Managing editor Matt Thacker makes his selection from the Spring 2025 issue. We publish one article from each edition on the website, but you can see the rest if you subscribe or buy a single issue or four-issue bundle. Matt has chosen Annie Chave’s piece, from her forthcoming back, about Waleed Khan, who survived a horrendous terrorist attack in Peshawar a decade ago.

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Waleed’s story is extraordinary. The matter-of-fact way he describes being repeatedly shot in the face by terrorists, the part cricket played in his recovery, the way he seems to have come to terms with his past and is dealing with the present make for a compelling read.

Matt Thacker, Spring 2025

Cricket saved my life

Annie Chave meets Waleed Khan, left for dead in a terrorist attack, but who has recovered thanks to his love of cricket

A loud noise; deafening bang after deafening bang. A piercing sound engulfs your ears, cuts through the air, replacing the laughter that a moment ago had rung out across the room like music. A dark stream of blood replaces the wide smile that had lit up your friend’s face. He has been shot. Shot in the head. He falls to the ground, one of a growing body count littering the hall.

It’s confusion rather than terror that fills you. Minutes ago, you were standing happily on the stage in your school hall with your teachers. Now it is a battlefield as men with guns burst through the doors. “Shoot at their heads,” they shout. A cacophony of chaos and screaming, of gun shots, of frenzied footsteps. Searing pain like you’ve never known. You’ve been shot in the face, and you cry out with a mixture of despair and agony. The assailant comes closer and searches your tear-filled eyes. Seeing that you’re not dead he shoots you. Again and again. You’re hit six times, your jaw spread across your face, your teeth are lost, your nose broken, but you are not dead; helpless, but not dead. You are left to die in pain.

In this nightmare like no other, you realise that if you want to stay alive you need to leave the smoke-filled auditorium. Unable to help your dying friends, you manage to crawl out, but you’re so weak that you fall, and those fleeing behind you in blind panic trample over your broken body. No one is looking down, only ahead, desperate to escape. You can’t speak because your face is an open wound, and your hands and wrists are trampled on and broken in the terror of the moment. You are paralysed with fear and pain.

You are discarded in a pile of the dead and struggle to stay conscious. You can’t move, can’t talk. You are dimly aware of the emergency services that have replaced the terrorists, and of the true horror unravelling around you. School turned war zone. You do everything you can to breathe deeply, blood bubbling in your open mouth somehow knowing that to stay awake is your only chance, and then you are discovered. You remember nothing more.

I met with Waleed in Birmingham in September 2023. He was a delightful and incredibly sincere 21-year-old with fading scars on his face, a battlefield of bruising signalling the atrocities that a young life should never have witnessed. His recovery, he claims, is down to the superb medical services, his family, friends, and an intense passion for cricket.

A school should be a haven, and the Army Public School was seen as the best in the Peshawar area of Pakistan, Waleed explains as he begins to relay his story to me: a well-practised monologue of a terrible tale. His parents would have been content knowing their two youngest sons were safely there. It was 16 December 2014, and it had been a normal morning sitting in the café with his friends at breakfast, still basking in the glory of their latest sporting success. The week before, he and his friends had won the inter-school sports competition, winning prizes in table tennis, cricket and basketball. It was a fantastic achievement and they had been greeted with much praise. “We were in celebration mode,” he tells me. “We could not stop talking about it.”

Waleed, at 12 years old, was not only captain of the cricket team but also one of the school’s youngest ever head boys. After breakfast, together with around 500 students aged between 11 and 18, he attended a first aid talk in the main hall. One of the bonuses of being head boy was to be on the stage with the principal and, on this occasion, with the army doctor, who was delivering the talk. He was standing up there, between these two men, judiciously avoiding eye contact with the friend who was trying to make him laugh when gunshot noises were heard. With an army barracks next door, it was not unusual to hear the sound of shooting, so the gunfire caused no immediate concern inside the huge auditorium, but the reassuring words from the principal were soon silenced as the shooting became closer and louder. So loud.

The teachers’ smiles began to fade as they rose to lock the doors, instinctively telling everyone to hide under their chairs. A deathly silence inside; a barrage of bullets outside, released into the hapless gardeners. The group of terrorists made their way up the steps to the front of the school and broke through the doors of the hall. 153 people were killed in the brutal attack, 132 of them children. Waleed lost all his close friends in a matter of moments. All 27 of his class were killed – except him. His place on the stage meant that he witnessed the full horror of the vicious attack. ‘I stayed standing where I was on the stage, too confused to move’, he says, but the stark reality is that had he been with his friends, he would not have survived.

