Even in the John Player (or ‘Sunday’) League, Imran evidently decided that this was to be his year. He turned in some impressively consistent figures: three for 23 off his allotted eight overs against Glamorgan; another three for 23 against Yorkshire; three for 34 against Gloucestershire; three for 39 against Middlesex; and so on. If the match warranted, he generally added a brisk 30 or 40 runs with the bat. The message seemed to be that he would take an average of three wickets in each one-day outing, and bowl that much faster than anyone else. It was the same story in the Benson and Hedges trophy, where Worcestershire went all the way to the final against Kent, which they lost. If Imran’s bowling was often, as one observer put it, ‘fast to the point of dementia’, it was also successful more times than not. He left everyone stunned in a Gillette Cup tie against Gloucestershire at Bristol when he began to bounce his friend Mike Procter, who was then widely regarded as not the best man to provoke. Sure enough, Procter retaliated when it was his turn to bowl. After a couple of hooked fours, Imran appeared to have won this particular duel, only for him to fall to the more innocuous seam of Tony Brown.
Imran’s combative temperament helped make him the supreme bowler he now became. ‘I’ve always hated taking a beating lying down — something essential to a medium-pacer,’ he says. ‘Sometimes [I] just saw blood in front of my eyes … It was during those moments that an increase of adrenalin would add an extra yard or two to my pace.’ People who played against him at the time generally agree that he was a difficult, extraordinarily driven opponent. Several of them described him as having been ‘intense’ or even ‘manic’ when he came ‘hurtling in’, his ‘fiery brown eyes’ with an ‘electric glaze’. With his fist clenched and his knees pumping up and down ‘he seem[ed] like a loose power line crackling around, and just as dangerous’. One Worcestershire colleague thought Imran’s intensity on the field ‘took a lot out of him as far as being a human being was concerned. You don’t turn that kind of competitive drive on and off. He was always away by himself somewhere, and we didn’t see him socially.’ Mike Vockins, a professional acquaintance for six years, ‘never got that close’ to Imran, and remembers that he would ‘disappear pretty frequently to London or Birmingham, presumably to visit Pakistani friends or family.’ You hear a lot about this sense of him having been a man apart from the rest of the team. Imran had a ‘persecution complex’, one former colleague believes. ‘One thing most cricketers have is a sense of humour — you need it — but he pretty well totally lacked the ability to laugh at himself.’ Set against this is the testimony of a well-known former Test player and academic, who remarked that Imran was ‘warmly accessible to all sorts of people on the periphery of the action like autograph collectors and dressing-room attendants and programme sellers, and a complete mystery to his team-mates. Without stretching it too far, you could see some of the elements of the classic cowboy type there in the way he did the business and then just silently walked off into the sunset. I always thought there was a touch of Clint Eastwood to the guy.’
So it seems fair to say that Imran wasn’t regarded as the life and soul of the party among his English county team-mates. But even those who had doubts about him as a person admired the often thrilling and always robust quality of his all-round cricket as seen in 1976. It remained a moot point whether Imran would ever thaw out as a human being, but clearly he’d already made the leap from journeyman county professional to world-class entertainer.
In the three-day match against Somerset in early June, Imran scored a full-bodied 54 in the first innings and 81 in the second. There was a raw fury to some of his strokes that made his partner D’Oliveira’s seem merely polite by comparison. Imran added an equally lusty 57 against Kent — and the pattern was set. He then beat Lancashire virtually single-handed, with bowling figures of seven for 53 and six for 46, as well as an unbeaten 111 in Worcestershire’s only innings. Another century followed against Leicestershire. And another against a Northants attack led by Sarfraz. Fast bowlers didn’t generally hope for glamorous figures against the Surrey of the mid-1970s, whose top order typically read: Edrich, Butcher, Howarth, Younis, Roope, Test players all. Imran took five for 80 against them. There were wickets or runs, and frequently both, right up to the game against Gloucestershire in the second week of September. Imran managed a single victim (ironically, his Test colleague Sadiq), having for once — exhausted, perhaps — forsaken pace for control. The local paper speaks of his ‘almost robot accuracy’ in the Gloucester first innings. Little did the reporter or anyone else know it at the time, but Imran had played his last match for Worcestershire.
