Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Meanwhile, Pakistan had overrun the New Zealanders, with Imran taking a respectable 14 wickets (including his best Test analysis to date, four for 59, at Hyderabad) over the three matches. It possibly says something for the Pathan revenge ethic that, years later, he was to speak of his particular satisfaction at dismissing Glenn Turner, ‘who had said that I didn’t have it in me to become a fast bowler’. Although onesided, the series wasn’t entirely free of incident. Early in the proceedings, Imran had occasion to speak to the umpire in Urdu to ask him to stand back from the stumps, whereupon the non-striking batsman had requested that he confine himself to English when addressing the match officials. Some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives had followed. In the third Test at Karachi, Imran was prohibited from completing his over against Richard Hadlee and temporarily removed from the bowling attack by another umpire, Shakoor Rana, who felt he had been over-generous in his use of the bouncer.

  Six weeks later the Pakistanis arrived in Australia to find that the home press didn’t much fancy their chances there. ‘COBBLERS!’ was the initial assessment of the West Australian, while the Herald Sun restricted itself to the only marginally more charitable ‘PAK IT IN!’ Dennis Lillee took the opportunity of his own newspaper column to remark that, though Pakistan had a few talented batsmen, their bowling attack (with Imran himself dismissed as ‘a trundler’) was rubbish. The first Test at Adelaide seemed to confirm the generally low opinion of the tourists. Australia got the better of a high-scoring draw, even though they lost their nerve when chasing a relatively modest 285 to win on the last day. The Melbourne Test, played over the New Year, followed a broadly similar pattern, at least up to the half-way point. Australia’s Greg Chappell won the toss and batted. A day and a half later he was able to declare on 517 for eight, Imran having been ‘tonked around’, to again quote the Herald Sun, with figures of none for 115 off 22 overs. Pakistan, who had seemed to be cruising at 241 for one, were then dismissed for 333.

  Under the circumstances, and now faced by a vocally derisive 60,000-strong crowd, certain other bowlers might have quietly given up the fight. But that was rarely to be an option that appealed to Imran. In the next two sessions he took five Australian wickets, including that of Dennis Lillee, whom he clean bowled. According to those who saw it (and Lillee himself, who didn’t) it was very possibly the fastest ball ever sent down at the Melbourne ground. Richie Benaud told me that, on the basis of this performance, which proved to be in a losing cause, ‘I promptly chalked Imran up as extremely interesting.’ In Benaud’s measured technical opinion, ‘he was [quite] determined, and had markedly increased his pace and improved his balance in delivery’. Cricket, of course, is played as much with the brain as it is with the body. Here, too, Imran was quite well fixed. That same week, he had happened to meet his old sparring partner Geoff Boycott, who was spending the winter playing for an Australian club side rather than with England in India and Sri Lanka. Boycott remembers that he took Imran aside and advised him to bowl ‘really quick’, preferably aiming ‘about four inches outside off stump’ in short, controlled bursts to make the most of the conditions. The Pakistan tour management seemed to concur. Seven days after leaving Melbourne, Imran went on to take six for 102 and six for 63 in the course of the third and final Test at Sydney, which the tourists won by eight wickets. It was their first such victory in Australia, and only their fifth anywhere overseas, and a major turning-point both for the team and for the ‘Orient Express’, as the Herald Sun now hurriedly renamed him. Some of the hyperbole might have been a touch overdone, but after this match there was no longer any question that Imran was a fast bowler to be reckoned with. Both the Australian and, more particularly, Pakistani press were highly complimentary. When the reader wasn’t swept along by the lively similes — ‘like a rampant stallion’, ‘like a blistering typhoon’, ‘like a runaway truck’ and so on — there was the statistical evidence to back the imagery up: in just three innings, Imran had taken 17 Australian wickets at slightly over 16 apiece. His departure from the field at Sydney, his shirt sleeve ripped off his arm from all the effort, had brought the house down; as he led his team into the pavilion, spectators of all ages pummelled the railings of the lower terraces, and jaded critics broke into wide grins up in the press box. The next minute saw a steady crescendo in the sort of rowdy whoops and high-pitched acclaim normally associated with a major rock star. Geoff Boycott was in the home dressing-room. ‘Even the Aussie players were standing up applauding,’ he recalls. ‘They thought it was bloody fantastic.’

