My first memory of Dale Steyn is him running through the Indian batting line up with a 7-wicket haul in Nagpur, on a pitch that certainly wasn’t conducive for pacers. That spell was one of the best displays of fast bowling ever seen in India. While that performance turned out to be a career defining one for him, he has given us many more thrilling spells before and after that. In an era that hasn’t really produced the kind of fast bowlers that were seen earlier, Steyn has stood out admirably. Pace, lateral movement, significant accuracy, a naturally aggressive outlook. He has everything you could ask for. Bowling at 90 miles an hour consistently throughout the day of a test match in all sorts of conditions is far from easy, but he has been able to do it for a long time, all thanks to his excellent fitness. Generally, cricket fans judge players – batsmen or bowlers, by looking at both their home and away record. Many high performing bowlers have failed to achieve the same heights when pitted against non-conducive conditions, but not him. The Nagpur spell being a case in point, he has generally managed to produce impressive spells even without much help from the conditions. In his own words, “I’ve said this many times before, a 150 or 145 km yorker is absolutely no different whether you bowl it here in Nagpur, Chennai, Johannesburg, or Perth. It’s the skill behind the delivery, what the planning is behind the delivery, that is what counts at the end of the day”. That sort of a mind set couldn’t harm anyone, except the batsmen facing him, of course. The last 18 months or so have been a struggle for him, and as a result, for his army of fans too. It started with his ineffectiveness with the white ball. He was going for runs and wasn’t even picking up enough wickets to compensate. He seemed almost helpless, which is a rare sight. If that wasn’t bad enough, a series of injuries kept him out of the game, resulting in a lack of rhythm and pace. Just when we thought that he was ready to go through the last phase of his career peacefully, starting with the tour of Australia in November 2016, calamity struck. He was bowling at nearly his best pace, quite comfortingly for his fans. Suddenly, he went down on his haunches, wincing in pain. Five minutes later we are told that he has fractured his shoulder. Not just a hairline fracture, the bone had snapped off completely. You couldn’t blame anyone for thinking that this was the last they had seen of Dale Steyn. 10 months later, he is back on the road to complete match fitness, but no one knows when he’ll play next. There can be endless arguments about his place in the pantheon of the greatest fast bowlers in the history of the game, but irrespective of what some people might have to say, he has been a great servant for the Proteas and he deserves to end on a high. “I love playing test cricket. It’s what I feel I’ve been put on Earth to do,” says the legend himself. All of us agree wholeheartedly. Here’s hoping that the Steyn-Gun has one last round.