The future Somerset and England bowler Vic Marks went up to Oxford in that same term. Thirty-five years on, he remains one of the game’s more astute critics. I asked him if at that stage in his university career Imran had ever appeared the least bit shy around his English teammates. ‘No,’ Marks replied. ‘More aloof.’ He added that Imran had been ‘hard on those he didn’t know and didn’t rate, declining to bowl them or encourage them … He knew he was better than the rest, [but] if he rated you he would try to help and advise.’ Still, at least one other colleague in the Oxford side remained bemused by Imran’s insecurity. ‘The guy generally had bags of self-confidence, sure, but oddly enough not when it came to his bowling. I thought he was a natural. Thousands of fans thought he was a natural. Just about every batsman he ever played against thought he was a natural. Imran remained unconvinced.’
Perhaps Imran’s qualms had something to do with the distinctly mixed signals he was still getting from his two principal teams. At Worcester, he notes, ‘I [was] bullied into bowling medium pace line-and-length stuff which didn’t suit my temperament.’ The key message from Pakistan was very different. Imran was astonished and overjoyed when Intikhab had thrown him the ball early on in the Test series with England and told him to do what came naturally — but, whatever happened, ‘Make them jump around.’ (He did.) Indeed, Imran occasionally seemed to be in two minds about his bowling even when he was his own captain. He rarely appeared for Oxford in the 1975 season, thanks to a commendable and possibly justified concern about passing his finals. In one of the games he did play prior to the varsity match, against Derbyshire at Burton-on-Trent, Imran surprised both the Derby batsmen and his own team by persisting in his attempts to bowl a leg break, an effect that was uneasily like that of a champion shot-putter who’d strayed inadvertently on to a badminton court. It was a curious strategic decision, or so the Oxford men thought. As it turned out, it was a repeat experiment and nothing more. After Imran’s leg spin had gone for eight in two balls he turned around, muttered something to the non-striking batsman, and measured out his full international run. A few overs later, he had taken three of the first four Derbyshire wickets to fall.
If his cricket career was somewhat erratic in the summer of 1975, his love life was a constant. Imran generally brought a ‘special’ girl with him to his matches, or even to watch him practise in the Parks nets. One female undergraduate recalls having feigned an interest in the game, ‘which I actually thought coma-inducing’, just to be near him. Imran made it immediately clear to his companion that he was a man of no small ambition, displaying ‘brass’ which impressed her. She wasn’t the only college girl who noticed the emerging star; a 21-year-old fellow politics student named Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the former Pakistan president and serving prime minister, was ‘much taken’ by Imran’s obvious talent. The elegantly shod Bhutto did not go unnoticed herself. Then in her second year of residence at Lady Margaret Hall, she was intensely outspoken both about Pakistan’s place in the world and the role of women in society. Several of Bhutto’s already quite vocal critics pointed to her Dior wardrobe and liberated lifestyle as a political symbol of conspicuous consumption, or worse, on her part. A mutual acquaintance who falls into this category told me that Bhutto had been ‘visibly impressed’ by, or ‘infatuated’ with, Imran, and that she may have been among the first to dub him affectionately the ‘Lion of Lahore’. In any event it seems fairly clear that, for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of ‘giggling’ and ‘blushing’ whenever they appeared together in public. It also seems fair to say that their relationship was ‘sexual’ in the sense that it could only have existed between a man and a woman. The reason some allowed themselves to suppose it went further was because, to quote one Oxford friend, ‘Imran slept with everyone’ — a gross calumny, but one takes the point — rather than because of any hard evidence of an affair. On balance, I rather doubt that Pakistan’s future prime minister and future cricket captain were ever anything more than good friends, and only for a term or two at that. Even in the morally libertine days of the mid-1970s, Imran’s Oxford love life soon attained legendary status. It was the beginning of a personal myth of sexuality that led some to credit him with literally scores of spurious ‘conquests’ in addition to the real, still quite impressive, total.