In retrospect, his departure was logical enough. A fractious relationship with certain colleagues, occasional friction with the club authorities and that oft-quoted boredom with Worcester itself all added up to a strong case against Imran’s returning for a seventh season at New Road. The reason his decision came as a shock to so many there was that they saw it in the context of his recent performances for the county. Imran finished the 1976 season with 1,092 runs at an average of 40 and 65 wickets at 23 apiece, earning him the Wetherall Award for English cricket’s best all-rounder. Worcestershire had enjoyed record attendances and reached a cup final at Lord’s. Some of his colleagues could only puzzle at the fact that, as one of them puts it, ‘Imran chose to fix something that wasn’t broken’.
Nonetheless, living abroad turned out to be an only mixed blessing for the ‘fanatically patriotic’ young star. On the positive side, it was liberating for him, as it was for so many other Test colleagues, from Asif to Zaheer, and more personally fulfilling, perhaps, than the likely alternative of a career in the middle reaches of the Pakistani civil service and an arranged marriage. Exposure to English county cricket, for all its flaws, also had the advantage of allowing him to develop as a bowler under the sharp eye of men like the Worcestershire coach Henry Horton and the evergreen D’Oliveira. Imran was doubly fortunate to play so much of his cricket at New Road, not only a picturesque ground in its own right, but in those days also a pitch that more often than not rewarded an attacking bowler like himself. Of his 65 first-class wickets in the 1976 season, 42 came on his home turf. Imran was an immeasurably better all-round cricketer when he left Worcester than when he joined them.
On the debit side, it’s clear that in more than five years there he never really settled in his adopted home. ‘Exile’ may be too strong a word for it, but Imran’s sense of isolation — not only from his English team-mates but from those ‘timid and alienated’ fellow expats — was something he repeatedly spoke of at the time. Instead of ‘fawn[ing] over British institutions’ the way so many displaced Pakistanis of his generation did, he seems to have regarded the host culture, personally gratifying though it was, as all too often wallowing in a mire of frivolity and decadence. Since Imran wasn’t the sort of man to insert metal studs in his face or to stab someone after a bout of drinking, he was clearly always going to be out of step with a significant part of British society as it developed during his time there. Nor was he that impressed with the ‘right-wing Tory regime’ of Edward Heath or the equally feckless Labour government that succeeded it. One or two friends and colleagues in England saw the first stirrings of Imran’s demotic, broadly speaking anti-West politics 20 years before he launched his Tehreek-e-Insaf (‘Movement for Justice’) party.
It’s also easy to believe that Imran was simply homesick in Worcester in a way that he wasn’t in the more collegial atmosphere of Oxford. Although most people in the club went out of their way to make him feel welcome, not every member of the local community was as obliging. These were still early days for the multicultural society, and many Britons avoided the shackles of excessive deference to what became known as political correctness. As it happened, there was one distressingly widespread illustration of the UK’s still somewhat rudimentary concept of race relations as a whole: ‘Paki-bashing’, of which Worcester saw its fair share around pub closing time most Saturday nights. As far as is known, Imran
was never directly targeted, but he attracted his quota of muttered asides both on and off the cricket field. For some reason, a disproportionately high number of these seem to have occurred while playing against Yorkshire. There was apparently one occasion when Imran went out to bat on an overcast evening at Leeds, to be greeted by the home team’s bowler ostentatiously peering down the pitch at him and enquiring, ‘Where are you, lad? Give us a clue. I can’t see nowt’ — all ‘standard, knockabout stuff, [but] not appreciated by Khan’, I was told by one of his team-mates, speaking of such antics in general. As we’ve seen, he tended not to fraternise with his own colleagues, though this seems to have been more out of choice than necessity. As Mike Vockins notes, ‘Worcester had a good group of very personable young cricketers around then. I’m confident that there would have been enough sensitivities among them for one or other to have dropped a word if they felt that Imran was unsettled, [and] for it to be noted.’ Seeming to refute the idea that Imran had complained about his life in Worcester virtually on a daily basis, Vockins adds, ‘We were wholly unaware that he disliked living here. I have no recollection of his ever having spoken about it over the course of five years, or having talked about being unhappy to me or any senior officer of the club.’
