At the Parks on the bitterly cold morning of 15 May, Imran went out to toss with the captain of Yorkshire, Geoff Boycott. At ten o’clock the entire playing area was covered with a sleet that had frozen in the night, and both the pavilion and the rows of deckchairs rather optimistically displayed in front of it seemed to have been varnished with ice. This gave the two men the opportunity to agree that conditions for early-season English cricket could be a bit on the crisp side. After these pleasantries were concluded, Boycott told Imran (whom he addressed as ‘young man’) that he didn’t much care for the occasion as a whole. ‘It’s not worth getting out of bed for these fucking student games,’ he complained. Someone in the sparse crowd then made an audible and rather racist remark in which he drew comparison between the ethnic make-up of the two teams. You could literally see the steam coming off Imran as he bounded back up the pavilion steps. Anyone at all familiar with him would have known what to expect next. Bowling at maximum revs for the next two hours he took four Yorkshire wickets, including that of Boycott with a late inswinger. A young boy’s perhaps ill-timed request for the Yorkshireman’s autograph a few minutes later was met in the negative. Back in the middle Imran was the most restless captain, pacing around with a frown when not actually bowling, making pantomime signals to his fielders. He took himself off at last after 39 overs, mentally perhaps, if not physically, exhausted.*
There followed a short and unremarkable match with Worcestershire, then the visit of the touring Indians, against whom Imran made 160 and 49. He began his first innings quietly enough, with just a clipping four or two against Madan Lal. But with the arrival of the spinners came one of the most ferocious onslaughts on any type of bowling which can ever have been inflicted at the Parks. The students put on 189 for the third wicket, 120 of them by Imran who, playing on the offside at one end and on the on-side at the other, struck the ball relentlessly to the near boundary, at least once with such force that it rebounded off the heavy roller half-way to the pitch. For good measure, he also took four wickets in the Indians’ first innings. Imran’s century was his highest score to date in first-class cricket. Eight days later, he broke his record with 170 against Northamptonshire. He then proceeded to dispatch the Northants middle order with three wickets in the first innings and four in the second. Imran was still bowling when Oxford won by 97 runs, having given one of the really great all-round performances.
Imran’s well-developed sense of self-respect might go some way to explain why, time and again, he and his bowling seemed to step up a gear when he had something particular to prove. An associated element of revenge — the Pathan principle of badal — was also observable deep in the mix. Most sportsmen, of course, talk about ‘pride’, at least as an abstraction, and virtually no pre-match press conference at any level of the professional soccer world would be complete without repeated references to the concept. But Imran took it to an almost messianic degree, and an ill-advised remark such as Boycott’s was apt to have roughly the same effect as lighting the touch-paper on a particularly spectacular firework. ‘Ten of us were just students together, playing a game,’ one of the Oxford team told me. Imran, by contrast, ‘came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little slight into a life-or-death struggle. I wouldn’t say he always thought everyone was ganging up on him. That sounds a touch paranoid, whereas in my experience he saw things from a very clear cultural-historical perspective. From what I heard and saw of Imran, and charming as he often was, he had a definite thing about certain aspects of the mother country. As far as he was concerned, we were all essentially colonialist swine who had been screwing his people for centuries.’
