As Shoaib Akhtar speaks he removes his green Pakistan tracksuit top, rolls up the sleeve of his white shirt and bends his elbow at about 45 degrees. Nothing unusual in that, you might think, except that Shoaib's arm is bent back in the opposite direction from the usual hinge, so that his arm looks like the aftermath of a hideous industrial accident. His party trick is not for the squeamish; the Guardian's photographer almost keels over at the sight of it.
But it is an ability which has defined his cricket career. It means the extra whip generated by forcing his arm against all expectations of nature allows him to hurl a ball quicker than anyone has ever been recorded bowling: 161kph, which translates into the somehow more impressive 100.3mph. It also means that, particularly in Australia where they take a dim view of blokes from the sub-continent at the best of times, his turn of speed has been largely dismissed as the result of a dodgy action. Twice he has been banned by the International Cricket Council for the unholy cricketing sin of chucking.
And the odd thing about this 27-year-old known as the Rawalpindi Express (just as well he doesn't come from Slough; he'd be stuck behind a failed train at Acton) is that the elbow is merely the start of it. "I am not blessed with normal joints," he says. "I have hyper-tension in my wrists, my knees, everywhere, look at my fingers, see?"
To demonstrate he pulls his thumb and forefinger back unnecessarily far, resulting in a click which reverberates so loudly round the lobby of the hotel in Leicester which is his temporary home that it makes the trio of professional autograph hunters waiting to pounce wince.
"Normal knees bend there," he continues on his muscular-skeletal guided tour. "Mine bend way back; that's bad for the hamstring, bad for the pelvis, bad for the shoulder."
Just as it seems he has finished and we can move on to, say, discussing the prospects of his Pakistan team in the NatWest series against England starting tomorrow, he produces the medical coup de grce . "Did I say I was flat-footed? Nothing, no contours, flat as a pancake, I can take my shoes and socks off and show you if you like."
I take his word for it. "Flat, completely," he continues. "Every time I'm in England I go to Birmingham to get special boots made. I went yesterday. I always see a couple of doctors when I buy them and get everything measured properly. Have to. See, I'm not normal. I couldn't walk when I was five. My mum will tell you."
Shoaib discovered how unusual he was when he took legal action against the ICC and consulted the academics in the human performance department at the University of Western Australia in Perth about his bowling action.
"In a way they were so ****** off with me," he says of the Perth doctors. "They freaked out. 'How can you be the fastest bowler in the world? You are just patheti cally abnormal.' They measured each single thing about me. They discovered that, where a normal person's joints move about 20%, maximum, my elbow can move 42%. Same with all my joints. It's not nice to have all this, it is why I have had so many injuries."
But what the Perth eggheads did resolve conclusively was that he does not throw the ball. Despite the wavering in the preamble, his arm is straight at the point of delivery, the principle of bowling. Thus reinstated and vindicated, how did Shoaib celebrate his reprieve? By being banned again, this time for ball tampering.
It happened in Sri Lanka, during the most recent of the incessant tournaments in which the modern international cricketer is obliged to compete (he says he has been home for two weeks in the past 12 months). He was caught trying to scratch the surface of the ball with his thumbnail, a trick which allows the ball to wobble more unpredictably through the air. The result was a two-match ban, which covered the final of the Sri Lankan tournament and the first game against England this week. Shoaib claims his actions were misunderstood.
"I was banned unnecessarily. They took it out too hard on me. I was cleaning the ball, just using my thumbnail to remove some grass stains."
Ah, the old hygiene defence. "Man, you cannot tamper with a Kookaburra," he says of the ball used on the sub-continent. "You try and put a nail into the surface. It's so hard, so smooth, your nail just skims off."
Does that mean he has tried in the past, shall we say, to make a few personal re-adjustments? "No, no, but I've felt the outside of the ball. The only thing I was doing was cleaning the grass off the ball. I think they went pretty hard on me. I accept the laws, they banned me three times. I had to go through legally to prove them wrong about chucking. I thought this time I deserved a bit better than that."
