Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  He seems to have been commendably focused on his studies at Worcester Grammar (whose fees of about £200 a term were paid not by the club, as popularly rumoured, but by Imran’s father). In the light of his future reputation as a sort of flannelled Austin Powers figure, it’s worth quoting one final schoolfriend, now a lecturer in psychology, who saw him as a socially naive young man. ‘He kept to himself, and didn’t show any interest in girls or sex that I was aware of.’ Sometime towards the end of the year, Imran apparently did write a well-received short story or essay, which he circulated to some of the senior boys, about a man who walks around London soliciting beautiful women. ‘He certainly didn’t do any fieldwork on it,’ his friend insists. Imran also spent hours retooling his bowling action both in the school gym and in the indoor net at Edgbaston which Worcestershire then shared. Although Henry Horton worked doggedly to convert the ‘catapault’ bowler into the well-oiled machine of later legend, it was John Parker, the young New Zealand batsman also in his first year at Worcester, who looked at Imran one day and casually suggested he ‘take a little jump’ before delivering the ball. The idea was both to gain extra momentum and to get more side-on to the batsman, who, as an added bonus, would then have to deal with ‘this crazy, vaulting Pakistani bowling at you at 90 miles an hour’, as one distinguished former England opener puts it. The improvisations in Imran’s bowling technique continued over the years. He could, and did, vary his run-up, steam in wide of the crease, move it both ways, or neither, and was apt to follow up a slower ball with a screaming bouncer that left batsmen wringing hands or standing transfixed. But what really set him apart was that ‘little jump’. It was at once superbly efficient and shamelessly flamboyant, and as such could be readily appreciated by players and spectators alike. At Edgbaston in 1982 Imran took seven for 52 in the English first innings, and was paid the compliment of the home crowd applauding their own team’s discomfiture as they savoured a bowling routine that was part athletics, part ballet and part tribal wardance. ‘It was,’ said the England captain, ‘a privilege to be there.’

  In July 1972 Imran won a place at Keble College, Oxford, after being brusquely rejected by Cambridge. Before going up he played some schools and Warwick Pool cricket, making use of his new action; although the exact number is hard to establish, I was told he had taken ‘a minimum of 25 wickets’ in the course of four single-innings matches. (He also played once for Worcestershire Seconds against Glamorgan, with the more modest if economical figures of none for 16 off eight.) In his autobiography, Imran notes a shade tartly, ‘When I reported to the county in 1972 I found a few things entirely different from the terms we had agreed. For a start, my wages had been reduced’ — supposedly from £35 to £25 a week — ‘and secondly, John Parker was to be specially registered ahead of me.’ Imran’s account doesn’t entirely square with that of the incoming county secretary, Mike Vockins, who, while not a party to the original deal struck in the pavilion at Lahore, had ‘all the bumph’ at his disposal. ‘There would have been only limited opportunities to play [Imran] in that 1972 season, although under the rules he would have automatically become eligible and registered once he went up to Oxford. I can’t recall any occasion during my 30 years as Secretary when any players’ wages were reduced,’ says Vockins.

  Even at that stage, Imran seems to have had distinctly mixed views about the appeal of playing county cricket seven days a week. As he quickly recognised, the sheer repetitiveness of it, often cited as a weakness, can be a marked asset from the player’s point of view; if you make a mistake, you get a chance to atone for it on an almost daily basis for five months. Set against that was the irksome routine of humping one’s kit up and down the British motorway system, and lodging in a series of guest-houses or hotels with little pretension to luxury. The wages were unspectacular — £800 to £1,200 per annum was typical for an uncapped player. For reasons of both background and temperament, Imran never fully integrated into the general banter of the county dressing-room or indeed of the pub. He never drank alcohol, a major handicap in almost every aspect of life as a professional sportsman in the Britain of the early 1970s. ‘We didn’t know quite what to make of him,’ one Worcestershire colleague recalls. ‘He certainly wasn’t one of the boys in the sense of going out on the pull, though I gather he did pretty well in that area by himself.’ Basil D’Oliveira, the South African-born player then in his tenth year with Worcestershire, told me, ‘I’m not surprised if there were misunderstandings, seeing most English county cricketers knew as much about Pakistan as they did about the dark side of the moon.’ Imran came to think that the ‘old pros’ on the county circuit were hopelessly negative in their approach to the game, and ‘slightly racist’ to boot. D’Oliveira confirmed that he had once heard an opposition bowler greet the new recruit ‘with a whole string of ethnic stereotypes, in which the word “chutney” somehow stood out’, and that ‘Immy’s response was to hit the second or third ball he faced from the guy out of the park.’ D’Oliveira added that it ‘wasn’t that unusual a scene’.

