If a cricketer can be judged by his mood when the chips are down, the Pakistan spinner has won plenty of admirers on his side’s dismal tour of Australia

If they ever publish a modern reboot of Frank Tyson’s holiday house staple, The Cricketer Who Laughed, there could be no better cover star than Yasir Shah. The Pakistan leg-spinner bowled his final inglorious deliveries of a truly dismal Test tour of Australia on Friday, but lost no fans with his undimmed optimism.

Before this three-game series we knew him as a chirpy character and an attacking bowler of considerable gifts, but what Australians in particular had not witnessed yet was how he performs in the face of adversity. In the past few weeks there has been plenty of it.

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It was against Australia in the United Arab Emirates that Yasir made his Test debut three years ago, though swept up in a drastically different mood to this one. Then he combined with Zulfiqar Babar to take 26 of the 40 Australian wickets to fall as Pakistan subjected the tourists to a slow, gruelling humiliation from which few escaped with their reputations enhanced.

Yet now, with the tables turned, there is a far different light cast on Yasir’s own struggles. In Australia, he has been charged, flogged, swept, slapped, slogged, walloped and taken down at every opportunity. Four times in the series he has conceded a century of runs, one of them a double.

When he was brought on to open in Australia’s second innings at the SCG on Friday, David Warner eyed him at first with mild puzzlement, first establishing his bearings for an over but then clubbing the first four deliveries of the spinner’s next either over or across the boundary rope; six, six, four, four. Smile at that, Yasir.

Perhaps he should not have been bowling at all. The unfortunate souvenir Yasir will take away from Sydney this time is not a man-of-the-match award but a hamstring strain suffered a few days ago when – and with no small amount of irony – he threw himself into a vain and unnecessary slide in the deep.

It was classic Yasir. Executed successfully it would not have saved a run anyway, but in its madcap futility it spoke of his inexhaustible energy for the task as those around him flagged and his commitment even to lost causes.

Through it all he kept bowling, and still Warner and Steve Smith slogged him. After each blow he would pivot at the end of his follow-through, stroke the patch of hair below his lip and more often than not, look down at the batsman with a toothy grin. If grins could win Test matches, Australia would have been whitewashed.

Instead – undeterred by the clear disregard for his talent – he simply kept limping back to his marker, a towel hanging from the back of his trousers like a mechanic’s rag. Then he was off again, pushing his troubles to one side and bounding into that eye-catching approach to the crease – like a startled lobster being lowered towards a pot of boiling water.

Yasir will depart Australia with eight Test wickets at 84 runs apiece – proof that no statistics in cricket are as unfair as those which cling to spinners. His 148.1 overs featured 11 maidens, though an inability to apply pressure in the face of Australia’s batting onslaughts was not from lack of trying. His captain’s bizarrely defensive fields throughout the series rarely did him favours, nor did the less committed fielding efforts of his colleagues or Sarfraz Ahmed’s sloppy keeping.

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Three weeks ago, before the first day’s play in Brisbane, Yasir was flashing a different kind of smile as he surveyed the Gabba pitch with Shane Warne – two spin bowlers sharing a moment of collegial optimism. That it has not worked out as planned since bonds Yasir with more than a century of other touring bowlers who have left Australian shores shaking their heads.

Instead of a sack of wickets, Pakistan’s limping and unsung hero must content himself now with the sheer pleasure he gave the hundreds of thousands of spectators who delighted in his theatrical bowling. Hopefully the youngest of those onlookers will have been moved most, and learned to appreciate that the good guy is not always the one depositing the Kookaburra on to the grandstand roof.

So much of modern sport is narrow-eyed and grim, but perma-smiling Yasir is proof that among the fist-bumpers and chest-puffers walk men whose joy in the mere playing of this great game can save even the worst of days.