Even then, everyone in Pakistan seemed to either play or watch the sport that was one of the few truly unifying national activities. Lahore’s Iqbal Gardens, like many other municipal parks, would regularly host ten club matches at a time. Play typically started after breakfast, broke for a lengthy lunch, and continued right through the insistent call for maghrib prayers, signalling sunset. As Javed Miandad would recall, ‘The light was often so bad [the spectators] couldn’t follow the game, but still you kept making your shots.’ There was a particularly vibrant cricket scene in Lahore, where club and even school matches, particularly those where any sort of feud existed, regularly attracted upwards of 5,000 spectators, and became a nursery for the national side. Nine out of the 11 names selected to represent Pakistan in the country’s first ever Test played most or all of their cricket in Lahore. According to the fast bowler Mahmood Hussain, the long-running rivalry between the city’s Government College and Islamia College ‘was a good preparation for the competitive pressures of Test cricket. I always bowled better when the crowd was against me, as so often happened.’ Rising right up in the historical centre of town, the Lahore (later ‘Gaddafi’) Stadium, modelled on the Mogul school of ornate brickwork and arches — reminding some of a clumsily iced cake — opened its doors in November 1959, providing a visually striking symbol of cricket’s local importance. English readers need only to think of Lord’s, painted bright red, soaring out of the middle of Piccadilly Circus rather than modestly tucked away behind a wall in St John’s Wood, to get a bit of the feel. The sport was a prominent part of every young Lahorite’s life and, in fact, a focus for the entire community. It’s said by the Pakistan scholar and traveller Sean Sheehan that when the Test team was in action at Lahore ‘five hundred miles away, near the Afghan border, tribal members [would] huddle around a radio, listening with bated breath and roaring with delight at every run scored’.
Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2006, Imran recalled that ‘From when I was seven to when I was nine, I had dreams in which I would score 100 against England at Lord’s, leading Pakistan to victory. I desperately wanted to be a Test cricketer. I remember clearly wanting that, never thinking I wouldn’t make it.’ It’s a vivid and compelling story, told from the perspective of a fiercely patriotic, middle-aged Pakistani political leader. But some discrepancy exists between Imran’s Sunday Times account and the one he gives in his 1983 autobiography, whose opening sentence is, ‘The game of cricket and I travelled on distinctly separate paths for the first eleven years of my life … quite frankly, I agreed with my father that it was a boring game with too much standing around.’
It’s a small historical point, but one perhaps worth clarifying before we move on. In March 1959, when Imran was six (not seven, as he writes), his mother took him to see Pakistan play West Indies at Lahore’s old Bagh-e-Jinnah ground. It was a generally unhappy occasion, at least from the home team’s point of view. They were routed. The West Indies fast bowler Wes Hall tore through the Pakistan first innings, taking five for 87, and making life especially uncomfortable for the wicketkeeper-batsman Ijaz Butt. Butt was to be carried off with a broken nose ‘as the blood gushed down his shirt’, Wisden records. Pakistan lost the Test by an innings and 156 runs. Imran notes that he remained ‘unenthusiastic’ about cricket as a career option, particularly as angry crowds took to the streets that night to protest against their team’s performance. This was to be a fairly frequent event in the history of the national side over the next 12 years or so. At about the same time as he watched his first Test, Imran and his parents moved to Zaman Park. Not long after that he found himself taking part in family pick-up games, where he had the opportunity to measure himself against Majid, six years his senior, among others. Once again, the results weren’t encouraging. ‘I wasn’t [even] as good as other boys of my age, and was always the last to be chosen,’ Imran recalls.