It means that English fans will be deprived of the sight of the quickest man on the planet in the first of this month's three-match series. And if we are disappointed in his absence, it is nothing compared to his own dismay.
"In Sri Lanka I worked so hard to put the team in the final," he recalls. "And then they said I couldn't play. I was walking up and down all day, pacing out my run-up in the pavilion, I was abusing and cursing. I knew if I had been there we would have won comfortably. I was abusing myself, telling myself I had let my country down. 'Just leave the f****** ball alone, man, you know the rules.' "
Anyone who has seen a Shoaib appeal, in all its leaping, snarling, yelling passion, will appreciate that this is a man who puts a lot into his cricket. Yet, partly because of his physical oddities, in a country where boys can bowl before they can walk he didn't pick up a ball until he was 15.
"My brother was captain of the local club," he recalls of his first outing. "I went to watch him play and they were a guy short. I said: 'I'll play.' My brother laughed: 'You?' But the others persuaded him. I think everyone was quite impressed when I came on to bowl."
Within three years he was in the national side, hurling the ball down at unprecedented speed. Indeed, such was his pace, his critics reckoned he was obsessed, bowling with one eye on the speed clock, more interested in breaking personal records than the opposition's resolve. It is a charge that infuriates him.
"It pleased me, yeah [to reach 100mph], but it's a people thing, a media thing. I've never boasted I'm the fastest ever. Who knows, they didn't have speed guns before. But I promise you it doesn't please me if my bowling is not winning matches."
In fact, he says, he would happily bowl a straight 130kph trundler rather than see a wayward, if record, quick one beat everyone and surrender four byes. "I have never known in the six years I have been playing international cricket a team win by batting. Bowlers win matches. But, you know, it's a team game. I deliver the ball to the edge of the bat, it gets nicked but one of the fielders has to catch it. I can't run round to the slips and take it. So I try to make a lot of my dismissals bowled or lbw. But sometimes you have to rely on your team-mates."
He sounds as if he has had some problems in that department. "Imagine if I was playing for Australia," he says, as if in confirmation. "With [Glenn] McGrath and [Jason] Gillespie softening them up, then I come on, I'd have got more wickets than anyone ever, mate. Because when I play for Pakistan, with Wasim [Akram] and Waqar [Younis] they are in decline. They were great but they're not match-winning bowlers any more. Wasim has not won a match since 1996. So I have to make it all happen on my own. There is so much expectation on my shoulders. But, if I come on after those two [Australians], when the ball's a bit older and swinging. Imagine, it would be 'see you, mate, talk to you later' every time."
As the inflection in his voice suggests, despite the Australian Cricket Board's constant sniping at his action, Shoaib admires Australians more than any other cricketing nation. He played grade cricket in Sydney in 2002 and says it opened his eyes to the game's possibilities.
"Positive, aggressive, so hard, so professional," he almost drools when describing the Australian way. "But best of all is their fitness. Go back a decade, people in cricket didn't believe in the gym. But these blokes were in there at six in the morning, or in the pool. They're eating the right things, taking the right supplements, following the science of America. Thank God the Americans aren't in cricket, because sports science-wise they are so far ahead. And those Australians have followed that example."
But the thing that most surprised him, he says, was the look in the batsmen's eyes when he came flying up to the crease, the way they faced up to the fastest bowler in history, who didn't pull his punches even against a bunch of part-timers. "You know what, mate," he says, his Sydney side accent growing by the moment. "They weren't scared. These are club cricketers and they played me just like a normal bowler. That's a mentality, mate. That's what we've all got to match."
Particularly that means England this week. But does all this Aussie-philia mean he will be heading over there permanently as soon as he can? "No way, man, there's only one place I want to live," he says, grinning his wide, affable smile. "Here. Man, it was 51 degrees when we left Lahore. When the plane touched down in Scotland it was six degrees. Bliss. The cold, the rain, I love it."
And he does not appear to be joking. It seems that, like his elbows, Shoaib Akhtar's meteorological taste buds got inverted at birth.
