Abdul Qadir's Australian sojourn

Abbamania from Cricinfo. ( Missed it until it is linked in Chapati Mystery). Excerpt:
""Great," Larkin thought, "I'm off the mark and I've seen his wrong'un. I'll be right from here."

Qadir's second ball was faster; wicketkeeper Micky Butera rocked back instinctively on his heels. It was also wider. "Very close to the edge of the pitch," says Larkin. It was too wide to make mayhem, so wide that the umpire cleared his throat and gave a preliminary twitch of his arms. Larkin flung his own arms high, his bat even higher - "to allow the ball to travel through harmlessly".

Instead the ball dipped - swooped, more like - as if by remote control. It landed, veered headlong in the wrong direction, then hit middle stump, like Shane Warne dumbfounding Mike Gatting all over again. In reverse.

"Abdul spun this wrong'un one and a half feet," gasps Butera. "Sounds ridiculous when you say it."

"I would play that ball the same way a hundred times out of a hundred," believes Larkin.

"There was an element of luck in the Warne ball," Cook points out. "Whereas Abdul's was absolutely contrived."

The only person not surprised was the contriver himself. Deep down, Qadir knew that by rights he should have been in Peshawar that Saturday, playing for his country not a suburb. His Carlton team-mates knew that he knew it. He did not need to say so; though sometimes he said it anyway. There was and remained only one wonder of Pakistani spin."
P.S. A couple of friends liked the above piece by Christian Ryan:
One of them writes that Sunil Gavaskar got his only test wicket by imitatating Abdul Qadir:
"It was during a Bangalore Test in 84 coming to a pointless and boring draw; Gavaskar was given the ball 15 minutes before the end and he bowled the first ball with a 40 yard runup and it was a wide. For the second ball he mimicked the peculiar dancing gait of Abdul Qadir coming in to bowl and probably in his efforts to
not burst out laughing Zaheer missed an innocuous and straight ball and was bowled."

Another writes "Christian Ryan seems to be in the finest tradition of writers on cricket and the story of Abdul Qadir is splendid."
My response to the second:
"There seem to be some Australian writers who come up with pieces like that. There are usually not prolific, usually going about some business or other, then come up with such pieces and do not really seem to care about building a career as writers. I read a book "Roads to Xanadu" about China by John Merson who apparently teaches history in some college. Lot of the time he takes part in some local environmental activities and probably a family man. The book is not publicized, it is not available any more. He might have written one or two more books but instead of career pursues life I guess. I remember another writer Matt Price who writes about politics and suddenly come up with pieces like that about cricket and does not even bother to make books out of them."
I learnt that Matt Price passed away in 2007 and there is a published book of some of his writings.