  Imran eked out the balance of a forgettable season for Worcestershire Seconds, distinguishing himself only with a four-wicket haul against Leicestershire and their perhaps less than stellar middle order of Schepens, Stringer, Wenban and Stubbs. While on the road he roomed alone, generally ate alone, and found ways to kill time alone before and after games. In another departure from standard practice Imran spent long hours wandering through museums and art galleries, browsing in public libraries and visiting the historic sights in various provincial towns. He seems not to have bonded with any of his team-mates, or to have gone out of his way to make friends. Writing of his time at Worcestershire as a whole, Imran was to note, ‘I just didn’t enjoy myself … Either the players were married and had their own lives, or they were unmarried and spent their evenings in pubs. Being a teetotaller, I was lonely and bored.’ About the best that could be said of the experience was that it allowed him to play cricket at a marginally more competitive level than would have been the case in Pakistan, whose domestic contests between various state agencies, transportation conglomerates and banks proved of only limited appeal to players and spectators alike.

  The crash course in culture served Imran well at Oxford, where he initially read Geography before switching to Politics and Economics. On the whole it seems to have been a more congenial atmosphere than that of the county Second XI circuit. One of his contemporaries told me that, at 20, Imran had been ‘a bit green’ and had stayed the course academically only through his own freelance efforts and the good grace of Paul Hayes, the senior tutor at Keble, who had evidently taken a shine to him. Imran had been ‘socially agile’, however — ‘If it was female and had a pulse, he pursued it.’ After a year living in college he moved out to a series of digs, getting around town on an ancient Bantam motorbike. It’s remembered that he liked to ride this at top speed, often preferring a zigzag pattern to a straight line, and even in winter carried his cricket bat slung over the back wheel. One Saturday night Imran rasped up on the bike to a party in Oxford’s Summertown area, accompanied by a ‘ravishing looking’ girlfriend. A certain amount of drinking and substance abuse had gone on among his fellow guests, I was told. Perhaps as a result, later in the evening a fresh-faced chemistry student reeled up to Imran and said, ‘I’m Cassius Clay and I’m going to knock the shit out of you.’ Imran, who was somewhat taller than his antagonist, put his hand on the man’s right shoulder and held him patiently at arm’s length while ‘the little guy punched the air in between them’.

  Imran was particularly fortunate to play his cricket at the Parks, a handsome, tree-lined ground that was only a short walk from Keble. In the summer term his practice was to go directly from his early morning tutorial to the playing field, returning home again for a late dinner. An Oxford team-mate named Simon Porter remembers him as ‘more inherently gifted, obviously, [but] also more driven’ than his colleagues. ‘Imran spent hours trundling away in the nets, essentially in an e
ffort to perfect his inswinger. He always wanted to know if you could “read” him, which I, for one, couldn’t — and I had the bruises all over my leg to prove it.’ It wasn’t unknown for Imran to attract a ‘small harem’ of supporters to the ground for even the most insignificant fixture. Another colleague remembers that, on losing his wicket in one inter-college game, Imran ‘strode straight through the front door of the pavilion, grabbed a bag, and strode straight out the back one, where a blonde in a sports car was waiting for him. He jumped in, and that was the last we saw of him for two days.’ A subsequent Oxford girlfriend, another blonde now called Karen Wishart (not her name at the time), thought Imran a ‘physically beautiful’ man whose charm was nonetheless limited in its scope. One evening the two of them went off together to ‘a little flat above a fruit and veg shop’ in the Oxford suburbs. Looking back on the episode years later, Wishart was left to conclude that Imran was a ‘music and roses at night, pat on the bum in the morning’ type. It would be only fair to add that another woman found him an ‘attentive, funny and charming’ partner, who nonetheless struck her as the kind who would ‘hug you politely and then just stroll away once you broke up’. The words proved prophetic.