Not that the stage remained safe for long. Waleed himself soon became a target, and after he had been shot repeatedly it is incredible he managed to move as far as he did. It certainly saved his life. It was only when he was finally found that he lost consciousness. He was rushed straight to hospital, but his chances were slim: 0.5% slim, he was later told. “They told my family that they should not expect me to survive, and the doctors gave them an eight-day cut-off, which meant that if I didn’t regain consciousness by then they would not continue to treat me.”

Fortunately, on the eighth day Waleed woke from his coma. He had been given another chance, a last-gasp reprieve. His immediate reaction, he said, when he woke was to panic and try to tear the oxygen mask off his face, to free himself from the bed. Terror was still foremost in his mind, and he was petrified if any doctor or any stranger entered his room for days afterwards. His survival was a miracle, and his family worked hard to protect him from the truth of the event, not allowing him to see his face or to hear all that had happened. ‘My mother even tried to convince me I’d been in a bicycle accident’, he smiles, but he had some recollection, his memory returning like the end of the reel in an old movie. It was when he was finally left alone that he decided he needed to search for the truth. He found the news on the internet. “When I saw it on social media,” he tells me, “it was the most devastating thing in my life.”

He’d known it was a massive attack. He could remember the noise and the pain, reliving the fear every time he closed his eyes, but learning the whole truth meant he had to come to terms with losing his friends all over again. And then, when he finally saw his face in a mirror, it was another hammer blow. The person looking back at him was so changed. So damaged. “I thought how am I going to face the world now? It took away all of my self-esteem. I had nothing left.”

As well as being subjected to long and complicated surgery, Waleed, unsurprisingly, was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He received regular counselling and was carefully supported by his family. Because of the number of operations, the recovery time needed, plus the inevitable mental-health issues, it was two years before he was able to return to education. In the meantime, he needed an outlet. That outlet came in the form of his great passion, and it helped not only to give him a sense of normality and focus, but also to get him to follow a “yellow brick” pathway that led to some of the best experiences of his life.

It is clear from the way he recounts it that he received very careful treatment, both under the knife and in the counsellor’s chair, but the reality was Waleed had just reached his teenage years and needed to lose the victim status that had been stamped onto his face with such cruel scars. Thankfully, early on in his time in hospital, whilst recovering from major surgery both in Pakistan and in England, Waleed had two experiences that had a huge impact on his journey of recovery.

The first can only be described as a fairy tale for any fan of cricket. Just before he left for England, the Pakistan cricket team were playing the 2015 Cricket World Cup, and the players all came to visit him in his hospital room. Among the visitors was Shahid Afridi, who, as Waleed excitedly explains, was and is his ultimate hero. He had followed the Pakistani team avidly since he was a young child, letting the game of cricket rule his moods, as so many sports fans do.

Before the incident, Waleed admitted with a shy smile, he attributed many of his happiest and darkest moments to the successes and failures of the Pakistani cricket team, finding it hard to separate their results from the successes and failures of his own life. “Since my childhood I’ve been really attached to cricket – it was my elder brother who got me watching it from a very early age, and I remember, in 2011, when Pakistan lost the [ODI World Cup] semi-final to India, three days afterwards, when I got my exam results and I’d done very well, I was so miserable that the teachers asked my mum why isn’t he happy? And she had to say he’s still unhappy about the cricket.”

It was an amazing experience for Waleed to meet the Pakistan side, his heroes all there to see him and him alone. It was hard though, he agreed, not to have his friends to share this with. How often, when your dreams meet reality, do you want to reach out to those closest to you and relive the experience with them? But the visit reinforced just how much cricket and those that played it mattered to him, and this served to give renewed purpose to a life that, for the previous year, had been solely focused on recovery and loss.

It took five long and very tough months before his body was sufficiently healed to allow him to travel to Birmingham for the necessary facial reconstruction. His panic had subsided, but it was a very fragile young man who arrived in England six months after the nightmare attack.

His past life was left behind, although the unfathomable massacre constantly replayed in his memory, his brain still fighting desperately to alter the inevitable ending. The hospital in Birmingham was a sanctuary of sorts, but it was hard to escape the online media story that pursued him. His father left his job in Pakistan to travel with him and stay at his side as he recovered and underwent endless operations.

