The next WG Grace, beard and all

It is the Muslim festival of sacrifice and as Hashim Amla scored run after run against Pakistan I thought to myself that even watching the man slit a goat's neck would be pleasurable. With his quick hands it would be over before the goat heard the second syllable of Allah-hu-Akhbar, so animals rights-favouring readers, hold your angry pens.

Speaking of flesh, it was in this form that I saw the very-soon-to-be-great man do his day job. I was in Dubai so I took myself to some of the games. Most of the cricket was pedestrian. It was the kind of play where being at the stadium amplifies the feeling of life slipping away, ball by ball, death coming a little closer with every play-and-miss from an inept Pakistani batsman, every efficiently brutal thwack from the masterful-but-dull Jacques Kallis.

But then there was Amla like an oasis in the desert. Like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Like Zulqarnain Haider on a slow news day. He was utterly engaging and he was also a saviour: he restored one's faith.

I applauded his every movement, even when he left the ball. That's how good Amla is to watch. All the clichés about beautiful batsmanship are actually true in his case. The bat really does appear to be a wand. It really does look like he has all the time in the world to play his shots. The bowlers really do seem to be complicit in his grand strategy, as if they are really following his orders and bowling to a pre-conceived plan (with Pakistanis, admittedly, this might actually be what's going on in more ways than one).

Of course, to many in my part of the world I was not acting as a faithful member of the cricketing community but an apostate.

It is popular belief that cricket is a religion on the Indian subcontinent. This isn't quite true. We don't follow cricket devoutly. We follow our own team winning devoutly. When this winning thing doesn't happen we immediately blaspheme ("Those jerks can go to hell. Let's go burn some tires!") or convert ("Forget cricket anyway, it's just an eccentric British 19th century pastime. Did you hear the Chelsea score?") or start planning for an extreme Reformation ("It's all about setting up Premier Leagues now, anyway, individual teams, commerce tied to city identities, none of these old-world national constraints.").

But Hashim Amla cuts through even the most staunch parochialism. During these past few weeks he has been a reminder of why we love the game at its simplest and most skillful. As bombs went off in Karachi, and Ijaz Butt sat in the royal box in Dubai not even bothering to clap but slapping his hand on the armrest of his chair like a hereditary emperor gone senile, and another absurd corruption scandal hit the front pages as a wicketkeeper fled to England, Amla stood there striking and caressing like the emerging great player he is, an antidote to all that was ugly and phillistine.

When Mohammad Yousuf came back into the Pakistan side at the tail-end of the ODI series, someone seated nearby made a dim-witted remark about his physical similarity to Amla. Basically, as far as I can see, they're both brown and they both have long beards. Aside from that, with Yousuf well past his throw-by-date, the only kind of fraternal link these two might have is similar to that between Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the move Twins.

And so in the hazy heat of the desert I have seen the second coming. In Hashim Amla I think cricket might just have found a name that one day will rival the legendary WG Grace.