Such was the general backdrop to Imran’s first match as captain against Cambridge, the university which had seen fit to shun his services two years earlier. It scarcely needs adding that his bowling proved a shade brisk for the opposition. Imran took five for 44 off 20 overs in the Cambridge first innings and five for 69 off 38 overs in the second. As a rule he was very fast, variable both in length and direction, with a preference for the ballooning inswinger, and desperately hard to score from. When he was short and on line a number of the Cambridge batsmen elected to take the ball on the body anywhere between the top of the pads and the general area of the forehead, if more out of necessity than choice. Not that Imran’s robust approach to the game precluded the odd moment of light relief, as when he saw fit to amble in once or twice and lob up a gentle leg break. One Cambridge batsman thought this to have been a prime example of reverse psychology on Imran’s part. ‘It bloody nearly worked, too, because one of our guys promptly lost his head and dollied up a catch, which was dropped.’ This had been ‘poorly received’ by the bowler. Pantomime then stalked proceedings on the third day, when Oxford were chasing 205 to win. They eventually needed just 61 off the last 20 overs, with half their wickets in hand. Imran’s ‘crystal clear’ instruction to go for runs was somehow missed by the Oxford No. 5, Edward Thackeray, who proceded serenely to 42 not out in just over three hours. Towards the end the general noise from the Tavern stand dissolved into an exasperated chant of ‘Wake up, Oxford’ and ‘We want cricket’. The situation was apparently no less trying to Imran, who could be seen pacing restively from side to side on the players’ balcony, occasionally pausing long enough to scowl or shake his fist towards the middle. After what was described as a ‘strained’ tea interval, he had resorted to thumbing through a copy of the laws to see whether Thackeray’s innings could be involuntarily declared closed. It couldn’t, and the match was drawn.
The team party, or post-mortem — there was no formal dinner — that evening was an equally stiff affair. For the most part, Imran (who left early to catch a train to Hove, where he was appearing for Worcestershire against Sussex) engaged only in uncomfortable small talk with his men, and chose not to dwell on the match at any length. Many silences resulted. At one point, apparently in an effort to warm things up, one of the less experienced members of the side reached over to the bar and offered his captain some champagne.
‘Thank you,’ Imran said. ‘I drink milk.’
Since 1971 Pakistan had been gradually returning to cricketing health, if not without the occasional relapse or well-publicised temper tantrum. The national team had a new bowler in Sarfraz Nawaz and a well-remembered one in Mushtaq. Asif and Zaheer were batsmen fit to set before the world. In 1972–73, when Imran was bedding down at Oxford, his countrymen had toured Australia and acquitted themselves rather better, both on and off the field, than the 3–0 result suggests. No side including Saeed Ahmed could be entirely incident-free, even so, and the selectors had been forced to draft in the all-rounder Nasim-ul-Ghani for the Sydney Test after Saeed refused to open the batting against Dennis Lillee. Pakistan had gone on to win and draw series against New Zealand and England respectively. Along the way, Intikhab Alam had been replaced as captain by Imran’s cousin Majid, who was considered an only modest success in the job. After three consecutive draws against England, Majid stood down and Intikhab returned for his third time in charge. ‘[The captaincy] is out of control … it’s a circus,’ the PIA president was heard to complain at a press conference in his office, throwing his pen so hard it bounced off the carpet.
The labyrinthine world of Pakistan politics, meanwhile, continued to be mirrored by that of its cricket administration. Abdul Kardar, the former captain of the national team, now combined his position as chairman of the BCCP with a cabinet office in the Bhutto government. In 1974, Bhutto and Kardar moved the headquarters of Pakistan cricket from Karachi to Lahore. They took the opportunity to rename the Lahore stadium after the self-styled ‘Glorious Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist Peoples Brotherly Libyan Army’ (and supporter of both the eventual South-East Asian nuclear powers, if not their cricket), Muammar al-Gaddafi, along with a gushing tribute from the Pakistani prime minister: ‘Today, to you, we say thank you … thank you, thank you, Glorious Guide.’
For what? some journali
sts wondered, no doubt in keeping with many residents of Karachi. Most of Bhutto’s government were involved in one way or another in the management of Pakistan cricket, although generally they restricted themselves to various pet schemes, such as their decision to honour the Libyan dictator, rather than the tedious business of day-to-day administration. Before and during Test series, therefore, when the BCCP should have been most active, its new office, a dim, green-carpeted room in the bowels of the Gaddafi stadium, was often utterly deserted — a condition which was only slightly improved even on the rare occasions when Kardar scheduled a meeting of the full ‘committee’, which consisted of a dozen or so Bhutto appointees based in Islamabad; more than once, the only people who bothered to show up were Kardar and a secretary.
