactly how much damage his action could create.
The finished product would become far more frightening.
Pace Was Only the Beginning
A lot of young bowlers can bowl quickly.
Very few build great careers from speed alone.
Waqar learned to add movement.
Then control.
Then the delivery that became his signature.
The late-swinging yorker.
At full pace, a conventional yorker is already difficult to handle. The batsman has almost no time to bring the bat down.
Waqar added another problem.
His yorker could swing.
And when the ball became older, it could reverse dramatically.
What looked like a delivery heading towards one line could suddenly dip back towards the base of the stumps.
For the batsman, the reaction time was tiny.
For Waqar, the result was often spectacular.
Why His Yorkers Looked So Violent
Waqar attacked the crease with momentum.
He had a rapid run-up and an explosive delivery action that generated serious pace.
But the real danger appeared after the ball left his hand.
He bowled full.
Very full.
Modern fast bowlers are often warned that overpitching gives batsmen opportunities to drive.
Waqar accepted that risk because the reward was enormous.
He wanted the stumps involved.
Bowled and leg-before-wicket were not accidental dismissals in his method.
They were central to it.
A batsman who missed Waqar’s full delivery often did not get a second chance.
Reverse Swing Becomes a Pakistani Weapon
Reverse swing had existed before Waqar, but Pakistan’s fast bowlers turned it into one of the most discussed skills in world cricket.
Imran Khan had already developed deep knowledge of using the old ball.
Wasim Akram became a master of making it move both ways.
Waqar added speed and the crushing in-swinging yorker.
Together, Pakistan created something unique.
While other attacks sometimes waited for the new ball to return, Pakistan’s quicks could become even more dangerous when the ball grew older.
For opposition batsmen, that was deeply inconvenient.
Survive the new ball and the problem was not necessarily over.
Sometimes it was only beginning.
Wasim and Waqar
Eventually, cricket stopped discussing them separately.
They became simply:
The Two Ws.
Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis.
Wasim was the left-armer with almost every variation imaginable.
Waqar attacked from the right arm with pace, late swing and the yorker.
Their differences made the partnership work.
The batsman had to constantly adjust angles.
One over could come from Wasim.
The next from Waqar.
One could swing the ball away.
The other could send it crashing back towards the stumps.
There was very little time to settle.
Two Bowlers Who Wanted Wickets
The great thing about Wasim and Waqar was that neither seemed particularly interested in merely keeping the scoring rate down.
They wanted the batsman out.
This gave Pakistan an attacking personality.
Captains could use the pair when a partnership needed breaking rather than simply when the new ball was available.
Tailenders were especially vulnerable.
Waqar had little interest in wasting deliveries against the lower order.
Full.
Straight.
Fast.
Game over.
A Fast Start to a Great Career
Waqar accumulated Test wickets extremely quickly.
According to the Pakistan Cricket Board, his first 50 Test wickets arrived in only 10 Tests, and he reached 100 in 20.
By his 27th Test, he had already taken 150.
That kind of pace immediately separated him from ordinary international bowlers.
This was not a player slowly building a respectable career.
Waqar was taking entire batting orders apart.
New Zealand Feel the Full Force
A home series against New Zealand in 1990–91 showed just how devastating he could be.
Across three Tests, Waqar took 29 wickets.
Twenty-nine.
In three matches.
That is almost ten wickets per Test.
For a young fast bowler still early in his international journey, it was an extraordinary series.
Pakistan had found much more than a useful quick.
They had found a match-winner.
The Cruel Timing of 1992
By early 1992, Waqar was at the height of his powers.
Pakistan were preparing for the Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
Waqar should have been one of their biggest weapons.
Then his back failed him.
A stress fracture ruled him out.
Pakistan went to the tournament without one of the finest fast bowlers in the world.
And then, remarkably, they won it.
Imran Khan’s “cornered tigers” recovered from a terrible start, reached the final and defeated England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Pakistan became world champions.
Waqar watched from outside the team.
It remained one of the great personal disappointments of his career.
The World Cup He Should Have Played
The 1992 tournament created an unusual contrast in Waqar’s story.
Pakistan cricket remembers it with enormous joy.
Waqar understandably remembered it differently.
He was happy for his country and teammates, but he had been denied the chance to participate in the moment every international cricketer dreams about.
In later years, he repeatedly spoke about how much missing that World Cup hurt.
The injury was especially cruel because he was not a fading veteran.
He was one of the most dangerous bowlers in the game.
England, 1992
If anyone wondered how good Waqar might have been at that World Cup, the answer arrived later that same year.
Pakistan toured England.
Waqar was still working his way back from the back injury.
He took 22 wickets in the five-Test series.
