adminALOO – potato, Laddu – a round sweet, Haathi – Elephant, Fatso, Big Boy.
Not exactly the kind of motivational messages you would find on the Notes to Strangers Post scattered around the London metro, but Azam Khan chose to immortalise those words anyway. He scribbled them on scraps of paper and stuck them to his wall. He looked at them every day.
“My dad was like, ‘are you mad, why are you doing this to yourself?’ Azam tells the Cricket Monthly. “I said, ‘this is giving me motivation.’”
He doesn’t have to spell it out; the cruel nicknames are all over the internet. Google Azam Khan and the top results include references to his father and Azam’s body shape. Living with the weight of both has proved a heavy burden to carry, in every sense.
Azam is the son of former Pakistan captain Moin Khan, known, among other things, for his athleticism. Moin is also the coach of Quetta Gladiators, the PSL team where Azam got his first professional gig at the age of 20. He only played one game for them in the 2019 PSL season and scored 12 off 15 balls. Cue criticism that his lack of runs was a direct consequence of his size. Both allegations hurt Azam so much that he created a written record of it, in his personal space.
“People will always judge me because my father has played for Pakistan, but it’s not my fault I was born in his house,” says Azam, now 24. “But after I got my chance in the PSL, people criticised me because I was overweight and said my body is not suited for the elite game of cricket.”
A year later Azam believed he’d proved them wrong. In the opening match of the 2020 PSL, he scored a match-winning 59 off 33 balls. But with no other scores of note in that season, he had not done enough. In fact, he realised that even though he trusted his own ability to score runs, he had to lean into the advantage of physical exercise and the importance of image.
He spent the next year working towards fitting into a sporting ideal. Some of that time was spent at Pakistan’s National Cricket Academy, on an exercise and eating routine. Much more was spent in the gym, working on his aerobic ability. In 12 months Azam lost 30kg. In the 2022 PSL he finished 10th on the run-scorers’ list. In between he made his international debut, and was snapped up by Barbados Royals in the CPL and signed by Desert Vipers for the forthcoming International League T20 (before the Pakistan board denied its cricketers a No-Objection Certificate for that league).
The story could end here, with a clear moral for aspiring players to get fit and lose fat, but it doesn’t. Azam was named in the Pakistan squad for the 2021 T20 World Cup, and then replaced by Sarfaraz Ahmed at the last minute because of what he was told were “certain performance criteria”, although he does not elaborate on what those were. He was not even part of the conversation for the 2022 tournament.
Last year, former Pakistan player Aqib Javed told ARY News that Azam should either “quit cricket or transform himself into a cricketer” – a not-so-subtle assessment of what a cricketer should look like.
Azam has a ready retort. “It’s not about being overweight. It’s about performance. If a guy is scoring 400 runs and he is super-fit and another guy is scoring 800 runs and he is not super-fit, I will keep the guy who scored 800 runs in my team. That’s my point of view.” – Cricket Monthly.
Online Reporter