The second experience took place shortly after he had made the journey to England and was trying to adjust to life in a strange new hospital when a stranger, who had heard his story, set about trying to improve his situation through a shared love of cricket. Waleed had just undergone a 12-hour operation which left him even more incapacitated. “In order to reconstruct my jaw, they had to take a bone from my leg, which meant I wasn’t able to walk. My doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to walk for four to six months without crutches. It was quite a hard thing for me, being such a cricket lover.”

Shortly after this surgery, Farukh Kazi, the owner of Forward Drive Cricket Academy in Birmingham, a man who claims to dream, eat and sleep cricket, got in touch to ask if there was anything he could do to help him. Farukh appears to have a genuine generosity of spirit and Waleed is one of many he has invited into his home. Aged 13, having barely left his hospital bed in months, accompanied by his dad, this young boy, leaning heavily on his crutches, must have been overwhelmed by being in a new environment with children his own age again. It’s hard to imagine what mental pictures it must have evoked, but the cricket bug is a strong one, and he found himself unable merely to stand by and watch. “It was tough to watch other kids playing and, as they were showing me around, I kept saying I wanted to bowl. Everyone, including my dad, kept saying that I couldn’t and that it was too difficult on crutches, But I was so desperate.” Eventually, seeing that there was no telling him, they gave him a tennis ball and told him to be careful and not hurt himself. “I was holding my crutches, and I started bowling with the other hand, that’s how much I wanted to bowl.”

The cricket flame had been reignited, and that meant that he could start identifying as a cricketer, not a victim of terrorism. That identification will never leave him, he’s quick to say, but before he could become the inspiration to others that he has gone on to be, he needed to find a reason to recover.

“The reason I started walking earlier than expected was when I looked at those kids playing cricket, I had such a longing to do the same. I was there with my crutches, unsteady on my feet after getting out of a bed that I’d been in a long, long time, and I didn’t want to be there any more. There was a voice inside that was shouting at me ‘Join in!’. I wanted to go back on that field and do what I was best at and what I loved the most. Sport does that, it takes you out of yourself.”

Over the months, Farukh treated Waleed as part of his family, and later, when he was able to move without crutches, he allowed him to come and go as often as he needed at the academy, with free access to all the facilities. He went there regularly, working obsessively on his strength and fitness, and getting stronger and stronger, eventually being able to run again, albeit not as fast as before. It was a huge part of his recovery, both physically and mentally, and it meant that, after two years, when he was able to start school he had the confidence and the strength to sign up and get selected for the cricket team. “Cricket is more than just sport,” he said on a short BBC film about his recovery. “When I’m upset or having those nightmares, it really plays a big role. Cricket is one of the most important things in my life, it really helped me in my rehabilitation process.”

As he had done in Pakistan, Waleed went on to be the captain of the school team. Despite his obvious injuries he could still bowl at a good pace. “Everyone was shocked when I bowled my first ball and asked me how can you bowl so fast?” he tells me conspiratorially. He lights up when he talks of cricket. The shy seriousness is replaced by an almost arrogant countenance that is so alien to this self-effacing, quietly spoken young man. This is the self-confidence that comes with ability.

His skill with the ball was such that he was recommended to Warwickshire CCC and he went along for their trials. Unfortunately, the trials coincided with another leg operation, which meant that at the same time he was starting his recovery, he had temporary post-op problems with his running. “When I went for my trials, it was something I wanted to take forward,” he tells me, “but then it struck me that I was going to have more and more surgery, and realistically I would train for maybe three or four months, and then another surgery would be required, and I would need to leave my training for it.”

This is a maturity that can only come to someone who has already lived a lifetime of horror and sadness, I think as I digest his words. Most young people would either feel justifiably sorry for themselves or think only of a future return to full fitness. Waleed is pragmatic beyond his years, and, for a while, we discuss his “living for the moment’ attitude. He is very assured about this. “One thing that changed in me after this incident is that now I always live in the day. I always feel that if I get through this day, then that’s great, it’s my achievement.”

It’s a sobering way of thinking, but I can’t deny it’s understandable. How do you plan for a future when you’ve been so close to losing yours? Time spent at the academy helped Waleed to keep focused. He talks a lot in these terms, so adept at using positive language, language he’s learned from years of counselling, and years of motivational speaking thereafter. It was through the training and the strengthening work he did at the academy, endlessly bowling; endlessly practising, that he feels he was confident enough to approach two local clubs.