No bowler took more.
Pakistan won the series 2–1.
Wasim Akram was magnificent as well.
English batsmen were confronted with the full problem of the Two Ws.
New ball.
Old ball.
Swing.
Reverse swing.
Yorkers.
There was very little escape.
Lord’s and the Five-Wicket Haul
At Lord’s, Waqar took 5 for 91 in England’s first innings.
His victims included Graeme Hick, Allan Lamb, Ian Botham, Chris Lewis and Phil DeFreitas.
Pakistan eventually won by two wickets.
It was Waqar’s only appearance on the Lord’s Test Honours Board, but the broader series mattered far more.
Pakistan’s fast bowling had taken control of English conditions.
The old assumption that touring Asian sides depended mostly on spin no longer fitted.
Pakistan had perhaps the most frightening pace partnership in world cricket.
England’s Batsmen Had Nowhere to Hide
The numbers from that 1992 series tell the story.
Waqar took 22 wickets.
Wasim took 21.
Together:
43 Test wickets.
Seventeen of those dismissals were bowled.
Nine were leg before wicket.
That is a revealing detail.
These were not bowlers relying only on edges into the slips.
They were attacking the stumps relentlessly.
One mistake and the timber was exposed.
A Career Built Around Strike Bowling
Waqar finished Test cricket with:
373 wickets from 87 matches.
His average was:
23.56.
He took:
22 five-wicket innings hauls
and
five ten-wicket match hauls.
Those are elite numbers.
But another statistic helps explain what watching Waqar felt like.
His strike rate was exceptional.
At the time he played, few bowlers with a large number of Test wickets dismissed batsmen as frequently.
Waqar did not need endless spells to create danger.
Wickets could arrive in clusters.
When One Wicket Became Three
This was perhaps his most frightening quality.
Some bowlers remove one batsman and the match settles again.
Waqar could remove one and suddenly destroy the next two.
The ball was reversing.
The tail was exposed.
Confidence disappeared.
One wicket became two.
Two became four.
A competitive total became a collapse.
Fast bowlers who can produce those bursts are priceless.
Waqar built a career around them.
The Best Test Match of His Career
One of Waqar’s greatest Test performances came against Zimbabwe in Karachi.
Across the match, he took:
13 wickets for 135 runs.
His innings figures were:
7 for 91
and
6 for 44.
A thirteen-wicket match is rare for any bowler.
For a fast bowler carrying the physical workload of repeated high-speed spells, it is exceptional.
The performance remains one of the clearest demonstrations of Waqar’s ability to dominate an entire Test.
He Wasn’t Only a Test Bowler
Waqar’s ODI record is arguably even more striking.
He played:
262 One Day Internationals.
He took:
416 wickets.
His average was:
23.84.
At the time of his retirement, his wicket tally placed him among the highest ODI wicket-takers the sport had seen.
And the shorter format suited his attacking instincts perfectly.
The Perfect Death Bowler Before “Death Bowling” Became a Science
Modern cricket talks constantly about the final overs.
Yorkers.
Slower balls.
Wide lines.
Match-ups.
Specialist death bowlers.
Waqar was mastering one of the most valuable death-bowling skills decades ago.
His yorker gave him an obvious weapon when batsmen had to attack.
Move across the crease?
The stumps remained vulnerable.
Stay deep?
The ball attacked the toes.
Swing hard?
Miss and the innings might be over.
His natural method was almost designed for the final overs.
416 ODI Wickets
Taking 416 wickets in ODI cricket requires more than one brilliant skill.
It requires longevity.
Waqar played against generations of international batsmen.
Different conditions.
Different regulations.
Different balls.
Different tactical eras.
He kept taking wickets.
The PCB also credits him with a world-record 27 four-wicket hauls in ODI cricket.
That is a remarkable measure of how frequently he produced genuinely match-changing spells.
Seven for 36
His best ODI figures came against England at Leeds in 2001.
Waqar took:
7 wickets for 36 runs.
Seven wickets in a 50-over match.
There are only ten available.
The performance arrived late in his career, which makes it even more impressive.
The young Waqar had terrorized batsmen with explosive pace.
The older Waqar had experience and tactical intelligence to add to the armoury.
The Burewala Express
The nickname Burewala Express became permanently attached to him.
Waqar was associated with Burewala in Punjab, and the “Express” part required no explanation.
At his fastest, he was genuinely rapid.
But unlike some pure speed merchants, Waqar converted pace into wickets at an extraordinary rate.
Fast bowling is exciting.
Fast bowling that knocks stumps out of the ground becomes memorable.
Waqar supplied plenty of both.