  One of Imran’s earliest appearances for Oxford was against Worcestershire, where he clearly had something to prove. Over the years, some of these county versus university encounters could be the ultimate in boredom, and many of the old pros saw them as little more than an agreeable way to improve their averages. That wasn’t to be the case here, at least in Oxford’s second innings. A powerful Worcester attack of Holder, Pridgeon, D’Oliveira and Gifford appeared to be sending down half-volleys and long hops all afternoon. It wasn’t so, but Imran’s polished innings of 54 more than had the measure of the professionals’ line-up. He followed it by scoring 47 and 51 against Sussex, a match I illicitly cycled over from my nearby boarding school to watch. Nothing seemed to better crystallise events than the straight six with which Imran greeted Sussex’s highly regarded off-spinner Johnny Barclay; 2–0–4–2–6 followed, all in the direction of the River Cherwell. After the over, Barclay took his sweater and came back to field at third man, still muttering to himself. Something similar happened a fortnight later against Gloucestershire. Imran scored 59 out of 106 in the Oxford second innings, peppering the old wooden scorebox-cum-groundsman’s hut with sixes. Others landed in the copse of trees behind square leg. Generally speaking Imran did rather less with the ball, but was still in a class of his own compared with his fellow undergraduates, a tall poppy among shrinking violets.

  It was the same story against Cambridge in the varsity match. Imran top-scored with 51 in the Oxford first innings (caught off the bowling of Phil Edmonds), but took only a modest three wickets throughout. One or two of his Oxford colleagues wanted him to bowl faster, of which he was fully capable, rather than to concentrate on line and length as Worcestershire always insisted. Both Imran and his new bowling action were still works in progress. Although tall, he wasn’t as well upholstered as he would be when he filled out two or three years later, and the ‘little jump’ was a formidable physical feat that wasn’t yet invariably effective when it came to getting the ball on the wicket. In those days, the former England captain Ted Dexter told me, ‘Imran used to come charging in [and] plant his left foot virtually parallel to the batting crease in the delivery stride. “Sooner or later, that young man will do himself an injury”,’ Dexter thought presciently. Oxford drew their match with Cambridge. A night or two later, Imran walked into the White Horse in Oxford’s Broad Street, where he became one of the first men to successfully order a glass of milk in a British pub. As usual there was a small group of acolytes at his table, including the statutory blonde girlfriend. ‘People were fawning on Imran because he was already a bit of a superstar,’ one of the party recalls. ‘But the English have always been fascinated with swarthy oriental mavericks. Or at least they were in those days. Imran would have turned heads even if he’d never picked up a cricket ball. I have a fond memory of him sitting there with his milk and his blonde, trying desperately to look unimpressed while somebody read out all the glowing references to him — how he was a tiger and a fighter and so on — in the morning press. He loved it. Who wouldn’t have?’ Imran may not have been the finished article, but good judges had begun to take serious note of him.

  Fighting was what life was about. That was the reason Imran ‘worked like a cur’, to quote a Keble source, to support himself at Oxford. When he was later to claim that ‘playboys have plenty of time and money — I’ve never had either’, he didn’t exaggerate his case. In the wake of the civil war and the subsequent currency crisis, the Pakistani government had imposed strict exchange controls that made it illegal to send more than the equivalent of £15 out of the country annually, with the prospect of a lengthy gaol term for anyone breaking the law. As a result Imran had no trust fund and an only minimal allowance. To keep himself afloat in the off-season he took a series of menial jobs, including one washing dishes over the Christmas holiday at Littlewoods store in south London. It was no worse than the fate of thousands of other students over the years, but it does refute the idea that he swanned through his time at Oxford like one of the teddybear-carrying toffs in Brideshead Revisited.

