For their part, the England team were similarly indignant that the three ‘Packerstanis’, as the media dubbed them, might now be parachuted back into the national Test side. In the build-up to the match the tourists had issued a press release saying that they were ‘unanimously opposed in principle to players contracted to World Series Cricket being considered for selection for International Cricket Conference Test matches’. The statement was read by Mike Brearley, the captain. It was his final act before flying home — Brearley’s left arm had been broken in a zonal match against Sind, and he handed the responsibility of leading England to Geoff Boycott, a man of many sterling qualities but not, perhaps, particularly well versed in the diplomatic niceties. With characteristic bluntness, the Yorkshireman had already aired his own views on Packer’s English and Pakistani recruits, whom he branded as ‘disloyal traitors’. In short order, the authorities at Lord’s sent a telegram warning their counterparts in Karachi of a ‘potential boycott’ (the pun, we can safely assume, was unintentional) of the forthcoming Test. Thirty-six hours before play was scheduled to begin on the morning of 18 January, Pakistan named a squad of 24 players. As he read the ‘interminable’ team sheet, Zaheer remembers ‘only hop[ing] that sports editors had space to print the full list’. All two dozen candidates appeared at Pakistan’s pre-Test net session, where, Imran reports, ‘For the first time in my life I wanted a cricket field to open up and swallow me. All the officials and some of the players made [me] feel distinctly unwanted.’
Imran and his two colleagues were then called in front of the Pakistan selectors and told that they could play in the Test if they publicly denounced Kerry Packer. Imran declined the offer, but took the opportunity to ask the panel on whose authority Omar Kureishi had issued his invitation for the three men to return. Kureishi had ‘no standing’ in the matter, he was told. At that Imran, Mushtaq and Zaheer caught the next flight back to Australia, leaving the official Test team to eke out another draw with England; the visitors eventually took ten hours to score 266, during the latter stages of which the crowd pelted the outfield with oranges. General Zia was on hand somewhat incongruously to present commemorative medals to both sets of players at the finish. By flying to Karachi and back Imran had missed out on the chance to play in a WSC Supertest, for which his match fee would have been Aus $5,000. It remains a matter of debate whether or not the England tourists actually threatened to pull out had the Packer trio been reinstated, but, if so, the home board seem to have needed little further persuasion in the matter. As play got under way at Karachi, Mohammad Hussain and his colleagues issued a statement announcing that ‘the BCCP has decided to depend on the talent that is available today and will be available in the future. [We] have therefore elected to restrict our choice to those players who will be available at all times to serve cricket, owing loyalty to the established authority and not to the highest bidder.’*
Exactly a week later, Imran appeared for a WSC World XI against the West Indians in a day-night game played in front of a full house at Melbourne. Packer himself flew back from a meeting in New York to watch the match. I was told by Asif Iqbal, ‘Uncle Kerry bustled in to the dressing-room with a huge grin — he’d just counted the receipts — and announced, “I’m looking forward to this one, boys. What a pity the West Indies will walk it.” I seem to remember him offering odds of 100–1 against us and several of the guys, myself included, taking him up on his generosity.’ The West Indies scored 238 in their 40 overs, which the World XI passed with five wickets and an over to spare. In an epic of sustained hitting, Asif made 113 and Imran added 65 not out. The picture of a beaming ‘Uncle Kerry’ (who paid up in ‘crisp bills’, Asif recalls) with his arms around the two players ran on the morning’s front pages, and did as much as anything else to put WSC on the map. Two days later, Packer called a press conference in the bar of his favourite golf club for which he appeared dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tight-fitting red shirt adorned by an ‘I love Imran’ badge. He accused the ‘MCC establishment’ at Lord’s of hiring a public relations agency and of always wanting to get their names in the papers. ‘Honestly, I’m past all that,’ he said as the motor-drives whirred. ‘All I care about is the cricket.’
Although enough major changes took place in Imran’s career around 1977–78 to make his head spin, his success on the field was a constant. He emerged from the Packer affair an infinitely better player than when he went into it. As a fast bowler, he now commanded all the variations. Although Imran clearly remained partial to the short stuff — as Ashley Mallett, the Australian tail-ender who ducked into one of his bouncers and spent a week in hospital, could testify — he was always more than a mere ‘enforcer’, whose sole job was to put the wind up the batsman. No less a judge than the former England captain Len Hutton told me that by May 1978 the ‘smooth Asian lad’ was already as good as any bowler he had ever seen. Although Lindwall and Miller had been ‘a handful’, and Frank Tyson probably had the edge over even them in terms of pace, none of them possessed Imran’s all-round ability with the ball allied to his ‘fanatical self-discipline’. Hutton made his remarks as he and I watched the ‘Asian lad’ jog repeatedly around the outfield during a rain delay in an otherwise forgettable early-season match at Hove. For whatever reason, none of his new county colleagues joined him.
* Even 35 years later, Boycott could still vividly recall the ball with which Imran bowled him. ‘It was bloody good,’ he told me cheerfully, high praise coming from that particular source.