There were, it’s true, certain ongoing administrative difficulties when it came to the matter of Imran’s lodgings. In his 1983 memoirs, written relatively soon after the events in question, he insists that he had arrived in Worcester for the start of the 1976 season, his annus mirabilis, to find that he was effectively homeless. ‘I had to sleep on Glenn Turner’s floor for the first five days, then the county put me up in what I thought was the lousiest hotel I’ve ever seen … After six weeks, I managed to find a flat of my own and then the club made me pay half the hotel bill.’ In time Imran solved the problem of his Worcester accommodation by rarely turning up there. After taking possession of a ‘lively’ second-hand Mazda, he preferred to bomb up and down the A44 to London at every opportunity. There appears to have been a familiar theme to Imran’s restiveness. Speaking of monogamy, the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow would write in his novel Dangling Man, ‘The soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisical women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?’ For Imran, the answer was clearly no. Even when he was seeing one of his ‘special girls’, he made little pretence of fidelity. Imran’s taste in women ignored all considerations of age and appearance, and also spanned the class structure. In the course of the Worcestershire years there was a ‘succession of debs, dolly birds and shopgirls’, I was told by one of his still impressed colleagues. To be fair to Imran, he also showed notable self-restraint, given that he was as often the pursued as he was the pursuer. One of his relatively few male English friends recalled an occasion when they had been sitting together on a ‘perfectly decorous night out’ in a London club, only for ‘a siren’ to walk over, sit down in Imran’s lap and place his hand on her leg. ‘Help yourself, sexy,’ she’d announced, rather unnecessarily. Although Imran declined that particular offer, he can hardly have failed to reflect on the life he left behind in Pakistan, where the authorities had recently re-introduced public flogging for ‘those who drink, gamble or sexually philander’.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Imran had reservations about Worcester, an undeniably lovely town but one which lacked any of the raw energy, vital nightlife and racy promise of neighbouring Birmingham, another of his frequent overnight haunts. His predominant sense of the place would remain its ‘soulless’ amenities, oddly enough with the sole exception of the public library, where he was a regular weekly patron. As well as the matter of his ‘lousy’ hotel and subsequent accommodations, Imran seems to have had two other particular issues with the Worcestershire club. They had waited until 1976 to award him his county cap, at which time his wages had risen from a basic £2,000 to a relatively munificient £2,500, with the prospect of various allowances and bonuses.
‘Provided I make up my mind to return to Worcester next year,’ Imran wrote to Mike Vockins in September 1976, ‘I would like the following terms: a) £4,000 basic salary; b) free accommodation; c) full return airfare.’ In time the club wrote back to offer £3,000. ‘After giving myself two months to make up my mind,’ Imran replied, ‘I have finally decided [not to return]. I have realised that even if you had agreed to everything I had demanded in that note, that still would not compensate me for the dreary existence that Worcester has to offer me … I honestly don’t think I can spend another six months of my life in such a stagnant place.’
This general dissatisfaction was compounded by Imran’s distaste for a specific ordeal he faced at Worcester, where, to a man, from the club chairman down to the lowliest programme vendor they addressed him as ‘Immy’. It was no more than the standard dressing-room lingo, which turned D’Oliveira into ‘Dolly’, Pridgeon into ‘Pridgey’, Inchmore into ‘Inchy’ (though Hemsley remained Hemsley), and so on. Although he never seems to have openly complained about it, Imran ‘absolutely loathed’ the practice, which apparently struck him as patronising. One of his local girlfriends remarked that by the time he left Worcestershire, it had become a ‘fixation’ for him and ‘definitely poisoned the atmosphere [with the club]’. He had pronounced the offending name as if he was ‘smelling a dead fish’. Early in their own relationship, she had noticed that Imran seldom gave up on that sort of grudge. ‘Once he took a dislike to someone or something, you could absolutely never get him back again.’
