For all that, however, the real reason that Imran initially failed in England was simply that his ample self-confidence wasn’t yet matched by his abilities. His team-mate Asif Iqbal told me that ‘he had bags of determination, but only a fair amount of natural talent and, back then, hadn’t learnt many of the tricks of the trade he acquired later’. Set against this measured description is the account of the former England captain who recalls that ‘Imran bowled a lot of balls on his first tour: take that any way you want’. Another senior Pakistan player thought the 18-year-old to be at a ‘critical point in his life … I told him that he should strive to get some qualifications, in order [to] have something to fall back on if the cricket failed. Otherwise he stood a good chance to end up a mere ditch-digger in Pakistan.’ Even if Imran made it, his colleague added, he should know that ‘professional sport was filled with reprobates who gambled and drank and ran after lewd women’. The teenager couldn’t argue, and merely kept saying, ‘I know, I know …’
Imran made his first appearance of the tour on a frosty early May morning, bulked up in three sweaters to play for the Pakistanis against Northamptonshire. Before that he’d restricted himself to bowling in the nets at Lord’s, which proved to be an only partly successful introduction to English conditions. For one thing, he still had no formal run-up. He just tore in off anything up to 10 or 12 scything paces and let fly. Imran’s first delivery in England duly reared up and spat past his colleague Aftab Gul’s nose. This would have been promising, but for the fact that Gul was batting in the next-door net at the time. Imran’s second ball ricocheted off the head of a spectator. His third was reported as being a vicious beamer that struck the iron cross-bar over the net and shot perpendicularly up into the air. ‘I was bothered by the difference between the hard grounds of Pakistan and the soft, damp, English turf [and] couldn’t get a foothold,’ Imran later explained.
At Northampton he took just two wickets in the match, but partially redeemed himself by clouting 28 and 33 not out in a low-scoring game after coming in at No. 10. ‘In the power and cleanness of his hitting, Khan gave as much pleasure as anyone,’ opined that doyen of cricket correspondents, E.W. Swanton. Imran took three for 58 in his next outing, against Hampshire, failed dismally against Nottinghamshire and wasn’t selected for the tourists’ showpiece match against MCC at Lord’s. In all, he was to have a distinctly mixed first impression of what soon became his adopted home. Some of the sledging in those pre-PC times tended to be blunter than today, and there was often a muttered ‘Paki’ or ‘Curry breath’ to be heard from the fielders as Imran came out to bat. The insults seem to have had the singular motivational effect of making him work even harder at his game. As Javed Miandad recalls, ‘On [that] tour, Imran developed a strict routine of physical training that he adhered to without fail throughout his playing days … Every day, he would bowl six to eight overs without fail. He wouldn’t be bowling to any batsman, but would just be on his own, bowling at a single stump … There was a popping crease, and 22 yards away there would be the solitary stump. It was just Imran and the craft of bowling, with the rest of the world completely blocked out.’
When the tour ended and Imran joined Worcestershire, he continued to practise in an indoor school with the county coach and former slow left-armer Henry Horton. The coach thought ‘the lad bowl[ed] like a catapault’, but recognised that there was talent there to be tapped.
One of Imran’s Pakistan colleagues told me that, such were his shortcomings in England, there had even been talk of sending him home early ‘to hone his skills with Lahore’ — a fate not much better, for an ambitious young professional, than being sent down the salt mines. He probably survived as much by luck as by any sudden improvement in technique. Two of Pakistan’s faster bowlers, Sarfraz Nawaz and Salim Altaf, were ruled out by injuries, so Imran found himself called up for the first Test against England at Edgbaston. For the record, he was 18 years and 240 days old on his debut: impressive, but almost a case of late development compared to other Pakistan internationals such as Mushtaq Mohammad, who had supposedly been just over 15 when he first played for his country. Imran would remember the pre-Test dinner as being a less than inspirational affair. Several of the senior players took the opportunity to remark that the England batsmen and bowlers were the best in the world; and as for their slip fielding, if you nicked the ball, there was no point in even looking round, as the catch would already have been taken. (They were obviously still unfamiliar with Keith Fletcher.) There were raucous celebrations when the news of Imran’s selection reached Zaman Park, where Mrs Khan distributed a large tray of the enticingly-named barfi, a fudge-like confection traditionally reserved for holidays. As we’ve seen, Imran’s father’s response was generally more restrained. One English-based family friend told me that Mr Khan ‘took great pride that Imran represented his country. He never missed his press cuttings and appearances on T V. But he followed them as though Imran had a permanent starring role in a school play. I don’t think he ever fully grasped the size of the stage his son played on.’
