Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  It was an only fitfully impressive debut, and Imran recalls that he was ‘treated [with] a certain amount of hostility. My team-mates thought I didn’t deserve a place in the side and was there on the basis of my connections.’ This sense of perceived rejection, and an answering competitiveness on his part, was to be a theme right through his career. A day or so later Wasim Raja, the captain of the Under-19s and a future Test all-rounder, greeted a friend with an account of the wild antics of a ‘posh kid’ on the team named Imran. According to Wasim, Imran wanted to bowl a bouncer with every ball, threw in a generous quota of beamers, and generally sprayed it around in an arc from gully to leg slip. One particular delivery had come close to felling the square leg umpire. ‘He’s the craziest cricketer I’ve ever seen,’ said Wasim.

  Yet the Lahore selectors soon began to take the kid seriously. In the next two Under-19 games, Imran was to show an at least rudimentary grasp of line and length, taking three for 19 and five for 42 respectively. He wasn’t, perhaps, as inherently gifted as some other up-and-coming bowlers around the world. He lacked the fluid hydraulics of even the teenaged Michael Holding. He wasn’t as squarely built as Ian Botham, or quite as lithely fast as Dennis Lillee or Richard Hadlee. Yet no young cricketer ever brought together such an amalgam of carefully nurtured talents. Imran was relentless in his pursuit of excellence. At least one observer saw him in the light of the 20th century’s approved canon for success, as ‘literally a self-made man’. Wasim Raja would long remember that ‘Imran was invariab[ly] the first on the ground every morning, where he would run circuits of the playing area’ — a novelty in the cricket culture of those days — ‘before repair[ing] to the nets to practise bowling at a single stump for an hour or more before the start of play.’

  Fanatically determined as he was, Imran may also have enjoyed a certain degree of old-fashioned patronage in his early career. He made his full first-class debut for Lahore against Sargodha when he was just turning 17. The chairman of the Lahore selectors was Imran’s uncle, and the captain and two of the senior players were his cousins. It was another only sporadically successful start. Bowling a lively mixture of bouncers and prodigously fast outswingers, Imran took two wickets at some 20 runs apiece. That was to be the highlight of his contribution to the match. During a subsequent rain delay, Imran wandered off to his nearby bedroom, fell asleep and returned to the ground to find he’d missed his turn in the batting order. When he did bat he was run out, and Lahore lost the match.

  Wasim Raja remarked of Imran’s bowling technique at the time that, while generally effective, ‘it wasn’t pretty … He more or less just ran in and hurled it.’ Other accounts of the young Imran recall that he had a slinging action much like that of the Australian Jeff Thomson. All parties agree that, in Wasim’s words, ‘It was awkward and unorthodox … You wouldn’t find it in the MCC manual.’ Perhaps as a result Imran tore a back muscle in his next match and missed nearly a season’s competitive cricket. He didn’t waste the time, however. He was the ‘most hard-working, the most focused student of cricket ever,’ a man closely familiar with the game in Lahore told me. ‘Everybody else would be gone at the close of play, and he would still be there. At that age, most of the kids in the team wanted to have fun. He wanted to be … Imran Khan.’ As soon as he was physically able to do so, he resumed his lengthy workouts, spending afternoons in the nets and evenings in indoor ‘skull sessions’ with men like Javed Burki and Majid, discussing the finer points of the game. In time he made a gradual comeback through the ranks of Lahore juniors and Lahore B, often coming on first change, before returning to the senior team. Wasim Raja saw an immediate difference in Imran’s action. ‘He was bowling chest-on, which looked even more awful. He’d also grown another inch and put on some muscle, and the whole effect [was] highly intimidating from the batsman’s point of view.’ Another Lahore colleague recalls Imran carefully smoothing down his hair on his brisk trot back to his mark, and his subsequent snorting approach to the bowling crease, ‘like that of a well-groomed bull’. His repertoire now included a ‘devastatingly fast’ inswinger as well as his stock bouncer, which ‘on average, he employed three times an over’.

