Last week Rehan Ahmed became England’s youngest debutant and soon after the youngest men’s Test debutant to take a five-wicket haul. But just how young is he really? Age is famously just a number (in this case 18), so maybe we can get a clearer perspective on his youth by listing a few things that are older than him for comparison.

In the comments section of our last article, Ged Ladd said he had been thinking about the “many garments” he had which were older than Rehan Ahmed.

So let’s start with that.

1. Ged’s cricket troos

Ged didn’t actually give us the birth year for these cricket trousers – maybe he can enlighten us in the comments. He says he does still wear them though.

We’re struck that they don’t look comically old, which is an alarmingly good measure of Ahmed’s age. We don’t look at these trousers and think, “I bet there are international cricketers younger than those trousers.”

2. Nasser Hussain’s England captaincy

We know Nasser has been a commentator for a good few years now, but it’s still faintly alarming to think that Rehan Ahmed wasn’t even born when he was England captain.

Rehan missed Rob Key’s 221 against the West Indies as well, the poor bastard.

3. Bad Boys 2

Back in the days of long play VHS, one of our housemates had a single tape with Speed, Species and Bad Boys on it. Quite the hat trick, we’re sure you’ll agree. One time we all watched the tape from start to finish and then when it reached the end and automatically rewound, we pressed play again.

That was obviously a long time ago. Bad Boys 2 came out eight years after Bad Boys though, at which point Rehan Ahmed still hadn’t got round to being born. (We still haven’t seen Bad Boys 2 and probably/hopefully never will.)

4. Get Busy by Sean Paul

Absolutely true. Sean Paul was getting jiggy and crunked up before Rehan Ahmed was even born.

Obviously there are quite a lot of songs we could have chosen here. (Most of the songs really, when you think about it.) We went for a Sean Paul one though because of something he said last week.

Sean Paul quite often says “Sean da Paul” at the start of his songs and as you’d imagine, a great many cricket fans – including Cricinfo’s Vithushan Ehantharajah – can’t help but hear it as “Chanderpaul”.

Turns out that’s exactly what he’s saying. There’s a very clear example here.

Bonus Sean Paul fact: He played for the Jamaica water polo team from the age of 13 to 21.

5. Call of Duty

We’ve never played Call of Duty. In our head, we’ve always explained this away as being because it’s a “new” game, so we were slightly taken aback to learn that a whole England leg-spinning all-rounder had been grown since it first came out.

We suppose Call of Duty probably became a more prominent thing in later incarnations as online gaming took off. Our only experience of playing a first person shooter online was Goldeneye 007 during an evening exploring Belgian beers with a friend. There was a lot of materialising and then being instantly shot in the head by teenage Americans who then swore at you in an annoying teenage American way. It’s not an experience we’re keen to repeat.

If you want a cricket game that came out BRA (before Rehan Ahmed) then what about this…

6. EA Cricket 2004

It’s easy to find just the right cricket game older than Rehan Ahmed because between 1995 and 2007, EA Sports released eight versions of theirs, naming each of them by year. We’re not even sure ‘EA’ is technically part of the title. It was like an exercise in devising the least googleable name possible.

One review described Cricket 2004 as, “a game that has been continually pumped out on a yearly basis with virtually zero improvements upon its previous incarnations.” There were two more instalments after this one.

In a 2012 article looking at computer game graphics through the years, IGN awarded Cricket 2004, “worst visuals”. Here’s a whole thing we did about computer game graphics through the ages, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

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We don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway.

We have a track record of getting overexcited about 18-year-old leg-spinning all-rounders. It worked out last time though, so the way we see it, it makes perfect sense to get completely overexcited again.

If he’s at all averse to being smothered by unrealistic expectations, Rehan Ahmed somewhat inadvisedly faced that overexcitement and justified it. This week he became England’s youngest debutant, England’s youngest wicket-taker and the youngest men’s Test debutant to take a five-wicket haul for any nation.

The thing with being a young leg-spinning all-rounder is that you have multiple possible routes to success. It’s nice to imagine Rehan Ahmed becoming a wrist spin Ben Stokes, smashing hundreds and ripping out sides in the second innings, but it probably won’t pan out that way. Adil Rashid turned out to be a limited overs bowlers who batted at 10. Steve Smith repeatedly metamorphosises into one of the finest batters of all time and now only very occasionally wheels out his double-elbowed chicken dance filth when Australia are in the field.

Rashid and Smith show it’s possible to arrive at very different outcomes from ostensibly similar starting points. And they’re the success stories. There are a lot of ways this could go.

Because 18 is pretty young for someone who bowls leg-spin. Crazily young. Obscenely young. Think of it this way, Shane Warne was pretty okay at bowling leg-spin and he didn’t make his Test debut until he was 23.

It was therefore no surprise at all to see Rehan Ahmed full tossing and long hopping in his first Test . That was so predictable it’s not even really worth remarking on. What was more interesting is that he didn’t mentally implode. Nor did he just rollock in gamely – he did so effectively too, revealing what on this early evidence appears to be a googly of at least semi-fiendishness.

Ben Stokes deserves some credit here. Ahmed had 0-28 after his first four overs. There are some England captains of the not too distant past who would have banished him from the attack at that point, quite possibly for the rest of his life. Stokes immediately gave him another over, which went for nine runs, and then brought him on again after not much more than another hour’s play. His next over went for three and the one after that brought a wicket.

Bowlers who plug away and keep things tight have their place, but Stokes knows that isn’t what a leg-spinner is for and so he didn’t measure Ahmed against that yardstick. England don’t want for bowlers who can plug away and keep things tight. What they have always struggled to find are bowlers who can come on and break a 100-run partnership.

That’s exactly what Rehan Ahmed did in his fourth over in Pakistan’s second innings. If that sounds a little like Stokes had left him hanging until a partnership had built – not a bit of it. He’d already bowled a couple of overs with the new ball. He knew his captain wanted him there and that he was far from afraid to use him.

If that Babar Azam dismissal was a bit filthy, the ball to dismiss Mohammad Rizwan two overs later was significantly cleaner. Then he got the other set batter, Saud Shakeel, in the over after that.

Rehan Ahmed was picked because England thought he might be the kind of bowler who could turn 164-3 into 177-6. Measured against that yardstick, he succeeded.

Verdict: A wrist-spin Ian Botham (only without all the other Beefy stuff).

You can watch Rehan Ahmed’s five-for on debut here.

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