News
Qamar Ahmed – “Q” to almost everyone in a press box – has died in Karachi at the age of 88. A first-class cricketer in the 1950s, he swapped pads for notebooks in London and became, by most measures, Pakistan’s best-travelled cricket reporter.
Across more than five decades he filed for Reuters, AFP, a string of newspapers on three continents and, for a spell, the BBC. Television work followed, including a stint with TVNZ during the 1992 World Cup that Pakistan famously won. He never really warmed to the limited-overs boom, referring to ODIs as “pyjama cricket”, but kept covering them until the 2007 tournament in the Caribbean. Tests remained his true love; when Pakistan met Sri Lanka in Sharjah in January 2014 he clocked up his 400th Test – a milestone celebrated in the ground with a small presentation from Moin Khan.
The job took him everywhere. He witnessed Sunil Gavaskar’s 10,000th run, Richard Hadlee’s 400th wicket, Anil Kumble’s 10-for at the Feroz Shah Kotla, the game’s 1000th Test and its 2000th in 2011. He reported Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup win from start to finish, sat in hotel rooms during the 1976-77 pay dispute that pushed the team towards professionalism, and later chronicled the fraught 1992-93 tour of the West Indies, when four Pakistan players were briefly held over marijuana possession; that episode became the backbone of his book Testing Times. He was also in Lahore when the Sri Lanka team bus was attacked in 2009, filing through the chaos with the calm born of experience.
Friends remember two other passions: food and conversation. Tourists – players and hacks alike – knew that a night at Q’s North-London flat meant curry, gossip and maybe an unprintable yarn about Imran Khan or Javed Miandad. “He had that old-school access,” says former Pakistan captain Mushtaq Mohammad. “You could trust him, yet he never stopped being a reporter.” Zaheer Abbas, a regular dinner-guest, adds: “Qamar listened more than he spoke, which is why his writing felt so fair.”
He ghost-wrote the autobiographies of Hanif Mohammad and Waqar Hasan, and in 2020 published Far More than a Game, a reflective memoir thick with personal snapshots. It reads a little like one of his conversations – warm, occasionally tangential, never in a rush.
Ahmed played 17 first-class matches for Sind, Hyderabad and Pakistan Universities, bowling slow left-arm spin and batting dutifully in the lower order. “I realised pretty early I was a better storyteller than cricketer,” he once remarked, only half-joking. The decision to head for Fleet Street in the early 1960s proved wise; by the 1970s he had become the go-to voice on Pakistan tours, bridging cultures at a time when international travel still felt exotic.
Colleagues found him generous. Younger reporters, especially, leaned on his memory. “He knew the game’s unwritten history,” recalls veteran broadcaster Iftikhar Ahmed. “If you were stuck, you rang Q.” He could be stubborn – the word processor never fully replaced his pocket notebook – yet deadlines were rarely missed.
Cricket’s landscape has changed: tighter access, a relentless white-ball calendar, the social-media din. Through it all, Qamar Ahmed stuck to the essentials: get to the ground early, talk to people, file what you see. It sounds simple; executing it for half a century is anything but.
He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter. Funeral prayers were held on Tuesday evening in Karachi, with former players, journalists and administrators in attendance. A memorial service in London, his second home, is being planned.
The press boxes will feel quieter now.