Cricket’s first ever World Cup, staged in England, and in which Pakistan started among the favourites, probably wasn’t the best of times for Imran to be concentrating on his finals. Although not originally selected, he was called up to play for his country in their opening fixture against Australia at Headingley, on 7 June. In Imran’s account, he sat the first two of his five exams on the 6th, a Friday, took the evening train to Leeds and arrived at his team’s hotel at four o’clock the following morning, the day of the match.* Australia won by 73 runs, the Pakistanis, like so many others, having been done for pace by Lillee and Thomson. After an epic road-rail return journey some friends finally dropped Imran off in the centre of Oxford where, after going down with flu, he sat his final three papers just as his teammates were losing to the West Indies by one wicket, with two balls to spare, at Edgbaston. That concluded the Pakistanis’ World Cup. Under the circumstances, Imran did well to get a 2.1 for Politics, if only a Third in Economics. ‘I could have exceeded that,’ he remarks. Two days later he was back playing for his country in a meaningless victory over Sri Lanka. The West Indies went on to win the cup. In stark contrast to the protracted seven-week ordeal of the 2007 tournament, the entire competition was completed in 14 days, Pakistan’s campaign in just seven. Majid Khan, again back in charge of the team following an injury to Asif, had won himself a considerable reputation as a specialist in English conditions, as well as being something of a thinker. His own run-a-ball innings of 65 against Australia was a classic of its kind. But Majid’s tenure proved an only limited success, in part because up to half his men would be bickering with the other half at any given time. And even his fondest admirers have never maintained that he was a particularly charismatic or inspiring leader. Pakistan, then, returned home in June 1975 in some disarray. The board sacked Majid, and replaced him with Mushtaq.
Imran left Oxford with a flourish, driving up in his new World Cup blazer, accompanied by his latest blonde, to play in his third varsity match at Lord’s. Several other admirers, both male and female, were seen to be waiting at the gate for a glimpse of their idol, at least one of them sporting a T-shirt customised with slogans indicating how positively she would react to any romantic overtures he might care to make to her. Inasmuch as most of the other students just walked into the ground unnoticed, it was an impressive entrance. The match itself was another draw, but a rather more distinguished one than its two predecessors. The chief honours went to Peter Roebuck and Alastair Hignell, who respectively hit 158 and 60 for Cambridge. Those items apart, Imran’s bowling had all the virtues of a cool, calculated, well-executed assault. As Hignell says, it was a ‘physically terrifying’ and ‘sickening’ barrage; no small accolade from a man who had just come through several bruising encounters with the Australian rugby team.
Imran was to have a modestly successful fifth season at Worcestershire, finishing with 46 first-class wickets at 26, almost exactly the same figures as those for his up-and-coming rival Ian Botham. Still, it was an ‘only fair’ existence. A salary of £ 1,500, paid in six instalments of £250, with a munificent £10 for each county championship win, allowed for little lavish indulgence. But over and above the financial rewards, or lack of them, it had become clear even to Worcestershire that Imran had certain deep-seated misgivings about county cricket as a whole. ‘The English professional just isn’t hungry enough for success. There’s too much cricket … the players get stale,’ he wrote of his experiences some years later. Apart from the ‘essential tedium’ of a system in which too many buckled when they should, perhaps, have swashed, Imran had a more specific objection to his working environment. As he says, ‘I simply found it boring
in Worcester’, where he had moved out of the Star Hotel first into digs and then into an ‘unsalubrious’ short-term flat above a fish-and-chip shop in the town centre.
Almost from the first, Imran had vocal reservations about his English club, where he had initially played a series of ‘grim’ and ‘dead-end’ Second XI matches before being ‘bullied’ into bowling ‘military medium’ for the seniors, allegedly at a reduced salary than the one ‘Harold’ Shakespeare (who died in 1976) had promised him in the pavilion at Lahore. As we’ve seen, the eventual terms were on the slim side: as well as his basic salary, the club undertook to ‘… arrange accommodation for away games on a bed-and-breakfast, early-morning tea and one newspaper basis … A meal allowance of £1 will be paid for an evening meal when away from home and for Sunday lunches when away from home’, before adding the rather bleak assurance that ‘a sum equivalent to the Second Class Rail Fare from Worcester to the venue of [an] away match will be paid to all players participating in the match’. Imran, though one of the least materially minded of professional sportsmen, was moved to send a two-page handwritten letter to Tony Greig, the captain of Sussex, in September 1975. ‘Dear Tony, I wondered if you and [your] committee would consider the possibility of taking me on staff next year?’ he enquired, citing ‘the availability of overseas registration and the young age group of the team’ as reasons for his interest. Four days later, Greig wrote back in more measured terms: ‘In reply to your correspondence of 12 September 1975 I would suggest that you telephone our Secretary as soon as your position becomes clear. You will appreciate the implications of any approach prior to your official release from Worcester … Yours sincerely, A.W. Greig, Captain of Sussex.’