A Different Threat From Shoaib Akhtar
Pakistan would later produce perhaps the fastest bowler ever recorded:
Shoaib Akhtar.
Comparisons were inevitable.
But Waqar and Shoaib represented different kinds of danger.
Shoaib’s extreme speed could overwhelm a batsman.
Waqar’s greatest weapon was what happened to the ball very late in its journey.
He did not merely ask:
“Can you handle the pace?”
He asked:
“Can you handle the pace when the ball suddenly moves into your toes?”
That second question made him unique.
Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar and the Best of the Era
Waqar bowled through a period containing some of the finest batsmen in cricket history.
Sachin Tendulkar.
Brian Lara.
Steve Waugh.
Mark Waugh.
Graham Gooch.
Alec Stewart.
Aravinda de Silva.
Sanath Jayasuriya.
Mohammad Azharuddin.
Allan Border.
Later came players such as Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist.
There were no easy wickets at international level.
Waqar still finished with 789 of them.
The Lara Challenge
Waqar himself later described Brian Lara as one of the finest batsmen he faced.
That was fitting.
Lara could dismantle bowling attacks once he found rhythm.
Waqar could destroy batting line-ups before rhythm ever developed.
Their battles represented one of cricket’s great themes:
Elite batsman against elite fast bowler.
No guarantees.
The 1996 World Cup Heartbreak
World Cups never treated Waqar particularly kindly.
He had missed the 1992 triumph through injury.
By 1996, he was fully involved.
Pakistan faced India in the quarter-final at Bengaluru.
The rivalry made the pressure enormous.
Late in India’s innings, Ajay Jadeja launched a famous attack.
Waqar conceded heavily in the closing overs.
India reached 287 for eight and later won the match.
For Waqar, it became one of the difficult nights of his career.
Great players are not protected from painful moments.
They are often remembered through them as well.
Why Great Fast Bowlers Occasionally Get Hit
Waqar’s 1996 experience also reveals something important about his method.
He attacked.
That carried risk.
A fast bowler targeting yorkers might occasionally miss the length.
A slightly short yorker can become a half-volley.
A batsman already looking to attack can punish it.
But asking Waqar to become conservative would have removed the quality that made him great.
His career was built around taking wickets rather than hiding from the contest.
Sometimes the batsman won.
Much more often, Waqar did.
Leadership Arrives
Later in his career, Waqar became Pakistan captain.
He led the country in:
17 Tests
and
62 ODIs.
Fast bowlers rarely captain international sides for long periods because their physical workload is already substantial.
Waqar took on the responsibility anyway.
He led Pakistan on the 2001 tour of England and continued through the early 2000s.
The captaincy period contained good victories and difficult defeats.
It added another layer to a career already full of responsibility.
A Captain Still Expected to Lead the Attack
Captaincy does not make bowling easier.
A bowler needs to concentrate on rhythm, field placements, workloads and individual batsmen.
A captain must think about everyone.
Waqar had to do both.
He was not simply placing himself at fine leg and directing others.
He remained one of Pakistan’s main wicket-taking threats.
That made the role unusually demanding.
The 2003 World Cup
Waqar captained Pakistan at the 2003 Cricket World Cup in South Africa.
The squad contained enormous names.
Wasim Akram.
Shoaib Akhtar.
Inzamam-ul-Haq.
Saeed Anwar.
Shahid Afridi.
Waqar himself.
On paper, there was considerable talent.
The tournament went badly.
Pakistan failed to progress beyond the first round.
It effectively marked the end of an era.
The End of the Two Ws
By 2003, both Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were approaching the end of their international careers.
For more than a decade, Pakistan cricket had been built partly around their ability to take wickets.
Now the game was moving on.
Wasim retired.
Waqar’s international career also came to a close.
Pakistan would produce more fast bowlers.
It always does.
But there would never be another Two Ws.
789 International Wickets
Waqar’s final international bowling record reads:
373 Test wickets
plus
416 ODI wickets.
Total:
789 international wickets.
That is an extraordinary body of work.
Fast bowlers fight their own bodies as much as opposing batsmen.
Back injuries.
Knees.
Ankles.
Shoulders.
Waqar suffered serious injuries and still accumulated nearly 800 international wickets.
The Numbers Only Explain So Much
Statistics show that Waqar was great.
They do not completely explain why he was unforgettable.
The memory is visual.
The fast run-up.
The old ball.
The late dip.
The batsman falling over while trying to get the bat down.
The middle stump flying backwards.
That image became a signature.
Some bowlers are remembered through figures.
Waqar is remembered through shattered stumps.
The Art of Bowling Full
Modern fast bowlers are often encouraged to hit the top of off stump.
Waqar frequently aimed even lower.
He attacked the base.