At Edgbaston Pakistan won the toss, batted and were still there two days later. It was the Test in which Zaheer Abbas scored 274, Asif Iqbal 104 not out and Mushtaq 100, and England followed on for the first time against Pakistan. Imran’s inaugural over in Test cricket was one he never forgot. It was bowled to Colin Cowdrey, who was then winning his 109th cap. Cowdrey failed to land a bat on the first four balls, if only because they were so wide. At the end of five overs Imran’s analysis was none for 19. The figures would have been worse had the England batsmen not been content to stand back and watch the ball pass harmlessly by in the direction of long leg. In one account, the Pakistani wicket-keeper Wasim Bari was obliged to ‘fling [him]self around like Gordon Banks’. At the end of Imran’s spell his captain took him aside and gently explained that an inswinger should ideally pitch outside the off stump, not outside leg. England managed to hold out for a draw thanks to rain and an unbeaten century by Luckhurst. The former Australian captain Richie Benaud was commentating on the match and rather generously remarks that ‘No one paid a great deal of attention to the tourists’ young all-rounder. He was just one of 11 players.’ Imran himself reports that as a result of the Test ‘the reputation of our side rose, while mine sank without trace … Dreadful … I considered giv[ing] up serious cricket.’ Clearly, a star wasn’t born.
The rest of the tour can perhaps be quickly recalled. Imran was back to his old routine against Yorkshire at Bradford, using the scattergun approach to try to dismiss batsmen, if mostly favouring the leg side. He was dropped for the second and third Tests, which Pakistan drew and lost respectively. It rained almost constantly. At the end of June the tourists took the bus up to Selkirk to play Scotland, where Imran recalls that two of his colleagues ‘sat talking about me, fully aware that I could hear them. They made no attempt to hide their scorn. Their verdict was that I would be lucky to get into the Second XI of an English club side, let alone a county team.’ Imran adds that he was immediately fired up to prove his critics wrong, although with initially disappointing results: wicketless in both Scottish innings, he managed knocks of 14 and 0 with the bat. His primary challenge remained landing the ball on the cut part of the pitch. Against Surrey, Imran took off his sweater to start bowling and the umpire good-naturedly called down the wicket to the batsman, ‘Right arm over, anywhere.’ Everyone duly fell about laughing, including, to his credit, Imran. Or perhaps he had merely been gritting his teeth. In the 11 matches he played on the tour he took a total of 12 wickets at an average of 43.91 each.
Things didn’t go that well off the field, either. Imran was fined £2, equivalent to his entire tour bonus, when he left the Pakistan hotel one night after stuffing a pillow down his bed, Great Escape-style, to make for the nearest disco. Another evening he enjoyed the heady atmosphere of the Top Rank, Swansea, only to find that his room-mate Saeed Ahmed had reported him for breaking the team curfew: fined £1.50. A day or two later a catch we
nt down off Saeed’s bowling, causing him to break into tears and Imran in turn to burst out laughing, resulting in another visit to the manager’s office. One wet afternoon in the Pakistan dressing-room, Sadiq Mohammad, at 26 one of the senior members of the team, asked Imran to get him a cup of tea, whereupon Imran told him to do it himself. It was a characteristic response by a man whose hallmark was the untugged forelock. Sadiq had ‘gone berserk,’ I was told. ‘He shouted at Imran, prodding his fingers towards his face, and said, “I’ll finish you now!” and “You’ll pay!”’ Imran had calmly looked the older player in the eye and said, ‘I’m not your servant.’
Even at this early stage, Imran attracted an entourage of flattering male followers who proved no threat to his ego and who acted as loyal buffers between him and the outside world. Or at least that was their role in later years, when a key duty was to restrain the more persistent of Imran’s female admirers. The 1971 entourage was only the first in a series of royal courts, often made up of junior colleagues. Players like Talat Ali and Azmat Rana, neither of whom appeared in a Test on the tour, were typically part of the group. A then 20-year-old legal secretary named Judy Flanders well remembers Imran’s activities at a popular lar Manchester nightspot: ‘He sat around, smouldered, muttered a bit to his mates, didn’t dance, drank only milk, and rested his hand affectionately on my thigh.’
There was something of a heroes’ welcome waiting for the Pakistanis when they flew home in the middle of July. Losing an overseas series to England 1–0 was considered a rare achievement, given both the negative pre-tour publicity and the team’s generally dismal track record over the past decade. The relative success on the field in turn fed into a renewed public enthusiasm for the national game. With hindsight, the centre of gravity of international cricket was already shifting towards South Asia, where most of the potential spectators, much of the wristy talent and a fair amount of the available gambling money all were. Imran himself was not on hand to hear the cheers and wolf-whistles of the crowd at Karachi airport. Later that week he treated himself to a final evening’s entertainment at the Mecca dance-hall in London’s Leicester Square, then caught the early train to Worcester, his principal English home for the next five years.
Had Imran gone back to Lahore and taken up engineering, as his father still periodically urged him to, he’d be remembered today as a talented underachiever. As it was, the odds were that he would go on to play perhaps one or two obscure seasons of county cricket. Then a professional career in Pakistan, possibly involving the civil service, along with an arranged marriage, and the occasional weekend appearance for the Gymkhana or a similar club; retirement; death; appreciative but not long obituaries, followed by a footnote recalling him as a ‘one Test wonder’ in the cricket reference books — that would have been it. The reason Imran succeeded where other, more naturally gifted, players failed was that he put his first year in England to such good effect, emerging from it fitter and faster than ever. More determined, too. Reflecting on Imran’s self-belief, Wasim Raja (no martyr to false modesty himself) admiringly recalled that, as a 19-year-old, he had had ‘a healthy ego [along] with the single-minded focus of a speeding bullet’.