He joined Lyndworth CC and Weoley Hill CC junior team. This was another step up. “I’m a different person on the cricket pitch,” he looks at me as he says this. It’s something he doesn’t do readily. His eyes, that by some miracle avoided injury in the attack, are so dark and yet so expressive now as he talks about the Waleed he is on the pitch, where he was able once again to be part of a team and, by doing so, to travel beyond the hospital boundary, losing himself in the competition on the field.

“When I play cricket, I’m incredibly passionate about it, and sometimes I get really aggressive and competitive too. I get lost in a different world and you would see a different me. It was the reason I so wanted to play again. Number one, it was my passion, and number two, I needed desperately to get away from all the negativity that surrounded me. It takes me to another world, one where I don’t think about those things and where I’m just engaged in the game. It has helped me so much just by playing a lot of matches. It gives me a sense of freedom and has helped my physical and mental recovery.”

Waleed, I suggest to him, needed what he had learned through the vehicle of cricket in order to gain the confidence, after two years away, to step into a school building and face education again. “Yes, the trauma sticks with you,” he admits, “but going back to school was the best decision I’d made.”

He joined the University of Birmingham School, and it was tough, probably tougher than we can imagine, where he repeated, relived, repeated, relived. Where noises and strangers must have made him jump every day. “After weeks of people asking, ‘Why do you look like that? Why have you got scars on your face?’ I had had enough,” he sighs, the frustration clear in the tone of his wavering voice.

He decided to do one of the bravest things he could possibly do. Peeling himself away from the social shadows that he hid behind, he asked to stand up on a stage and, in front of the whole school, in full detail, he told them all about what had happened. “I’d become antisocial because of the trauma, and I didn’t want to make any friends because I had this fear of losing them again, so doing that was a big step for me. The moment I got up there I started regretting it, I was thinking, what am I going to say to them all? The night before, in my room, I had tried to write it down and so my bedroom floor was full of screwed-up papers. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to start, and it was truly terrifying to stand up there, but then, as I was thinking I’d made a terrible mistake, I remembered something my mentor in Pakistan, Muniba Mazari, told me. ‘If you’re talking to a room of 500 people, you know 499 people won’t listen to you, but there will be one person who will be listening to you, and you’re there for that one person, to change their life. Don’t think of the other people, just think of that one person.’ So, I just started talking and talking, and I don’t know how long I was there, but I noticed it had become very quiet, and when I looked up, I saw tears in the students’ eyes and the teachers were crying. It was the first time someone had got a standing ovation in our school, and that’s when I realised my words had so much power because of the story I had to tell. Something that I thought of as my weakness was actually my biggest strength.”

Waleed can only nod when I suggest he has now become a celebrity in his school. And it’s true, he is now well known across the country for the motivational speeches he has since gone on to give. He is keen, he says, to share his story with other young people, and to help them understand how terrorist organisations work, how they try to radicalise people using the umbrella of religion. “I want to show their true face by talking about everything my friends and I went through.” Shortly after he gave his school speech, Waleed became one of the early ambassadors for the #Iwill Movement, which was started in 2013 by the then Prince Charles. It was set up to give opportunities to young people to express and assert themselves. This is a movement that Waleed fits perfectly, since it gives both support and empowerment for the young “to make a positive difference on issues that affect their lives, their communities and broader society”. I can see that it is a movement he clearly loves, and that he promotes it brilliantly.

Waleed has also since spoken within the cricketing world. In 2019 he was invited to talk at a fundraiser for The Shahid Afridi Foundation. In his naturally self-deprecating way, when we spoke of this, he was more excited about sharing a table with the great man than about the fact that he was asked to speak there, but he does admit that it was a great experience. It’s hard to imagine that there were many dry eyes in the house.

The emotion was certainly in evident and widespread when, in 2018, he was invited onto Test Match Special during the second day of the England v Pakistan Test Match at Headingley. ‘I didn’t know it was such a big thing before I got there,” he admitted. During his interview with Jonathan Agnew, as well as talking about the role cricket has played in his recovery, he praised his mother, who gave him strength immediately after he discovered the true horror of the attack. “I was so angry at first,” he told Agnew, “but she told me to look positively at the fact I was saved and to get better for my friends.” She inspired the idea that it was better to finish this incident with education rather than anger. And Waleed, to the thousands listening, shared a well-rehearsed and deeply felt statement: “With guns and bullets we can only kill a terrorist. With education we can kill terrorism.” He may well have made some listeners blush when he claimed that “kids here take the opportunities and the peace in their country for granted.” His message was clear, “I’ve been given the opportunity to change lives,” he said. And there is little doubt that he inspired some cricket fans that day.