  Imran had, meanwhile, left Aitchison College, whose vaunted enthusiasm for sports seems not to have extended to sharing one of their own with a professional cricket team. He spent his sixth-form year at the nearby Cathedral School. Although founded and run by a Christian mission, and thus somewhat at odds with both Niazi and Burki family tradition, the school ‘more or less indulged [Imran]’, as one of the staff remembers. ‘He was a special case, [someone] who just seemed to be in a hurry to get to somewhere else. He was always driving and pushing, even as a teenager.’

  Besides cricket, that drive and push found expression in longdistance running, javelin- and discus-throwing, and various other demonstrations of adolescent physical prowess. Imran was a full-time member of the Lahore team in the 1970–71 season, where he was lucky enough to have his cousin Javed Burki as captain. Javed cannily used the 18-year-old tear away in short bursts. In the BCCP Trophy against Rawalpindi Blues (surely a song title) Imran took two for 26 and one for 10, followed by the more impressive first innings figures of 18–3–54–6 against Pakistan Railways. In the cup semi-final against Karachi he scored 17 and 60 batting at No. 3, but was said to have served up a ‘dog’s dinner’ with the new ball. Moving across to the three-day Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, Imran recorded figures of five for 75 off 16 overs against Rawalpindi, missed the grudge match against the government’s Public Works Department, but returned to play in the losing semi-final against Punjab University, where he took two for 96 in the first innings and one for 10 in the second, while scoring 36 and 68 in the middle order. At the end of the season Imran had a first-class batting average of 31.69 and a bowling average of 21.60. His first full year in domestic cricket was also to be his last, because he was rarely seen again in Pakistan after that except at representative level.

  As Imran played cricket, the situation in the country as a whole was ‘desperate’, he later recalled. The first ever fully democratic national elections were due to have been held on 5 October 1970, his 18th birthday, but had to be postponed by two months because of the cataclysmic damage caused by floods in East Pakistan, where 200,000 people died and some 12 million lost their homes. It was generally agreed the relief operations were not well handled by the government. The result of the election gave the Bengali militant Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib) and his Awami League an absolute majority in the National Assembly and all but two of the 162 seats allotted to East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a champion of Islamic socialism, a strong army and ‘a 1,000-year war with India’, emerged as the leader in the West. The irreconcilable differences of the two men’s programmes and the growing threat of secession by the Bengalis set in train the breakdown first of parliamentary government and eventually of all domestic law and order. President Yahya Khan, the hard-drinking, straight-talking former army chief, first refused to honour the election results and then sent 40,000 troops to arrest Mujib and suppress the rioting that erupted in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. Unrelieved suffering from the cyclone, coupled with brutal suppression by Yahya’s army, may have killed as many as 500,000 more men, women and children over the next month. The confrontation eventually led to the events that brought about Pakistan’s dismemberment in December 1971. Even before that, Imran had seen ‘AIR-RAID SHELTER’ and ‘CARELESS CHAT COSTS LIVES’ notices being tacked up on public buildings, just as he had in 1965. More and more recruits signed up for Yahya’s, or Bhutto’s, army; I was told that the Khan family had been ‘rightly alarmed’ they would be evicted from Zaman Park, either by invading Bengalis or the Indians, if not by government fiat, and forcibly resettled, much as had happened following Partition in 1947. In the end they kept their home, although in the most harrowing circumstances. India again went to war with Pakistan in 1971 just as the latter finally tore itself apart. In the ensuing 13-day bloodbath,
some 300,000 Pakistani civilians died and the country’s armed forces were crippled for a generation. As the author Tariq Ali says, in less than a fortnight the nation ‘lost half [its] navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army’. India and its Soviet ally jointly declared the outcome of the war, and the emergence of Bangladesh from the ruins of East Pakistan, to be a triumph for socialist and democratic principles.

  Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Imran proved to be an aggressively patriotic sportsman, not least when it eventually came to playing against India. Already, by 1971, he’s remembered as a ‘fine adornment of Pakistani manhood’, who was widely known for his ‘impassioned if selective’ monologues on his country’s history. Physically, too, he was quite imposing, having coaxed his hair into a Beatle moptop and developed a particularly intense, piercing stare — ‘that don’t-fuck-with-me squint of his’, as one ex-girlfriend characterises it. He spoke in an almost sepulchral tone, with the occasional incongruous ‘Strewth!’ or ‘Gorblimey!’ coming to intrude on his otherwise exemplary English. Even his dress code was distinctive, eventually flaunting a conflict of styles dominated on the one hand by traditional Pakistani garb, and on the other by a collection of hip-hugging velvet flares, garishly loud shirts splayed open to the chest and chunky jewellery such as might have been favoured by Gary Glitter in his ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ era.