* To cap a generally wretched occasion, Intikhab had somehow forgotten Imran’s name when the time came to introduce him to the Queen on her annual visit to the ground. After a lengthy pause, Her Majesty had shaken his hand nonetheless, and moved on.
* This may be an understandable and minor lapse of memory on Imran’s part after an interval of more than 30 years. The last possible weekday train from Oxford to Leeds in 1975 would have left at around 9 p.m. and taken four hours or so to reach its destination. Even allowing for the vagaries of a typical British Rail journey of the time, a 4 a.m. arrival would seem to be a stretch — but one can accept Imran’s point that he was ‘totally knackered’ throughout most of that fateful week.
* Even in the spring of 1976, Imran seemed able to restrain his enthusiasm for returning to live in the UK. ‘Have just received your letter,’ he wrote to the Worcestershire club on 26 March. ‘I didn’t realise that the first match is going to start on 24 April — and hence the need to return earlier than the 20th. Unfortunately Majid and Myself have booked tickets to come via the Far East — USA — London route — and this means that I cannot arrive soon[er] … But please don’t worry. I am at the peak of my fitness.’
* The TCCB also called for a concurrent 12-month ‘qualification period’, which was standard practice when a player moved from one county to another, although there were exceptions to the rule — such as Ray Illingworth’s transfer from Yorkshire to Leicestershire, and Mike Denness’s from Kent to Essex.
* Imran also benefited as a bowler by being able to study the best in the world at close quarters. Dennis Lillee and Mike Procter were both ‘significant’ in helping convert the previously somewhat random run-up of anything between 10 and 15 stuttering paces into the well-oiled long jumper’s gallop it became. It’s mildly curious that Imran became a more fluent bowler in part by studying Procter, who, as the latter cheerfully admits, ‘flung it down off the wrong foot’.
* In 2008, Mike Brearley recalled, ‘While I was in hospital in London, there was the mother of all [rows] in Pakistan. I was getting phone calls and press visits asking for my comments, and I was also in touch with the MCC. I was less heated than the rest of the team about the issue, not least because I knew that I and others were in the side largely because of the absence of our own WSC players, and felt that there were personal reasons involved as well as principled ones. After all, we had played our Packer men in the previous series against Australia. Whether or not it was the result of the England t
eam’s threats that Pakistan didn’t play Imran in that Test, I don’t know.’
FOUR
‘War Without the Nukes’
Considering the time and effort that went into his move there, Imran had mixed initial impressions of Sussex. The feeling seems to have been mutual. Several former county players echo the all-rounder Neil Lenham, who broke into the side some years later and who told me that Imran had been ‘a good team man in his way’, but one who, whether pounding round the ground on his solitary jogs or disappearing promptly at the close of play, ‘essentially did his own thing’. A second team-mate ‘always saw Imran as slightly intimidating, for some reason. In those days he was strictly a “Yep” or “Nope” kind of guy, and that kept you off balance.’ To another colleague he seemed ‘basically aloof, very sure of himself, and very careful to keep people from getting too close to him’. The Sussex and England batsman Paul Parker adds that there was ‘a definite mystique’ to the ‘narrow-eyed, unshaven Immy’ who — again — had ‘more than a hint of Clint Eastwood’.
For his part, Imran, though enjoying the spirit at Sussex as a whole, had doubts about the newly appointed county captain Arnold Long, 37, whom he describes as an ‘extremely affable man [who] was completely unsuitable for the job. Long was too inflexible and hated taking risks of any type … His basic philosophy of the game was to make sure the team didn’t lose, hence missing out on a lot of opportunities where with a little risk we might have won.’ To compound Imran’s frustration, his friend and mentor John Snow had been sacked by the county, and his eventual replacement, the hyper-aggressive South African bowler Garth le Roux, had only limited first-class opportunities in 1978. In their absence, Imran was obliged to share the new ball with the former Surrey and England warhorse Geoff Arnold, who at 34 was clearly nearing the end of an illustrious career. On the batting front, Javed Miandad was away playing for Pakistan for much of the season, Tony Greig, suffering from epilepsy and a variety of other problems, emigrated to Australia, the versatile Keppler Wessels was doing military service and the Sri Lankan-born opener Gehan Mendis perhaps under-performed with an average of only 29. For all these reasons, Sussex finished a below-par ninth in the county championship, one place down from their 1977 position.