I asked Mike Vockins, the long-serving Worcestershire secretary, about all this. Among other things, Vockins mentioned that he and his committee had fought a hitherto unreported running battle with the Test and County Cricket Board to retain Imran’s services. There were various sub-plots involved, but the basic problem concerned the TCCB’s rule, already the source of a skirmish with the club in 1973, restricting each affiliate side to a maximum of two overseas players. As Worcestershire already had New Zealand’s Glenn Turner and the West Indian bowler Vanburn Holder on their books, the club had mobilised on their somewhat unappreciative young all-rounder’s behalf.
‘At the end of Imran Khan’s time at Oxford, the TCCB decided, to my surprise, that his qualification for us lapsed,’ Vockins recalls. As far as the board were concerned, Imran had effectively become a Pakistani again after graduating. ‘It seemed totally illogical, and was also at odds with what both the club and more to the point Imran himself wanted. Not only did we appeal, but we were determined that we should present our case as well as we could and duly retained John Field-Evans QC, later to be a High Court judge, to fight our corner. It was quite an anxious time. I didn’t want Imran to be unduly worried, and so sought to give him confidence that the appeal would be successful and otherwise didn’t involve him directly.’ Another source then on the Worcestershire committee told me that it had cost ‘a lot of money, certainly in the several hundreds of pounds’ to appeal against the TCCB’s ruling, and that ‘that should answer any questions about whether or not we were fully committed to Mr Khan and his welfare’. (Even so, there remained Imran’s core point that ‘all my Oxford friends had moved to London, and I was stuck in Worcester … I was bored to tears there,’ he told me.) After several ‘trying’ months the club had prevailed and ‘both we and the player in question were happy to continue our association together’. Imran omits the episode of the TCCB registration from both his autobiographies, but it does seem to refute the idea that he’d been utterly miserable at Worcestershire from the start, or that the club had ever been less than wholehearted about keeping him on their books.
Imran went back to Pakistan that autumn, for only his second visit home in four-and-a-half years. He marked the occasion by making a few low-key appearances in the BCCP Patron’s Trophy on behalf of Dawood Industries, a ‘manure and insurance combine’ based in Karachi, as it intriguingly described itself. The same tournament hosted sides from the federal Water and Power Development Agency and a heavily fancied Income Tax (Collections) Department. In the second half of the season Imran represented Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in the Quaid-e-Azam Cup. He took six for 68 and five for 79 against Punjab, gave a bravura all-round performance in the tie against National Bank by taking three for 53 and six for 48 as well as scoring a second-innings century, and followed up with another six-wicket haul against Sind. Imran finished his short involvement in the domestic season with 446 runs at a touch under 30, and 52 wickets at 19 apiece. PIA paid him the equivalent of some £75 a month for his services. Back in Worcester, Mike Vockins was sitting down to write to Imran: ‘The committee has agreed that your basic salary for 1976 should be £2,000, on top of which you will receive appearance money, win money and team prize monies in the normal way … We shall also contribute £100 towards your air fare back to this country.’ On 19 November Imran wrote back to thank Vockins for his offer. The financial terms were ‘very satisfactory’, although he evidently still had doubts about the quality and cost of his local digs, for which ‘last summer I had to pay about £9.50 a week until John Inchmore moved in with me’. Imran’s eventual contract for 1976 bears the handwritten codicil: ‘I would like it to be noted that my accommodation should be subsidised if the rent is too high.’
Imran’s devotion to the grail of constant self-improvement was again kindled during his winter in Pakistan. When not playing competitively in the domestic competitions he found time to practise at the Lahore Gymkhana, next to his family home in Zaman Park. Imran had greatly disappointed the citizens of that cricket-mad enclave by not showing up during any of his Oxford vacations over the previous three years. Now crowds of them came to the Gymkhana to watch him work out (he had a young net bowler throw bouncers at him from 15 yards to improve his hook shot) and mill around the pavilion door for autographs. ‘Every young boy in Lahore wanted to shake Imran’s hand,’ one friend recalls, ‘and many of their elder sisters also worshipped him in their own way.’