It’s not clear to what degree, if any, the BCCP officials balanced their misgivings about Imran’s one Test performance to date with their apparent new-found preference for Lahore over Karachi, a bias which was to be reflected in a number of hotly debated selections over the next decade. Perhaps they simply felt that after three years he was ready to return. In either event Imran joined his colleagues midway through their 1974 tour of England. His first appearance, against Warwickshire, following just four days after the varsity match, came as a rude lesson in the comparative merits of student and representative cricket. Imran went for 126 runs off his 22 overs in the Warwickshire first innings. At one stage the opener John Jameson carted him for 50 in four overs. Rain then spared him any further indignity. The unimpressed tour manager, Omar Kureishi, promptly called the team together and read them the Riot Act, which ‘in no way dented Imran’s high spirits or self-confidence’, according to Kureishi’s then teenaged son Javed, who accompanied the side. ‘I remember him as this supremely cocky, long-haired guy who was tremendous fun to be around. Imran thought nothing of marching up to a senior player and telling him, “Your grip’s all wrong, chum”, or advising everyone on their fitness and diet. I once watched, fascinated, as he dropped two raw eggs into a glass of milk in a London restaurant and drained it off in one gulp. Very specific about things like that, Imran. Always finished his day off with a carrot.’
The tour management took the view that Imran’s jaded performance against Warwickshire must be due to a hectic nightlife, and as a result imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on the entire team. ‘This brought some dirty looks in my direction,’ he recalls.
Duly rested, Pakistan turned in a bravura performance against Nottinghamshire, whom they dismissed for 51 in their first innings. Sarfraz moved the ball about ‘like a boomerang’ in Derek Randall’s phrase (the pitch having been ‘a bog’, he added), and finished with eight for 27. Imran took a single wicket. The following week he managed a modest one for 56 and two for 65 against the Minor Counties, and was sufficiently worried about his finances to write a ‘Dear Mike’ letter to the Worcestershire secretary, telling him that he had been ‘made to understand by the other professionals in the touring team that their clubs keep on paying their basic wages throughout the duration of the tour. I wonder if that applies to me as well … I hope it does’ — all part of a ‘miserable’ first month back in Pakistani colours. (Javed Kureishi, even so, remembers accompanying Imran to the cinema around that same time, where the 21-year-old ‘laughed like hell’ throughout a Snow White cartoon. ‘There really was a core enthusiasm and innocence to the guy.’) As slumps go, this wasn’t quite on the scale of, say, Denis Compton’s famous bad patch of 1946, but it contained some pretty spectacular flops which inevitably caught the critics’ attention. ‘The student looked out of his depth at this level,’ was the Daily Mail’s scathing assesment. Imran was distinctly lucky to play in the first Test, at Headingley, and even then he operated as a third seamer after Sarfraz and Asif Masood had taken the new ball. If anything, he shone more with the bat: appearing at No. 8, he lashed 23 and 31 in a low-scoring match which petered out in a draw. These weren’t tail-end runs, either; Imran hit Old high and handsomely for a first-bounce four into the crowd in front of the press box, and when Arnold tried him likewise with a bouncer he found himself flat-batted down to the West Stand bookstall with, in one account, a stroke ‘like a tracer bullet’.
Imran went back to the nets and worked on his action, sending down the daily equivalent of 10 overs to a batsman and another half-dozen with just himself and a stump. Another game he evolved was to bounce a cricket ball off the side of a bat, and then try to retrieve it again with either hand as it shot off at odd angles. Wasim Raja once watched Imran spend 20 or 30 minutes by himself throwing a ball against a small upended trampoline; he would then catch the rebound and, in the same action, try to return the ball to hit the target, and again field the rebound. The performance was ‘all very impressive, because the [other] players just focused on their batting or bowling, while Imran also wanted to improve as an athlete.’