The turning-point came when he was rising 13, and had moved into the upper school at Aitchison. As a result, when the new cricket season began in October, Imran found himself for the first time playing on a professionally prepared pitch. He also had access to a coach named Naseer Mohammad, a former club player with decided views about what a proper cricketer in the making should look like. ‘Correct’ was the operative word. Mr Mohammad took one look at Imran’s repertoire of cross-batted slogs and went to work on him in the nets. An Aitchison contemporary and fellow Colt remembers that ‘Naseer’s interest and enthusiasm were just almost contagious … He would practise with you — I remember hours of the forward defensive — literally until you dropped.’ When the afternoon sessions did not go well, the coach often kept his pupil at it into the misty autumn dusk, bringing out an old white cricket ball and turning on the weak pavilion lights. Imran recalls that by the time the new season began in 1966, ‘My attitude to the game had changed: all I wanted to do was play cricket … I decided that I was going to play for Pakistan, and soon.’ By this point Imran was just turning 14. He responded to maternal approval and appreciated applause. He participated enthusiastically in school Under-16 matches, impressing coaches because he took direction willingly and trained harder than anyone else did. And thanks to a sudden pubescent growth spurt, he possessed the classic fast bowler’s physique long before he was a fast bowler. Imran had caught up with his illustrious cousins through hard work, natural talent and an utter unwillingness to fail at anything he put his mind to. The consensus at Aitchison was that he was an orthodox and hard-hitting batsman, as well as a safe pair of hands in the field. No one yet thought of him as a full all-rounder, least of all Imran himself.
The next three years saw the cricketing equivalent of the Great Leap Forward, even if they proved less distinguished academically. Although not studious, Imran was a quick learner and, with his mother’s and older sister’s assistance, proved an at least adequate pupil. The portrait of him that most often emerges from those who knew him at Aitchison is of a teenager who was long on graft and determination and less so on raw intellect. Even some of his later disciples had their doubts about his mental candlepower, although, as at school, no one who knew him ever questioned his perseverance. The curricular emphasis there was on English, maths, geography and history, the last two of which generally took a dim view of India and its territorial claims in Kashmir. Aitchison, originally known as Chiefs’ College, had been founded in 1886, and was modelled strongly on the British public-school tradition. Delivering his inaugural address to the boys, the school’s benefactor Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had remarked that ‘… much, very much, is expected of you. I trust you will use well the opportunities here afforded you both for your education and for the formation of your character … This is an institution from which you will henceforth banish everything in thought and word and act that is mean, dishonourable or impure, and in which you will cultivate everything that is virtuous, true, manly and gentlemanly.’ The school (motto: ‘Perseverance commands success’) was laid out along the lines of a Mogul fort, ambitiously crossed with a traditional English church — there were steeples, cloisters and stained glass windows — and set in a tree-ringed 200-acre estate. (One well-known American travel writer insists that Aitchison could have ‘easily been found in the rolling Sussex countryside, were [it] not for its prominent central minaret’, but this merely displays his ignorance of modern English rural life.) Several graduates I spoke to about the school referred to it as ‘the Eton of Pakistan’. There was a house system, uniforms, an emphasis on organised sport and a daily routine ‘as ritualised as Edwardian English behaviour’. By and large, Imran was in his element.
Both at Aitchison and its next-door neighbour Zaman Park, he was clearly moving in a more exalted world than most Lahorites. The student body included luminaries such as the princes Salahuddin and Falahuddin, the Nawab of Kalabagh’s son and several future or present Pathan chiefs including Imran’s friend Sardar Jaffer Khan Leghari, the strongman of the Leghari tribe. Even in this company Imran wa
s considered quite combative. He seems to have been as adept at mind games as he was at the raw aggression that was such an integral part of his cricket. ‘Imran was a merciless enemy on the sports field’, whose great strength as a batsman ‘was his ability to get his opponent off-balance’, an Aitchison contemporary recalls.
Even then, he was a crafty performer … Imran would deceive the bowler into thinking he was weak against the short ball, for instance. He would hop and jump and generally carry on like a man standing on hot coals. You could see the fielders smiling to themselves … The bowler would charge in and bowl probably the fastest bouncer of his life, and Imran would deposit it about twenty yards behind the tall trees on the square leg boundary.
Another Aitchison friend recalled an altogether gentler Imran away from the cricket field. ‘There was a boy who sometimes begged at the school gates. He was about 16, like us, and he was crippled … One evening he was dragging himself home [and] with his arms already full Imran leant down to speak to him and then picked him up. Off he staggered with the boy and crutches and books and cricket gear up the road and the steep steps to the boy’s house, where he gently set him down again. No one else was around. To me, that was the real Imran as much as the cut-throat sportsman was.’