For their part, some at Worcestershire believed that Imran had effectively used the club as a sort of paid finishing school. According to this theory, he had joined the county as a promising but erratic young seamer and, thanks to men like Henry Horton, left again as a devastatingly hostile ‘quick’ of international class. This was perhaps to downplay the role the bowler himself played in the transformation. In the same vein, certain of the county membership remained stubbornly convinced that they had subsidised Imran’s education at Worcester Royal Grammar School, whereas in fact the fees were paid in full by his father. (The members might have been on firmer ground had they raised the matter of the help given him in areas such as his work permit and TCCB registration.) There were equally persistent and unfounded rumours that he had been poached by another team with the promise of higher wages. As the whole dispute became noticeably more bitter in the autumn of 1976, a senior member of the Worcester committee summoned Imran and put it to him that he was leaving ‘because there aren’t enough girls in this town for you to roger’. This same general thesis was aired in the local press, and was eventually widely reproduced in Pakistan.
The opinions of most Pakistani news organisations are not noted for nuance, so the varying fortunes of their Test side tended to get the most graphic possible treatment. ‘WORLD BEATERS!’ the Karachi Star had insisted following a short, unofficial tour to Sri Lanka in January 1976 in which Imran participated. Taken as a whole, the media believed the appointment of Mushtaq Mohammad as national captain to be a major turning-point in the history of Pakistan cricket. ‘We have seen some heated exchange of words between the Board and several of the players,’ the main Lahore morning paper conceded. ‘But those days are over. We can go to the extent of predicting our men will remain successful, peaceful and united for many decades to come.’
It lasted about nine months. Once back in Pakistan, Imran promptly joined his fellow members of the Test squad in protesting their rates of pay, which currently stood at 1,000 rupees (or £50) a man for each five-day match — substantially better than their 1971 levels, but still leaving them firmly at the foot of international cricket’s financial league table. All hell again broke loose in the press. One imaginative and much-quoted report in Lahore insisted that the dispute was really about the players’ hotel and travel arrangements, and that the entire squad would take strike action were their ‘nine-point list of perks’ not met in full. Had a request for a chauffeur-driven limousine apiece made it a round 10, there could no
t have been more public outrage. The whole matter came to a head in the middle of the three-Test series against New Zealand in October 1976, when the Pakistan team wrote to the board to confirm that they would down tools unless their grievances were at least taken under consideration. The board responded in kind, with a telegram stating that anyone who didn’t immediately accept the existing terms would be banned from Test cricket for life. Five of the team promptly dropped their demands. The remaining six, including Imran, were in negotiation with the board until 90 minutes before the start of play in the second Test, which Pakistan won by 10 wickets.
Not untypically, there appears to have been some misunderstanding between the two sides about the exact terms of the deal that had been thrashed out to allow the match to go forward. Imran recalls that the board chairman Abdul Kardar had ‘admitted our demands were not that unreasonable’ and ‘agreed to a full dialogue’. A fortnight later, Kardar was quoted in the press calling the players ‘unpatriotic bandits’. The board’s subsequent threat to ban the so-called rebels from the winter tours of Australia and the West Indies made headlines even in England, where a ‘distraught’ Mushtaq Mohammad suggested that he would resign from the captaincy. At that stage the Pakistan head of state, Fazal Chaudhry, intervened. The board’s selection committee (though not Kardar himself) were sacked, eventually to be replaced by a government-appointed sports authority, and the players were each awarded 5,000 rupees (£250) a Test, sufficient to ensure that the winter’s itinerary went ahead as scheduled.
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