Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Despite or perhaps because of missing several early matches, and seeing others lost to rain, Imran was consistently able to operate at full steam that season, and often to pitch the ball fearsomely short. He came down on Hampshire, in early July, like a wolf on the fold. Imran hit the visitors’ attack for a run-a-minute 114, including a six and 16 fours, then ran in to bowl with 45 minutes left on the first evening. Hampshire were soon 8 for one, which brought the young Mark Nicholas to the crease. He was to tell me that the memory of what followed was still quite vivid.

  Christ, it was horrific. Imran bowled up the hill, Garth le Roux came down it. I had a little school thigh pad and was wearing a helmet for the first time. I was so far out of my depth it was a joke. The umpire, Barry Meyer, muttered to me to get down to Garth’s end, which was marginally safer, he felt. I didn’t manage it for long. Next over, I was back facing Imran. The first ball whistled past my visor at startling pace. The next ball thundered into my gloves and the third caught the thinnest edge of the bat as I tried to avoid it. I often tell people that I shouted ‘Catch it!’ I turned and watched what seemed to be a slow-motion image of the dark red ball hurtling to the wicketkeeper’s right side miles back. That put an end to my misery.

  By this stage in the season, Arnold Long seems to have actively reconsidered his policy of playing Imran only in every other match. Sussex went straight from demolishing Hampshire to an away fixture with Glamorgan. Imran took four for 25 and four for 8 in the two Glamorgan innings, between which he hit their attack for 124 in slightly over 90 minutes. As a result, everyone went home a day early. For all that, Imran remained oddly diffident about his batting, or at least showed an exaggerated respect to certain bowlers, as again seen by Paul Parker. ‘I remember him being deeply apprehensive in the dressing-room at the prospect of facing Pat Pocock, and another occasion when he and Bomber Wells were batting at Hove against Lancashire. “Flat” Jack Simmons was bowling at something less than warp speed, and Imran seemed positively mesmerised. He looked as though he’d never held a bat in his hands before in his life. He could sometimes do that against the spinners. Eventually Bomber hit Simmons for a four, and Imran promptly called a mid-pitch conference. “That was a fantastic shot,” he said, with genuine awe in his voice. “How did you do it?” Bomber muttered something about using his feet, and Imran nodded as though this was a revolutionary new breakthrough. Next over he walked down the wicket and hit Simmons for six.’

  Two months after their ill-tempered encounter at Lord’s, Sussex and Middlesex met again at Hove in the semi-final of the Gillette Cup. Some residual warmth seems to have tainted Imran’s performance. Mike Selvey remembers ‘sitting upstairs in the Hove watching area as Imran bounced Wayne Daniel, who was our No. 10. From 80 yards away, I and the rest of the full house distinctly heard the Sussex keeper shout “You cunt!” before the ball had reached his gloves. Wayne, not a man to rile easily, was hopping mad and subsequently took six for 15.’ Sussex lost the match.

  There’s something almost autistic about English cricket lovers, or at least the ones who faithfully attend county matches, wrapped up against the elements, as was the case throughout 1980, thermos in one hand and a pile of reference books in the other. I should know, as I spent much of that alleged summer huddled at various Sussex grounds obsessing over the players’ statistics, most of which I knew better than my own family’s birthdays. So before leaving the season, a final memory of Imran coming in to bowl against Nottinghamshire at the Saffrons, Eastbourne, on a typically dank morning in early August. On a pitch which offered a hint of swing but little perceptible bounce, even Nottingham’s Clive Rice was to struggle to get the ball to rise knee-high. As the session progressed, one or two of his deliveries gave up the attempt and merely trickled through to the wicketkeeper, allowing for some good-natured satirical comment from the crowd about the wicket’s resemblance to a ‘rice pudding’. When Sussex came to bowl, the now 36-year-old Geoff Arnold, something of a past master of the conditions, went for roughly four runs an over. At the other end, meanwhile, Imran snapped into action with a full-service performance that was generous in its use of the late inswinger and hardly less restrained in the toe-crushing yorker and bouncer departments. He troubled all the Notts batsmen, the first four of whom were current Test players, scythed through the middle order, and wasn’t afraid to slip in a seemingly innocuous slower one to account for the tail-enders, most of whom had edged in the direction of square leg by the time he came to release the ball. At the end of the session, Imran’s figures were 13.3–5–11–5. Sussex took a first-innings lead of 156, and were ultimately denied only by a combination of Rice’s second-innings century and the rain.