Imran sometimes used to say that his pleasure in playing cricket every available hour of the day was enhanced by the knowledge that, in at least one sense, it was a complete waste of time. So many hours ticking past, and it not mattering. So many afternoons when other boys were in the library or diligently writing essays or studying their Koran, while Imran, immaculately turned out in whites, practised his forward defensive in the nets or carted the opposing team’s bowlers around the park. It’s worth mentioning again just how fortunate he was in his choice of school. As Haroun Rashid, a year senior to Imran at Aitchison, recalls, ‘The place prided itself on its sports, and certainly in [the 1960s] cricketing abilities were better appreciated by the powers-that-be than academic ones.’ Imran was equally lucky to play on two such exquisite grounds as Aitchison and the Lahore Gymkhana (whose club was captained by another cousin, Javed Zaman) rather than the sparsely grassed mud tracks where most Pakistani cricketers honed their craft. As he was turning 16 Imran had duly become the youngest member of the Aitchison First XI. He modestly confirms, ‘I was by far the best batsman [there]; I saw myself as the next Bradman.’ In the course of a year and a half he had ‘radically changed’ his attitude to the game, if even that phrase conveys a process bordering on reincarnation. Imran now carried his cricket bat with him wherever he went, tucking it under his bed at night. He persuaded the domestic servants to bowl at him for hours on end in the garden at Zaman Park, moving proceedings to the front hall if it rained. When high summer came he stayed home in Lahore rather than join the traditional family holiday in the hills, in order to play for the local Wazir Ali league. This was cricket strictly for hard-core devotees of the game: the Wazir Ali matches were bruising encounters that typically began at 7 a.m. and continued in baking heat right through to sunset or beyond. In time even Mrs Khan, the scion of a fanatically keen cricketing family, was moved to ask Imran’s older sister Robina if he was ‘all right’.
The fighting spirit that Imran often credited to his Pathan ancestry wasn’t just confined to cricket. In April 1965, when he was 12, Pakistan and India had gone to war in one of their periodic disputes over Kashmir. The whole family gathered at the Khans’ house in Lahore, only 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the Indian border, and decided to form a home guard to repel a possible parachute landing by the enemy. Imran was vocally eager to go up the line nearer the battle, and had to be restrained from marching off with a knapsack in the general direction of the front. In the end he contented himself with doing sentry duty in Zaman Park with his 18-year-old cousin Majid. A year or so later he was running around the neighbourhood on one of his regular training exercises when a local boy with whom he’d exchanged words rashly shouted out, ‘Look at that ponce!’ Imran reportedly hit the boy so hard that he broke one of his own fingers. He was also known to play competitive soccer and hockey, could swim a length of a pool with seven or eight windmilling strokes, and once went trekking with a party of schoolfriends up into the Northern Areas close to the Chinese border. But when the cricket season began ‘he was a man of such single-minded ambition … with such intensity,’ says Haroun Rashid. ‘In 1968 when we went to Lawrence College in Ghora Gali, our traditional rivals, for our annual sports meet, Imran opened the batting for us and, without losing his wicket, proceeded to decimate the hapless Gallians. It was a slaughter of the innocents … Due to Imran’s sixes about half a dozen balls were lost in the forests surrounding their cricket ground. The match was over in half its allotted time.’