  This was the self-admittedly ‘bumptious’ individual who, on 4 March 1971, strode out into the Lahore Stadium to play for the BCCP side against a touring International XI, marking his first representative appearance for his country. The short goodwill visit by the Internationals had not been entirely free of incident up until then. In fact, the team’s previous match at Dhaka had come to an abrupt end shortly after England’s John Murray, who was batting at the time, ‘happened to notice the Pakistani who had been fielding at long leg edging up to the slips and furtively muttering to them, “There will be trouble” about a split second before someone set the main stand on fire. The next thing I knew we were in the middle of an army escort screaming down a dark road towards the airport, where we caught the last plane out to Lahore.’ Conditions there were ‘marginally more tranquil’, Murray says. Imran eventually took three wickets in the match and, coming in at No. 9, hit 51 not out after his team had collapsed to 80 for seven. The Internationals’ Australian bowler Neil Hawke, the man who saw most of the batsman, recalled his ‘not being aware [he] was in the presence of an obvious genius’. Another player I spoke to couldn’t even remember that Imran had taken part in the match. But it was apparently enough of an all-round performance to impress the then 77-year-old Wing Commander William (or ‘Harold’) Shakespeare, the chairman of Worcestershire, and his outgoing county secretary Joe Lister, both of whom were accompanying the tour. According to the written minutes, they particularly admired the 18-year-old’s ‘attitude’ and ‘obvious passion’ for the game. As a result, Worcestershire offered Imran a one-year contract, with an option to renew, at a basic salary of £35 a week along with a somewhat vague promise to secure his ‘special registration’ as the county’s primary overseas player. The momentous deal was consummated with a simple handshake in the pavilion. Imran’s parents initially withheld permission, but were eventually won over by the argument that he could finish his education at Oxford or Cambridge, as several Khans had before him.

  Later in the spring Imran received a letter from the Pakistan national selectors, offering him a place in the party to tour England that summer. He was more than five months shy of his 19th birthday, and was still notionally studying for his A levels at Cathedral School. The country was just then embarking on the process of ripping itself apart. Displaying some of the same self-destructive qualities, the Test team had acquired the name of ‘Panikstan’ for its consistent ability to lose from a winning position. Impatient with the practice, the home crowds had increasingly taken to verbally or physically abusing their cricketers. After one Test at the National Stadium in Karachi, the Pakistanis’ team bus had been set on fire. Even so, in a nation still struggling for its identity, playing representative sports remained the peak of most young male Pakistanis’ ambitions. ‘A cricketer then could be like a rock star today,’ said Wasim Raja. The ‘distinct [and] high honour’ of the occasion was reflected in the board’s printed invitation received by Imran, which one family member who saw it remembers as a ‘really elaborate affair’ bearing the signature of a ‘government dignitary or minister’, which may have helped soften Ikramullah Khan’s disappointment that his only son had apparently shunned a technical career and instead taken up with so ‘boring’ a sport. It’s possible that, like many fathers of his generation, he took a restrained approach to showing his emotions. I was told that Mr Khan had later been in a crowded shop in central Lahore when a radio news report announced that the Pakistan team had won a match in England. Everyone in the place had ‘gone wild [and] started cheering’. He did not tell them that the young fast bowler who had helped bring about the victory was his son. When Mr Khan later told the story in private to a colleague at Republic Engineering, he was ‘as proud as if Imran had been elected prime minister of Pakistan’.