The philosophy was aggressive but logical.
The stumps cannot move.
A batsman can leave a wide delivery.
He cannot leave a yorker heading for middle stump.
Waqar forced batsmen into action.
That is one reason so many of his most memorable wickets looked dramatic.
He was bowling at the target itself.
Influence on Pakistan’s Fast-Bowling Culture
Pakistan already had Imran Khan.
Then came Wasim.
Then Waqar.
Later generations inherited a powerful tradition.
Shoaib Akhtar.
Mohammad Asif.
Umar Gul.
Mohammad Amir.
Wahab Riaz.
Shaheen Shah Afridi.
Naseem Shah.
Each bowler has a different style.
But Pakistan’s belief in attacking fast bowling owes much to the great quicks who came before.
Waqar is one of the central names in that lineage.
Waqar the Coach
Retirement did not end his association with Pakistan cricket.
Waqar moved into coaching.
He worked with fast bowlers and served in senior coaching roles with the national team.
That made sense.
Few people understood high-level fast bowling better.
Technique matters.
But so do confidence, workload and the psychology of attacking a batsman.
Waqar had spent years living all of it.
Hall of Fame Recognition
In 2013, Waqar Younis was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.
The recognition placed him formally alongside the game’s greatest players.
He was later inducted into the PCB Hall of Fame as well.
By then, the case hardly required explanation.
Nearly 800 international wickets.
Elite performances in Tests and ODIs.
One of cricket’s greatest fast-bowling partnerships.
And a delivery that influenced generations of quick bowlers.
Waqar Younis by the Numbers
Waqar’s international career included:
87 Test matches
373 Test wickets
Test bowling average: 23.56
22 Test five-wicket hauls
Five Test ten-wicket matches
Best Test innings bowling: 7/76
Best Test match bowling: 13/135
262 ODIs
416 ODI wickets
ODI bowling average: 23.84
Best ODI bowling: 7/36
27 ODI four-wicket hauls
789 international wickets
22 wickets in Pakistan’s 1992 Test series victory in England
29 wickets in three Tests against New Zealand in 1990–91
17 Tests as Pakistan captain
62 ODIs as Pakistan captain
ICC Hall of Fame: 2013
PCB Hall of Fame
Nickname: The Burewala Express
More Than Wasim Akram’s Partner
There is a danger when discussing Waqar Younis.
Because the partnership with Wasim Akram was so famous, Waqar can sometimes be described simply as the other half of the Two Ws.
That understates him.
Wasim was a genius.
So was Waqar in his own way.
A bowler does not take 373 Test wickets and 416 ODI wickets because he happens to share the ball with another great player.
Waqar built his own reputation.
His own method.
His own fear factor.
And one of the most destructive yorkers the sport has ever seen.
Waqar Younis’ Lasting Legacy
Imagine facing Waqar Younis at his peak.
The ball is old.
The field is attacking.
He begins the run-up.
You know what he wants to bowl.
Full.
Fast.
Swinging late.
You know the yorker is coming.
And that knowledge may not help at all.
That was Waqar.
A bowler whose greatest delivery became famous precisely because batsmen knew about it and still struggled to stop it.
He missed Pakistan’s greatest World Cup triumph through injury.
He experienced difficult tournament defeats.
He battled serious physical problems.
Yet when his career ended, the record was enormous.
373 Test wickets.
416 ODI wickets.
789 internationally.
He helped Pakistan win in England.
He tore through batting orders at home and abroad.
He formed one half of the legendary Two Ws.
And he gave fast bowling one of its most unforgettable sights:
A late-swinging yorker crashing into the stumps before the batsman could bring the bat down.
Pakistan has produced faster bowlers.
It has produced bowlers with different variations.
But when cricket talks about the art of the yorker, one name still arrives almost immediately.
Waqar Younis.
The Burewala Express.
Quick Facts
Full Name: Waqar Younis
Born: 16 November 1971
Country: Pakistan
Playing Role: Fast bowler
Batting Style: Right-handed
Bowling Style: Right-arm fast
International Career: 1989–2003
Test Matches: 87
Test Wickets: 373
Test Bowling Average: 23.56
Test Five-Wicket Hauls: 22
Test Ten-Wicket Matches: 5
Best Test Innings Bowling: 7/76
Best Test Match Bowling: 13/135
ODI Matches: 262
ODI Wickets: 416
ODI Bowling Average: 23.84
Best ODI Bowling: 7/36
International Wickets: 789
ODI Four-Wicket Hauls: 27
Tests as Captain: 17
ODIs as Captain: 62
1992 England Test Series Wickets: 22
ICC Hall of Fame: 2013
Nickname: Burewala Express