It was the watchword and comfort of the Pakistani Test selectors that their team ‘got through the Sixties unscathed’ as one of them said later. Unscathed, but hardly unbeaten; in the entire decade the Test side managed only two wins, both against New Zealand. The history of Pakistan cricket as a whole in the 1960s is one of corruption, dissent and consistent under-achievement. Hanif Mohammad remained the pioneering figure, but even he eventually outstayed his welcome, apparently wanting to finish his 17-year career with a then impressive-seeming 4,000 Test runs. He fell 85 short, after Abdul Kardar, the chairman of selectors, had remarked tetchily, ‘I can’t give him another five Tests.’ Hanif went out to widespread barracking from crowds who had grown impatient with his kind of dour, bricklaying approach to batting, and after a power struggle with his successor as Test captain, Saeed Ahmed. Saeed was not a success in the job. On hearing the unsentimental announcement of his own replacement by Intikhab Alam, he threatened to punch (and reportedly did ‘jostle’) chairman Kardar, among others. Intikhab’s first series in charge was at home to New Zealand, whose manager remembered his own side as being ‘hopeless’. New Zealand won 1–0, with two Tests drawn. By 1969, around the time Imran was making the step up to first-class cricket, the Pakistan national team was anchored firmly at the bottom of the unofficial league table.
A public- and private-sector consortium had, it’s true, raised funds for an Under-19 side to tour England in 1963, where they performed better against the counties than the senior team had a year earlier. As a result of this initiative, Pakistan went on to organise a number of youth teams to play both domestically and around the world. But set against this modest success, there was acrimony amid the acronyms — by 1966, the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan (BCCP) and the newly restructured Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) began a near-continuous clash, with the PIA chairman accusing the BCCP president of ‘exploiting players’ and being ‘short-sighted’. In time, the major Pakistan banks, the national railway company and various government departments all fielded teams in the domestic first-class cricket tournaments, leading one BCCP administrator to fret that this could be a ‘potential recipe for … disaster [in] providing competitive sport and a sound Test team’. It was. Imran himself was later to observe, ‘Pakistan is the only country in the world where cricket is played between commercial organisations and not between regions, zones, cities or states. The result is abysmal … Most of the matches are meaningless and insignificant.’ Added to the structural deficiencies were some of those unique qualities of Pakistani national life that were to continue to play such a vital part in their sporting fortunes. The 1965 war against India interrupted regularly scheduled Test cricket for two years, and the 1968–69 England tour of Pakistan was eventually abandoned when a crowd of some 4,000 students, unhappy with the current military regime, invaded the pitch at Karachi; the police responded by firing tear gas, most of which blew straight back over their shoulders and through the broken windows of the England dressing-room.
In the same week that the red-eyed MCC tourists caught a hurriedly booked return flight to London, the regional selectors summoned Imran to an Under-19s trial in Lahore. There were 200 other hopefuls present, each of whom batted for five minutes in two adjoining net
s. Imran lasted only half as long as that before being given the hook — a rare failure for a self-assured 16-year-old whose school batting average was currently 67.50. ‘As I stood watching the other triallists, reality slowly seeped in,’ he later noted. ‘I was a reject.’
The proceedings weren’t quite over, however. Before he could slink off, Imran was told to go back to the nets and turn his arm over. Doing what any red-blooded teenager would do in the circumstances, he pulled up his collar, West Indies style, loped in and bowled a bouncer. According to the best available evidence, this was ‘fast but somewhat deviant … It nearly hit the man in the next net.’ After his third or fourth ball, the chairman of selectors stopped Imran and announced to the group as a whole that he had ‘the ideal seam bowler’s action’. This was followed by something of a lull, I was told. Certainly Imran himself would remain, at best, ambivalent about his potential new role. By and large, batsmen were idolised in Pakistan, where the seamers typically sent down a desultory few overs before the captain summoned the first of his four or five spin bowlers. Often even this brief delay wasn’t necessary, as there were competitive matches where the spinners opened the attack. To give the ball a good tweak was the instinctive response to the beach-like pitches, with cracks down which Geoff Boycott would remark he could stick not only his house key, but the house as well, that were prevalent at every level of the game in Pakistan. Men like Niaz Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Majid himself, none of whom were exactly brisk, regularly took the new ball for the national Test team of the time. Nor did either the climate or the uniquely atrocious standard of most wickets around Lahore as a whole encourage the average aspiring cricketing prodigy to bowl fast. But there it was. The following week Imran was selected to play for the Lahore Under-19 team against a touring English side. He opened the attack, sending down four fiercely erratic overs in the England first innings, taking three for 7 in the second, and batting No. 10.
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