Again though, Waleed tells me, he was overwhelmed by having so many great cricketers in the box with him. He was so humbled, he smiles, to be in the box with Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram and Geoffrey Boycott. The view from there, he said, was incredible, and the whole experience surreal. Second only to this was appearing in the same 2019 edition of Wisden as Imran Khan, who had recently become the Prime Minister.

“So, you’ve finished your further education and done your A levels, What now?” I ask. “I always live in the day.” he replies, but he does admit to having long-term plans. “I just don’t worry too much about them.” “So, if it’s not cricket, what are the plans?” I ask. The answer, “I want to pursue a career in aerospace,” isn’t what I expected, but then I ponder. He’s obviously a very intelligent man, he’s undergone one of the worst experiences anyone could endure and not only overcome it but made something positive out of it. Why not aerospace? They’d be lucky to have him.

“And cricket?” I ask, and then there it is, that shine in his eye, that wide lop-sided smile, that air of authority and confidence. “I have more surgery planned next year,” he explains, “but I play when I can.” He has a new role now though. “I take my younger brother to the Academy to play, he’s passionate about cricket. He was still very young when he joined me in England, and he’d see me watching Test or one-day cricket and ask, ‘Why are you watching this?’ He was only interested in T20s at the time, but the more he watched the more addicted he became, he kept saying, ‘this is real cricket’, and he got hooked.”

This ticks all of my red-ball boxes of course, and we talk for a while about the limitations of T20 cricket and the joy of Tests. It is hard to exaggerate the sparkle and the change in him as he describes the Tests with bowling wickets on green pitches and the competition between bat and ball. But mostly we talk of a sense of unity that the game of cricket instils, and how, with a good number of overs in the day, Test cricket is, as Waleed says, “the best example of discipline, unity and determination.” He wants to help his brother, he says, to experience the joy of cricket, but also to maybe go on and have the professional experience that he couldn’t. “He’s started playing for his school team and is learning to bowl leg spin. I practise with him as much as I can because I want him to take further what I wasn’t able to.”

It’s significant, and eerily poignant, that his brother is currently the age Waleed was when the attack happened. A perfect age to develop your potential, I suggest. A moment, but just a moment of silence, while the reality reaches those cautious eyes. “Yesterday,” he continues with a laugh, “he was home ill from school, and instead of lying in bed he asked if he could go and play cricket, and so Mum grounded him saying he was supposed to be ill.”

Waleed plans to take his brother to Edgbaston as much as he can, both to watch games and to play in the indoor facilities there. He tries to go there as much as possible to watch England, but of course Pakistan, and especially the team he grew up with and met, are his passion. He has nothing but praise for Babar Azam, whom he describes as “a game changer”. It was when he watched him live in the World Cup in 2019 at Edgbaston when Pakistan beat New Zealand by six wickets with a Babar hundred that he became a huge fan. “Babar Azam can play all formats, he’s our Virat Kohli,” he beams. It’s easy to love the Pakistan team, we agree, and we slip happily into discussing their unpredictability.

And so Waleed, spared death by the barest of margins, will go on to inspire. His motivational speaking and his volunteering work are extremely important to him. No, he won’t be the Pakistan cricketer he dreamt of being as a young boy, but he’s made a big impact in the world that he inhabits. “The incident has taught me that real happiness is living for others. I don’t think I got this second chance without a purpose. It happened and it was terrible, but I have to live with it now and make the best of it. The worst thing I can do is to feel sorry for myself, and I know that because I was in that place for a while, as we’re all human, but giving up on something is not helpful. My face lowered my self-esteem to begin with, but the day I accepted myself the way I am was the day I started meeting people, when I started talking and feeling confident and feeling better.”

I honestly believe he does feel better, I think as we finish our coffee, and I stop recording his voice. How else does a young man who has been a victim of such a traumatic experience agree to meet a stranger in a coffee shop and tell his story to her? A story that involves so much sorrow, so much bravery and so much cricket. It’s huge credit to Waleed, and to the careful planning of his family, that he was able not only to accept leaving his childhood home at such a vulnerable age but also to continue his education and fashion a life in a strange new country.

“You know to this day I don’t know how I managed to survive. I still dream of it sometimes, and even now if I’m walking through the city or there are strangers around I don’t feel comfortable, but cricket kick-started the process of surviving, and through that process I have become passionate about campaigning and helping others.”