Raees Mohammad passes away at 89

KARACHI: Raees Mohammad, the only one of the five Mohammad brothers to not play for Pakistan, died here on Monday. He was 89.

Sadiq Mohammad, his younger brother who opened the batting in 41 Tests and 19 ODIs, confirmed that Raees had died after an illness. The Mohammad brothers who represented Pakistan all the way from their inaugural Test in 1952, in which the great opening batter Hanif made his debut, to 1981, when Sadiq played his last Test.

Wazir Mohammad, the oldest of the brothers, is currently Pakistan’s oldest living Test cricketer at 92. Hanif died in 2016 at 81. Mushtaq, the most capped of the Mohammads with 57 Tests, and Sadiq are 78 and 76 respectively.

Raees, the second-oldest brother, did not contribute to the siblings’ combined 173 Tests - Shoaib, Hanif’s son, added a further 45 to the family’s count in the 1980s and 90s - but was 12th man for the Dhaka Test against India in January 1955. He played 30 first-class matches, 17 of them for Karachi or Karachi B. Batting right-handed, he made 1344 runs at 32.78, including two hundreds, and he also picked up 33 wickets at 31.27 with his legbreaks.

Raees Mohammad passes away at 89 In an interview, Wazir said of Raees that he was “the most stylish batsman among us five brothers”. Hanif, meanwhile, wrote in his autobiography that Raees was “the unluckiest of us all to have missed out on representing his country. In my opinion, had he played, he would have proved himself to be a better allrounder than even Mushtaq.”