  Imran was 24, and he was famous.

  Back in England, Imran’s representatives were engaged in an as yet quiet but ugly spat with the Worcestershire committee, his decision to quit the club seemingly only hardened by his triumphs of the past 12 months. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that there were no obvious personal confrontations before that. But by late 1976 Imran was clearly impatient to move on. In retrospect, Mike Vockins believes that it was ‘inevitable … the real reason for his departure was to be somewhere nearer London, and the party life that went with that’. Seeming to confirm this thesis, Imran’s friend and occasional landlord, the journalist Qamar Ahmed, told me that it wasn’t about ‘cricket as such … he left to have a more exciting life and to enjoy the bright lights’. Worcester must have seemed even more dreary a prospect to Imran after his having tasted international fame, although the same problem never seems to have applied to Basil D’Oliveira, the best-known sportsman in the world for a time in 1968–69 following his controversial omission from an England tour of South Africa on allegedly racial grounds. ‘I love it here,’ D’Oliveira once told me as we enjoyed the hospitality of an after-hours club in central Worcester. ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.’

  In his own quiet way, Imran now measured himself against the modern giants: Lloyd, Richards, the Chappell brothers and Lillee. Though he didn’t bluster about ‘climbing in the ring’ with Larwood and Voce in the way Fred Trueman occasionally had, he aspired to belong in their company; as Asif Iqbal recalls, he was ‘always going to do more than the rest of us’. Some of the same self-assurance was evident in Imran’s handling of the protracted judicial wranglings with Worcestershire. By all accounts, the county appears to have initially accepted the inevitable with some good grace. Dropping the club a note on a souvenir postcard while on an overseas tour, Imran wrote, ‘I am sorry to inform you that I really do want to leave … I genuinely feel guilty I’m letting [people] down, but I am afraid I have also to think whether I am happy living in a place I don’t like. Moreover I was treated pretty poorly by the club as regards my accommodation.’ ‘I was distressed to read the contents of your note,’ Mike Vockins wrote back, urging him only to ‘keep an open mind’ and ‘achieve a truly objective decision’. On 1 January 1977, the day he was to tear out the heart of the Australian batting at Melbourne, Imran was formally released from his contract and thus able to negotiate with other counties. He chose Sussex, on account of his friendship with Tony Greig as well as the club’s relative proximity to London. To his evident displeasure, Worcestershire then objected to the move, claiming to have a ‘proprietary interest’, to quote the subsequent legalese, in a player they might reasonably have felt they had discovered in the first place. Their creative solution to ‘Mr Khan’s withdrawal of labour’, as the lawyers put it, was for him to serve a suspension for the entire 1977 season, after which he would be free to play for whomever he chose.* Later that winter the parties met before the TCCB registration committee at Lord’s, where Worcestershire’s barrister cross-examined Imran over the course of two ‘intense’ sessions about his ‘capricious’ motives for leaving the county. The judicial process as a whole had been ‘almost like [a] criminal trial,’ he later complained. At the end of the hearing, the TCCB formally found Imran’s case ‘not proven’ and agreed to suspend his registration until January 1978. The curt, one-paragraph ruling made reference to ‘the player hav[ing] put forward reasons … deriving solely [from] his
own personal enjoyment and social convenience to reside away from Worcestershire’. To the men in the committee room, this was ‘not grounds for his [immediate] registration with Sussex’, nor was it ‘in the best interests of competitive County Cricket as a whole’.

  At that stage Imran and Sussex appealed to the 25-man Cricket Council, the sport’s ultimate governing authority in the British Isles, and a body hardly less august than the medieval Star Chamber. In due course there was another all-day hearing at Lord’s before the Council’s independent tribunal, accompanied by an epistolary scrap between the various lawyers over who exactly would pay the estimated £7,000 bill for the two proceedings. The event was umpired by Oliver Popplewell, QC, aged 50, a distinguished Cambridge University and Free Foresters wicketkeeper in his day and more recently Recorder of the Crown Court. Each side arrived for the encounter with a full complement of barristers, solicitors and expert witnesses. Among those appearing for the appelate was the former Sussex and England captain Ted Dexter, who told me:

  I didn’t know Imran. But I got a call from Tony Greig seeking my help in securing a ‘free’ transfer to Sussex. Next thing I found myself speaking in a panelled room at Lord’s along these lines: ‘Imran is a very unhappy young man. He has been unable to make friends. His natural habitat is the London area and though he would prefer to move to Middlesex, Sussex is willing to ensure his access to old haunts and a reconnection with old acquaintances, male or female …’ It’s the only time in my life that I have knowingly committed perjury. I still get a cold shiver when I think back to the quizzical looks that came my way that day at Lord’s. Just as well it was not a court of law or I might have spent time inside at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

  After only ten minutes’ deliberation, the tribunal found for Imran, whose ‘special registration’ for Sussex would be completed on 30 July 1977. In his ruling Mr Justice Popplewell noted: ‘We are impressed by the argument that Khan’s unhappiness was a genuine one, and that there was no evidence of financial motivation in his movement … The strict application of the requirement of 12 months prior residence [in Sussex] can be mitigated.’

  It was not a universally popular decision. On 26 May, Worcestershire formally wrote to the TCCB secretary, Donald Carr (of Idrees Beg fame), to express their ‘very considerable misgivings over the procedural arrangements adopted for the Appeal’. Carr volleyed back on 29 May that the matter was ‘closed’. There was talk of some county pros refusing to play against the ‘disloyal’ Pakistani, who further earned the censure of the Cricketers Association for ‘hasten[ing] the onset of a football-style transfer system’. Reading the correspondence now, one is struck by the quaint sense of outrage at the notion that a professional athlete should feel free to take his services wherever he chose. ‘Cricket and its relationship between authority and players has suffered a grievous blow,’ the Association’s Jack Bannister thundered on 25 May. Bannister subsequently revealed that acting in his professional capacity he had ‘contacted the 17 county sides with the question, “In your dressing-room, is there a totally unanimous view either for or against the decision allowing Imran Khan to play in August?”’ The results showed nine sides ‘totally opposed’ and four sides ‘largely opposed’ to Imran, with only two in favour and one neutral. Curiously enough, according to Bannister ‘No reply [had] yet been received from Sussex, for whom John Spencer says that the players want more time to consider the matter.’

  In the end, the boycott never materialised. Bannister and the other parties dropped their protest. Imran was, however, subjected to some choice abuse on his later visits to play Worcestershire. Of this Mike Vockins says, ‘I was so incensed with the crowd on more than one occasion that I felt minded to get on the PA and insist that spectators show the normal sporting courtesies, before swiftly recognising that this would just have goaded further those who behaved in that unacceptable way.’ In time Vockins himself inherited Imran’s locker in the Worcester dressing-room ‘along with some abandoned cricket gear which was in pretty dire straits. “Festering” would just about sum it up. The boys believed that on occasion, rather than getting kit laundered he rang the sponsors for a new lot and threw the old stuff in the locker.’ Despite this rather dubious personal legacy, Vockins, an eminently fair-minded man who went on to take holy orders, has ‘delightful’ memories of Imran, a view broadly shared by the current Worcestershire regime 30 years after the acrimonious events at Lord’s.

  In between dressing up in a dark suit and tie to go into the witness box, Imran had continued his scintillating run of form on Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies. The first Test at Bridgetown featured some notably robust bowling from the home team’s Roberts, Garner and Croft. But even they appeared sluggish in comparison with the ‘Orient Express’, who announced himself with three consecutive bouncers to the opener Gordon Greenidge. The former England wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans told me that he had watched this blitz while standing immediately in front of the pavilion with a ‘strangely silent’ Sir Garry Sobers. While Godders himself had characteristically cheered and whistled in appreciation, his illustrious companion had merely followed proceedings with narrowed eyes. When the third ball in rapid succession ‘nearly decapitated’ the batsman, Sobers finally spoke: ‘Bit brisk, this chap.’ The words were uttered with a thin smile and seemed to Evans to be a sort of ‘royal warrant’ coming from the man who was arguably cricket’s greatest ever all-rounder. That Test was drawn, and the West Indies won the second, at Trinidad, by six wickets. Imran reports that he had lost his temper and ‘bowled appallingly’ after being attacked (something of a role reversal) by Greenidge and Roy Fredericks in the latter match. There was then another draw at Georgetown.