Rather more serious than mere playing disappointments was the ‘institutionalised racism’ Imran apparently encountered at ‘varying levels of British society’, if not, it should be stressed, at his new county. As mentioned, there were some harsh words from the crowd when he returned to Worcester for his first few matches there after leaving the club. In other cases, it may be harder to say where normal boorish behaviour ended and out-and-out racism began. One of the Sussex team told me of an occasion when, during a crowded rail journey to London, Imran got up and offered his seat to a black woman who would otherwise have had to stand. ‘It was a typically chivalrous gesture, but one Immy apparently saw in a racial light. To him the reason no one else gave up their seat was “colour prejudice”, while to me it was just a normal scene in a rush-hour train.’ Always thin-skinned, and perhaps over-alert to the least sign of what he called ‘colonial condescension’, Imran tended to interpret many of the everyday knocks of British life as motivated by racial bigotry. In 1978, he writes in his autobiography, ‘I attended a meeting of the Cricketers Association to hear sixty per cent of those present vote that English cricket would be better off without overseas players. I was amazed at their attitude, and haven’t been to another meeting since.’ Imran chose to ignore the Association’s argument that a strong case could be made for limiting the number of foreign-born players purely on cricketing grounds. Comparable quotas existed in other walks of professional life and indeed in other countries, including his own. Similarly, Imran was reportedly ‘unimpressed’, or worse, by the part played by the TCCB and their distinguished secretary Donald Carr in the recent Karachi Test fiasco. If so, it may be relevant that this was the same Donald Carr who 22 years earlier had been captain of MCC in their ill-fated match at Peshawar, still a source of keen debate in Pakistan. Imran certainly encountered his share of heavy-handed treatment over the years, but it’s arguable that he was over-sensitive to what he considered racial abuse.
Sussex began their season with four consecutive and eminently forgettable draws in which Imran did more with the bat than the ball. Their fifth match was against Gloucestershire at Hove. Gloucester batted first and made 129; Sussex replied with 424–7, with Imran, profitably exploring the aeriel route over extra cover, scoring 167 at a run a minute. Thirty-one years later, one of the fielding side still remembered the subtle efforts of the bowlers not to catch their captain’s eye and become the next victim. The 22-year-old Paul Parker, a fluent stroke-maker in his own right, was batting at the other end for the early part of Imran’s innings. Sussex added 83 runs in the hour before tea: seven extras, nine to Parker, and 67 to Imran.
Gloucestershire came out to bat a second time. Zaheer immediately hit Imran for a four. As Paul Parker recalls, ‘The Sussex lads were geeing Imran up. We all told him he never bounced Zaheer or any of the other Pakistani players. As motivation goes, it was crude but effective. The next over, Immy ostentatiously added a couple of yards to his run and came in like a freight train. The bare-headed Zaheer just managed to get a touch of his glove on the ball a split-second before it crashed into his forehead and ballooned up for a catch to gully. Ten of the Sussex players immediately appealed. The eleventh, Imran, rushed up to enquire about the batsman’s health. “Zaheer, my friend, are you all right?” we heard. “Speak to me. Zaheer … Zaheer …”’ Zaheer gave Imran a ‘baleful look’, but otherwise showed no after-effects of being hit on the skull by a 145 kph (90 mph) bouncer. He was given not out by the umpire, and went on to score 213. Sussex were left needing 87 to win in 20 overs, on a worn pitch. They finished on 84 for eight, which was about as good an advertisement for county cricket (and for the use of the crash helmet) as you can get.
It would be fair to say that Imran was an enigma to most of his team-mates, and perhaps consciously set out to be. He was inclined to oracular judgements and, as Parker recalls, tended to be ‘friendly but cryptic’ if asked for his advice by a younger player. One of his junior Sussex colleagues remembers ‘getting up the nerve to ask Imran some technical point about in-swing bowling, to which the standard coach’s reply would have been all about the correct grip on the ball and the exact angle of the left elbow at the point of delivery. Imran’s four-word response was: “Be like a tiger.”’
Ironically, Imran himself was curiously diffident when it came to his batting, which improved beyond all recognition in 1978. Immediately after the Gloucestershire match he scored 105 not out against Somerset, followed by 49 against Andy Roberts’s Hampshire, 113 not out against Nottinghamshire, 65 against Surrey, 53 against Middlesex, and more in the same general vein. Most if not all these innings displayed not only technical skill, but coolness of judgement, a proper degree of aggression and the requisite ‘bottle’ against fast bowling; he was someone who could take it as well as give it. At the end of the season Imran had 1,339 first-class runs at an average of 42, which was to rub shoulders with the likes of Botham, Gooch and Gower. Not surprisingly, he was awarded his county cap. Yet, as Paul Parker recalls, ‘Immy was strangely modest about his batting prowess. I remember David Steele, of all unprepossessing people, bowling for Derbyshire against us at Eastbourne. After studying Steele’s innocuous little left-arm floaters for the best part of an hour, Imran approached the batsman at the other end, Paul Phillipson, and said a bit apologetically, “You know, I think perhaps I can hit this bloke.” Phillipson’s reply was “Get on with it.”’
While Imran was settling in with Sussex, the Pakistani Test team minus its Packer players was touring England. The visitors were crushed in the three-match series, which saw the beginning of the Botham legend, and did little better against the counties. At times Imran found himself playing only a few miles away from where his sometime colleagues were going down to their la
test defeat. The ensuing sense of ‘debasement, discredit and disarray’, to quote Wasim Raja’s assessment of the tour, would have far-reaching ramifications for Pakistan’s cricket administrators. Having deposed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup, General Zia assumed the state presidency in September 1978. On his third day in office he dismissed Mohammad Hussain and his co-selectors and formed a new board under Lieutenant-General Azhar Khan, a former military governor. Khan was given orders to bring back Pakistan’s WSC players at any cost, even if this meant doing business with Kerry Packer, a man General Zia described as ‘a prostitute’.
Imran Khan Page 14