  Despite his claim to have been neglected by Worcestershire, Imran played for the county in 11 first-class matches in the second half of the 1973 season. The club found him new if rather basic digs in the town’s Bromyard Road, and even went to war with the Test and County Cricket Board to keep him registered with them under the board’s Rule 4, relating to ‘temporary special players’. Imran came into the team in time to play Warwickshire in a fixture starting on 14 July, just three days after appearing for Oxford at Lord’s. The more free-spirited, if not always effective, student approach to the game gave way to the trench warfare of the county championship, conducted behind the sandbag of broad pads — the main idea being for batsmen to obtain a reasonably good average each season at the minimum of risk and physical exertion to themselves. For a cricketer who abhorred the safety-first school epitomised by certain old pros, it was all mildly depressing. Imran took just 31 wickets in the 11 matches (one of them, admittedly, when he bowled Garry Sobers) at some 24 apiece. But even that modest achievement eclipsed his performance with the bat — 15 innings, 228 runs, average 16.28. Being Imran, though, what he lacked in mature ability he fully made up for in self-belief; the fact that he neither scored runs nor took wickets troubled him as little as did most of the criticism he received over the years, and had the same general effect. ‘It taught me never to stop, that when you lose you fight harder the next time.’

  Back in Oxford, Karen Wishart sometimes talked to Imran about his future — Imran apparently uncertain, Wishart positive that he would play cricket for only a year or two more and then go back to a steady job in Pakistan. Both the civil service and engineering were mentioned. Wishart often urged Imran to ignore the temptation to become a fully professional sportsman who presumably might just about eke out a living for another ten years or so while his contemporaries got on with their ‘proper’ careers. Down that road, she insisted, there was nothing to gain and everything to lose. Imran frequently said he didn’t much like the idea either.

  If Wishart took that for an answer, she knew less than she thought she did about a man who was born to perform.

  * At which point Newsweek’s editor apologised, remarking that his story had been based on an anonymous source who now ‘wasn’t sure whether it was true or not’.

  * Opening the bowling with Imran for the school’s First XI was a Kenyan-born 18-year-old named Rabi Mehta, who in the 1980s went on to author several scholarly articles about the aerodynamics of a cricket ball in flight, and thus to ‘explain’ the theory of reverse swing.

  THREE

  The Swinger

  In 1974 Imran was elected captain of Oxford. It was a somewhat surprising choice, considering his only mixed form with bat and ball, untried diplomatic
skills and still limited command of English. According to those with whom he discussed the club’s offer, he hesitated a day or two before agreeing, apparently concerned that ‘the guys’ might not accept him. There was also the question of whether the added responsibility would affect his own game, as has been known with cricket captains. Trying to bat, bowl, lead from the front and learn the language, one friend said bluntly, was at least one job too many.

  The offer was nonetheless a heady one for a 21-year-old Pakistani who had a somewhat romantic view of the British university tradition as a whole, based as it was on the exploits of men like Majid’s father Jahangir Khan, who had been up at Cambridge in the 1930s. Accepting it would give him a certain cachet, as well as the chance to bowl himself as he saw fit. After another winter of training and periodic trips to the indoor school at Edgbaston, Imran’s action was now close to the real thing. ‘I also knew I had the temperament for fast bowling,’ he remarks. With five years of first-class cricket and one Test appearance to his credit, ‘I was ready … confident the job would [make] me a better player’ — a judgement that events bore out to a quite astonishing extent.

  Imran hit the ground running, taking five for 56 against a Warwickshire side including six current or former England Test players and the West Indies’ Alvin Kallicharran. He then began to do the thing in style. Innings of 117 not out and 106 against a full-strength Nottinghamshire. Another five-wicket haul against Derbyshire. A cameo of 20 (Oxford’s top score) against a Somerset who were giving a second match to a teenager named Botham. Imran seemed to be playing some of the counties by himself, fielding tigerishly to his own bowling and driving batsmen into errors and indecision where previously there had been only confidence. As one of his colleagues told me, ‘You frequently had the feeling that he could have made up a team with just himself, a couple of serviceable all-rounders and maybe a wicketkeeper.’