  Following this, Imran’s tour, hitherto only intermittently dazzling, took much the same upward trajectory as it had at a comparable stage in Australia. Reviewing his performance in the series as a whole, one Jamaican paper wrote, in an only slight case of overstatement, that ‘his fame soared like a rocket and hung high over Caribbean skies for weeks’. In more prosaic terms, in the fourth Test at Trinidad Imran took four for 64 off 21 of the most hostile overs imaginable in the West Indies’ first innings. There was a moment in mid-afternoon when, with the ball flying round the batsmen’s heads and some in the crowd calling their disapproval, the atmosphere threatened to grow ‘iffy’, to again quote Evans. But Imran and Pakistan had stuck to it, eventually winning by 266 runs. The West Indies then generally did Pakistan for pace at Kingston, to take the series 2–1. Imran took six for 90 in the first innings and two for 78 in the second, as well as contributing much-needed runs in the lower middle order. Short of staying behind to sweep up the pavilion, it was hard to see what more he could have done. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s specialist batsmen failed to similarly rise to the occasion. Set 442 to win, they were soon 51 for four. At that stage, in a show of less than total confidence in the outcome, the tour management saw fit to change the date of the team’s return flight to Pakistan from Wednesday, the last scheduled day of play, to Tuesday; an admission of ‘a general lack of resolve’, Imran notes ruefully.

  In the five Tests Imran took 25 wickets at 31.60 apiece. He’d clearly taken his time to find his form early in the tour, as great players frequently do in unfamiliar conditions; only mediocrity being always at its best. Generally speaking, the series confirmed that Pakistan for all their occasional frailties deserved their place at cricket’s top table. It also did no harm at all to Imran’s reputation. ‘I want to be known as a good bowler … My ambition is to dominate … What I’m always after is penetration,’ he’d once remarked. Within a few short months his textbook technique, iron will and unshakable self-confidence had convinced even the most sceptical that his targets were well within his scope.

  His fame was already secure in Pakistan, where satellite technology had allowed huge numbers to watch their team’s two winter tours. As a result, cricket soon reached the plateau occupied only by soccer or rock music in Britain. This was the era in which the j
ournalist Fareshteh Aslam refers to Imran as a combined Superman and Spiderman, ‘this exotic-looking guy doing battle on our behalf’. Mobs now followed him about, and Imran, who a year earlier had been known to stop and chat with fans at his local Lahore milk bar, learnt to hurry out of the players’ entrances of cricket grounds around the world and make his way to safety through side streets and roped-off alleyways.

  As it happened, there was something of a precedent for this level of intense adulation of a Pakistani cricketer. A hard-hitting batsman named ‘Merry Max’ Maqsood had played for his country 16 times in the 1950s, while enjoying a particularly active social life. Equally famous for his strokeplay on and off the cricket field, he had soon acquired a substantial cult following. At the end of the 1954 tour of England, Merry Max had stayed behind to take a local bride. Since he was allegedly already married the news initially caused something of a splash in Pakistan, though even the Star eventually held this to be a ‘largely private matter’ between him and the lawful Mrs Maqsood. No such restraint greeted the news of Imran’s various affairs 30 years later, for which the press deployed their full, 24-point size headlines. He was the first tabloid superstar of Asian sport.

  On a bitingly cold morning in late May 1977, a shaggy-haired, tanned young man wearing a silk shirt splayed open to display a gold medallion walked through the gate of the municipal cricket ground on Pavilion Lane in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His arrival was noted by a solitary reporter, who saw the man nod to one or two friends, then sit down in one of a sea of empty seats, essentially unrecognised by those few duffle-coated spectators in attendance. The reporter was intrigued to learn the man’s identity. It was an ‘almost comically mild-mannered’ Imran, already one of the world’s most famous sportsmen, who would spend the early part of the season playing a variety of modest Yorkshire league and club matches while waiting to qualify for Sussex. He seems to have enjoyed the substantially less formal atmosphere of rural northern grounds and all the familiar icons associated with the lower reaches of English cricket: deckchairs, long grass, tiny plastic cups of volcanic tea and a sparse but surprisingly loyal fan base. Imran took the opportunity to put in place some final refinements to his bowling action, running in closer to the stumps and occasionally going round the wicket in order to stand up straighter at the moment of delivery. By the end of his first season in Sussex, he reports, he felt ‘more confident of putting the ball where I wanted it’.