Relatively few who have grown up in Lahore, as Imran did, have willingly returned for any extended time after tasting the seductions of the West. (It would be fair to say, too, that a stint in the likes of Birmingham or Dallas has, conversely, led some to appreciate Pakistani life all the more.) And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the 23-year-old native son who spent the winter of 1976 there was ‘virtually unrecognisable’ from the 18-year-old tyro who had flown off with the Pakistani team in 1971. Imran’s boyhood companion Yusuf Salahudin told me that his friend had led a ‘somewhat cloistered life’ growing up in Zaman Park, ‘surrounded by his extended family almost as if it was a colony’. When Salahudin met Imran again after some five years’ absence, ‘I thought he was more obviously mature and outgoing … A man of the world … There was a certain familiar confidence there, but also a new sense of calm. As you grow older, you begin to realise more and more what works for you and what doesn’t, and I think he’d settled into himself in his twenties more than as a fanatically ambitious teenager.’ But for all his cosmopolitanism, Imran clearly remained a Pakistani to his core. ‘London’s most famous socialite’, as Today called him in 1986, wasn’t born in England and apparently preferred not to live there either, once his playing days were over, even if it meant being separated from his two young sons. Years later Imran was to refer to the ‘sad spectacle’ of ‘timid and alienated Pakistanis losing their identity [in] Britain’, a fate he conspicuously avoided.*
There’s nothing quite like the gathering of players, officials and press on the first day of training before the beginning of a new English cricket season. The start-of-term atmosphere, with its ambient smell of embrocation and linseed oil, is often enlivened by tropical rain or even snow falling on the newly cut playing area. They still talk about having to swim for the pavilion in Worcester. By contrast, the spring and summer of
1976 were the hottest for 30 years, with outfields that were baked to a shade of burnt yellow and white. On the grass banks in front of the stands during Test matches, bare chests and floppy hats were in order. This was the series in which the England captain Tony Greig ill-advisedly spoke of making the West Indies ‘grovel’, only for the tourists to take the rubber 3–0, the beginning of some 15 years’ domination of world cricket. Back at Worcester, Imran seems to have rapidly appraised the situation and concluded that these were conditions ideally suited to out-and-out fast bowling. The pitches were rock hard, and with the hook shot now in his repertoire he was able to bowl bouncers with the confidence that he could handle any return bombardment that happened to come his way. About the only cloud on the horizon was again the knotty and apparently insoluble matter of Imran’s accommodation. There’s a note in his file suggesting that Worcestershire had ‘made arrangement for [Khan] to meet a local Estate Agent’, but that even this had not fully resolved the long-running problem. ‘On two occasions the player failed to take advantage of that arrangement,’ the note concludes.
Imran announced his intention right from the start, when the county hosted Warwickshire at the end of April. This was one of those matches that begin in a downpour and end in a heatwave. After a briefly delayed start, Worcestershire scored 322. The visitors, for whom Amiss made 167, were able to see off the somewhat benign Worcester new-ball attack of Inchmore and Pridgeon without undue difficulty. There was an opening stand of 146. Imran then appeared and proceeded to bowl a selection of inswingers and bouncers at speeds of around 90 miles an hour, hurling the ball down like a live coal. Wickets fell. At the other end, Paul Pridgeon continued to plug away on a line and length for most of the second afternoon session. After just a few overs of this contrasting attack, the senior Warwickshire batsman had called a midwicket conference with the junior one. ‘I’ve assessed the situation, son,’ he announced solemnly, ‘and if you take the Pakistani, I can look after Pridgey.’ A minute or two later, the junior batsman took the opportunity of the tea interval to slip off to hospital for a precautionary X-ray to his skull after Imran had dropped in another short one. (This was to be the last full English season before the introduction of helmets.) The Warwickshire bowlers, led by England’s Bob Willis and David Brown, duly returned the favour on the third day, by which time the wicket appeared ‘like concrete’, with the addition of ‘several deep cracks, off which the ball shot like a skipping rock’, to quote the local paper. Coming in at No. 4, Imran scored 143 at slightly less than a run a minute.
Imran Khan Page 10