Even so, it was a struggle. Imran would have been less than human if he hadn’t taken time to adapt to single life in an English provincial town just as early autumn approached. Worcestershire initially accommodated their overseas signing in a rather spartan room in the market square’s Star Hotel. Local folklore has it that, while staying at the Star, Imran put his mattress on the floor each night, and each morning the chambermaid, ignorant of the oriental custom, returned the mattress to the bed. He was not selected for the county side in the remaining part of the season, but played seven matches for the Second XI, and less formally in the Under-25 groups and assorted knock-ups. Once again these gave scant evidence of any latent genius, although the newcomer ‘absorbed’ everything, I was told, and was a ‘quick study’. Imran was once seen to take a thick coaching book with him back to his digs. He had apparently combed through it overnight and mentally photographed what he needed, because the next morning ‘he could quote the book’s exact captions [and] whole chunks of the actual text,’ an impressed colleague recalled.
On 9 August, Imran arrived at the unprepossesing County Ground, Derby, with his usual baggage: style. Clad in tailored whites and a Pakistan touring cap, a polka-dot handkerchief sticking out of a pocket, he treated the sparse Tuesday morning crowd to 110 of the best runs possible, out of a grand total of 222. Regrettably, this early-career promise wasn’t to be entirely fulfilled. By the beginning of September, the Worcestershire Second XI had lost four of their last five games and were drifting near the bottom of the 14-team league. The county still seem to have thought of Imran, to the extent that they did so at all, as a middle-order belter who could bowl a bit. It wasn’t an entirely illogical preconception, since they had engaged him in the first place after watching him hit the International XI’s Neil Hawke around the park at Lahore. Although not exceptionally wristy, Imran had developed a series of taut, slightly robotic arm shots which could give the ball an almighty thump. Even so, one or two good judges including Henry Horton appeared to think he had the makings of an all-rounder, a natural replacement for the seemingly ageless but actually 40-year-old Basil D’Oliveira. Though not perhaps the most accurate, Imran’s bowling was pretty spectacular by county, let alone Second XI or Club and Ground standards. He knew it. Beset though he often was at Worcester by nagging doubts about his overall prospects, his claims for himself weren’t small — and weren’t on the whole misguided.
On 1 September, Imran was selected to play for Worcestershire in a three-day match against the touring Indians. It seems somehow fitting that his opponents for his debut should be his nation’s mortal enemies. Imran drew some attention to himself before play started by appearing in the net swinging three bats at once, a practice favoured by professional baseball players to make the bat they hit with feel lighter. To his bemused team-mates, though, it’s possible it merely looked eccentric. He wasn’t to follow up this preliminary flourish when in the middle, scoring 0 and 15 and failing to take a wicket. At least one of the Indian team thought him ‘a hype’.
Imran hadn’t forgotten his promise to his parents to finish his education in England, and shortly after the India game he entered Worcester Royal Grammar school as a boarder, with a view to taking A levels and going on to university. His ten months there don’t appear to have been happy ones. Apart from the institutional food and the cold, he was miserably homesick, his one friend in England being his cousin Majid, who was far away at Cambridge. At half-term and on other holidays, Imran stayed behind and moved into an attic room in his headmaster’s house. One retired staff member described him to me, perhaps not surprisingly, as ‘a bit of a loner’. The English boarding school system was not then troubled, as it was later, by counsellors. Had it been, Imran would no doubt have been thought worthy of concern. In the event, he seems to have been somewhat of an object of satire to the other boys, to whom he had, in any case, little to talk about, preoccupied as they were with glam rock and soccer. Even so, the familiar determination and ambition were to the fore. Despite a still imperfect grasp of English, Imran passed Economics and Geography with an A and a C grade respectively. He completed the two-year course in the equivalent of just over two terms, or nine months.*
One winter Saturday afternoon Imran and Majid visited Mike Selvey, the future Surrey, Middlesex and England bowler (and Guardian cricket correspondent), at his flat in Cambridge. Selvey thought the nearly invisible teenager swathed in a heavy overcoat and a variety of scarves to be ‘very quiet and shy. [Although] Imran said very little, years later he told me how much he appreciated it. I always got on well with him and called him Fred, as in Karno.’
It seems most people who met Imran during his first year or so in England had the same general impression Selvey did. Away from the cricket field, he was basically ‘shy’ and ‘rather mousey — a bi
t of a mumbler,’ two grammar school contemporaries recalled. Older and more sophisticated people reacted similarly, finding Imran a very different proposition from the later celebrity. ‘He didn’t treat himself like a statue of himself,’ Basil D’Oliveira said after meeting him in 1971.
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