It worked, not right away in every case, but eventually in a series of improved bowling performances on the tour. The second Test, another draw, was notable chiefly for the incessant rain and the Pakistanis’ subsequent complaint about the state of the Lord’s pitch.* Little did they or the spectators know that this was to be a feast of entertainment compared with what followed. The third and final Test at The Oval — drawn again — ‘tapered off into the type of meaningless sport which only cricket can produce’, to quote the journalist Omar Noman. Imran then bowled a tidy 10 overs for 36 in his first ever one-day international, which Pakistan won, and took two for 16 in his second, with the same result. He ended with an ‘immaculate exhibition’ (Wisden) of fast bowling in the admittedly more relaxed atmosphere of a 50-over thrash against a Yorkshire League XI at Harrogate. Imran’s figures for the tour — 249 runs at an average of 31.12, and 15 wickets at 41.66 — perhaps failed to do justice to what one critic described as an ‘efficient but rather lugubrious’ young all-rounder. Wisden was kinder: ‘He should be a powerful figure in Pakistan cricket for years to come.’
That ‘efficient but lugubrious’ might have given pause to anyone who knew Imran only as the priapic Oxford smoothie who charmed his way into a succession of beds. (‘About thirty’ over the three years, I was told — an impeccably moderate figure for the mid-1970s, although another well-placed source thought it had been more like one a week.) But spending any extended amount of time in close quarters with the Pakistan cricket team and its management would have tried the most equable of personalities. As Imran himself recalls, ‘My overall performance on the tour had been adequate, yet snide remarks were still being made about my connections, and statements to the effect that better men had been left behind.’ By all accounts there were one or two unflattering references behind his back to what one famous contemporary later dubbed his ‘Olympic ego’. (When you talk to people who knew the young Imran professionally, the word ‘humility’ comes up a lot. They say he was extremely sparing with it.) The 21-year-old’s self-confident manner occasionally chafed the other players, but in 1974 he encountered little overt hostility except from Asif Masood, who apparently disliked him almost on sight. Intikhab was fairly friendly, and Majid remained a firm ally. Mostly, though, Imran’s colleagues just ignored him, which was the usual practice with the younger players. None of them seems to have known or cared much about his life in England. ‘Imran was thought to have a superior attitude,’ Wasim Raja recalled. ‘People backed away and left him in his own castle.’
The demands of university and Test cricket, as well as of the Oxford examiners, left little time for Worcestershire, and as a result Imran made only a handful of one-day appearances for his county over the summer. He used most of the brief gap between the varsity game and the Pakistani tour to bowl in a Gillette Cup tie against Sussex that ran long, thanks to rain. That would have made his schedule over the course of one six-day period: Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, captaining Oxford at Lord’s; Wednesday and Thursday, playing the knockout game at Hove; early Friday, reporting for international duty with Pakistan at Birmingham. On most of those days, Imran also had to give
interviews, attend functions and generally roam around the country by British Rail. It was a full workload, even by his standards. The people who knew him best also knew how utterly unsparing of himself he was apt to be — how ‘he gave 200 per cent, whatever the competition’, as Wasim Raja put it. ‘No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew Imran would work harder than anyone else.’ But even they didn’t know how hard he would work.
Back in Oxford, Imran made a friend out of a fellow third-year student on his Politics and Economics course. Now a 55-year-old television pundit and author of various self-help books, he had heard that the ‘famous Khan’ could be a bit standoffish. He adds that when he met Imran for the first time he’d been expecting someone ‘as warm as a December night on an ice floe’, but in the event ‘he turned out to be almost absurdly polite, in that rather courtly way some Asians have. Between the accent and the blazer, he was almost like a Terry-Thomas stereotype. Better-looking, though.’ After banking his admittedly meagre appearance money from Pakistan and Worcestershire, Imran was able to rent a small flat close to Oxford town centre. There were framed hunting prints on the wall, a wolfskin rug and reportedly rather more in the way of furniture than the average student digs of the era. On several mornings in the autumn of 1974, a plump young woman with the word ‘IMRAN’ daubed on her forehead kept up a forlorn vigil outside the main gate at Keble (where, these days, her quarry rarely appeared), displaying a ‘Fatal Attraction’ form of obsession, erotomania, of which Imran would come to see more over the next 20 years. The trappings of fame were starting to come fast.
Imran Khan Page 9