  No major team travelled overseas with less expectation than the Pakistanis did in late April 1971. Led by Intikhab Alam, who had finished on the winning side only once in his 26 Tests, the squad boasted the stylish but frail middle-order batting of Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal and an as yet only locally famous 23-year-old named Zaheer Abbas. The bowling resources, as Majid recalled, were ‘thin, not to say gaunt’ and focused on the young Lahore seamer Asif Masood, the man whose crouching approach to the wicket reminded John Arlott of ‘Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress’. In the event Masood took nine wickets in his first Test against England, only to suffer a dramatic decline in form from then on, leading to his premature retirement from all cricket in 1976. The tour itself took place against the backdrop of the Pakistani civil war, which both split the party along ethnic lines and provoked mass demonstrations against its supposed regional bias even before the players left their home soil. Earlier in the spring, the national Under-25 side’s visit to England had had to be cancelled when Bangladeshi separatists threatened to firebomb the team’s hotel. Right up to the last moment, there was a lively debate about the propriety of 16 cricketers ‘fly[ing] off to sun themselves in England’, as one report put it, at that particular point in their nation’s history. Hence, perhaps, the BCCP president’s masterly understatement at the pre-tour press conference, when he admitted that his team was in ‘a little bit of turmoil’.

  For all that, Imran records that he was ‘brimming with excitement’ at the prospect not only of his first cricketing tour but of his first time out of Pakistan. Although not exactly a household name, he was beginning to acquire some of the trappings of being a local celebrity, a status he enjoyed. The Lahore newspaper ran a long if factually flawed profile of the schoolboy ‘heavy hitter’ who was sure to ‘knock the spots [off] the English attack’. Family friends converged on Zaman Park with pre-tour congratulations and advice. Imran’s father is said to have taken special pleasure in seeing his son kitted out for the first time in his navy blue Pakistan blazer. Shaukat Khan was ‘beside herself’ with maternal pride, I was told, although anxious that Imran should not return from his travels with an English wife; it was a ‘long tradition of the Jullandari Pathans’ — words Imran heard often as a boy — to marry inside the fold. The many cricketing Khan relatives can be presumed to have heartily joined in the celebrations. On the eve of the team’s departure to London Imran came out on to the street in front of his family home and signed autographs for a small but vocal crowd who had gathered there, while some of the adolescent girls among them shouted endearments and threw rose petals at his feet.

  Now all that remained was the tour, which did not go well.

  Given the nature of Pakistani cricket, it’s somehow inevitable that there would be various factors behind the scenes that contributed to a generall
y lacklustre performance on the field of play. The country’s arrival on the Test-playing circuit in the 1950s and their periodic successes against all five of their international opponents had been one of the early bonds of nationhood. Less than 20 years later, that initial wave of optimism had given way to what Imran calls an ‘inferiority complex … The English team was thought to be invincible [and] I was told it would be impossible for me to take any wickets there.’ An air of mild apology, or deference, seemed to attach to the blazered figure of Masud Salahuddin, the 56-year-old Pakistan manager (and another of Imran’s cousins), whose self-professed lifelong ambition was to win honorary membership of the MCC. Early in the tour, Mr Salahuddin formally thanked his side’s hosts by remarking in a speech that ‘England [had] taught us Pakistanis much-needed discipline through the game of cricket’, including the protocol of how to eat with a knife and fork. Imran reports that he had been too embarrassed to listen to the rest. To be fair, the manager was not conspicuously well served by his home board, whose most senior positions were now a sinecure of the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). Whatever their skills in managing a public utilities company, the WAPDA officials were not, for the most part, ideally suited to the job of supervising a national sports tour taking place thousands of miles away, whose day-to-day running at least one senior player thought ‘a joke, even by our standards’. While in England Imran would receive just 150 rupees, or roughly £7.50, for every five-day Test he played. The fee for a three-day match against one of the counties was some 80–100 rupees, depending on attendances, and even this pittance was often slow in coming. The players’ weekly stipend was an equally modest £3–7 each, based on seniority, not exactly a fortune even in the Britain of 1971. At the end of the 11½-week tour, Imran was awarded a bonus of £2. No wonder that Zaheer Abbas reports that ‘one of the first English words I learnt when I switched from Urdu was “peanuts”. Everyone in the Pakistan team told me it summed up our wages.’ In another of those administrative lapses that characterised the tour, Imran was frequently called on to share a room with Saeed Ahmed, the deposed captain who had a ‘persecution complex’, Wasim Raja believed. Following his sacking, Saeed had developed an ‘embittered disposition’, I was told, and it was ‘damn hard to be his friend’. According to the testimony of Wasim and others, he was not the ideal man to have as a mentor on your first overseas tour.