  For the second successive season, Sussex were fourth in the county table; Imran took 54 first-class wickets at an average of 17.90, which was to bracket him with the distinguished quartet of Marshall, Procter, Hadlee and Lillee. He was again the leading all-rounder in English domestic cricket. But while there were few bowlers anywhere in the world to compare with Imran at his breeziest, he was always about rather more than raw power. There was also a functioning intellect. One of the Sussex players told me admiringly that Imran had been ‘almost obsessive’ in following the local weather forecast, and had often waited patiently for the Hove sea breeze to blow, ‘at which point he would come steaming in at a hundred miles an hour, before just as suddenly slipping back a gear into a highly effective containment mode’. Such was his control, and his craftsmanship, that few batsmen played him with any sort of comfort even in the most lifeless conditions. In the last county match of the season against Gloucestershire in another mudbath at Hove, Imran bowled 25 first innings overs of brisk pace, with all the variations, and frequently made the ball pass disconcertingly close to the batsman’s head. With any support from his fielders he would have returned better figures than his three for 71.

  Imran’s efforts for Sussex appealed not only to the cricket tragics who followed their team around to every match. They also attracted a much broader audience. It was noticed that, starting from the 1978 season, the percentage of female spectators at grounds where he happened to be playing rose beyond all previous recognition — one unscientific estimate is that there was an average of 700–800 young women at most such fixtures, and that ‘they were there for only one reason’. Partly as a result, the Sussex chief executive, Roy Stevens, reported that the club’s once ‘crippling’ overdraft would be paid off in the near future. In time various glossy magazines like Vogue, not previously known for their cricket coverage, sent correspondents to watch Imran in action. Such phrases as ‘Bowls a maiden over … Makes a nice catch … Beautiful hair … Thighs … Sultry … Imran is sex’ duly went around like stops on the Circle Line. But the appeal was even more ecumenical than that. A then freshly elected MP named John Major remembers Imran as an ‘inspirational figure’. To Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath respectively, he was ‘an adornment’ and a ‘role model’, while one now middle-aged and eminently respectable female former Labour cabinet minister adds that there were ‘few sportsmen capable of making an entrance with quite such a flourish. When I saw him, Imran ran on the field in a pair of tight white trousers, shirt unbuttoned, vigorously clapping his hands above his head. He seemed to be applauding the crowd, and of course we applauded him back.’ As an exotic, Anglicised cricketer, perhaps Imran’s only peer was Kumar Ranjitsinhji, later the Maharajah Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, who played with such distinction for Sussex and England at the turn of the 20th century. The swashbuckling ‘Ranji’ received the level of adulation then normally reserved for stars of the music hall. When he stepped out of a carriage or alighted from a train, reporters crowded round him, and there were impromptu press conferences at curbside and station — ‘this was a man’, The Times wrote, ‘more famous in the great salons of London than any statesman’. Some 70 years later, much the same could be said of Imran.

  Writing in his magisterial history of Test cricket in Pakistan, the journalist Omar Noman would say
of the Khan phenomenon, ‘His wider appeal was based on a lethal combination — sexuality and power … The truth or the exaggerations didn’t really matter; what was arresting was the marriage between sex, wealth and power. Some of the most glamorous women in the world seemed to be captivated by him.’

  After the setback of losing to India, Pakistan soon continued their rapid ascent of Test cricket’s unofficial league table. That was not, however, to preclude some lively internal debate. Imran, for one, was ‘never totally convinced’ by Javed’s captaincy skills, and seems not to have been alone in his doubts. Wasim Raja referred to Javed as a ‘precociously gifted batsman who was impatient with others who didn’t come up to his expectations’ — mild compared to the remarks of one former player who described his captain, in his no doubt jaundiced opinion, as a ‘talented shit’.

  As the Test team’s most consistently successful player, Imran could and did command a respect among his colleagues that Javed himself could only feebly approximate. Wasim Raja likened the situation to one of those ‘feudal regimes with a boy king [nominally] in charge while the first minister actually calls the shots’. By all accounts Imran’s influence extended to everything from cricket technicalities down to certain of his team-mates’ individual style choices. For example, he advised Abdul Qadir to affect a ‘pointed French-style beard’ on the grounds that it would help to unsettle the opposing batsmen, and had the advantage that ‘it works with the women, too’. And, certainly, that bowler’s ducal glare back down the wicket was a significant part of his armoury over the years. For the next 18 months or so, Imran increasingly came to be seen as a spokesman for senior players such as Majid and Zaheer in airing their views about Javed and the board. Below these men were various newcomers to the Test side, some of doubtful worth and others of real craft and enterprise. Taken as a whole, Pakistan would soon come to rival the West Indies as the pre-eminent team of the 1980s.

  At the turn of the year, a side of young MCC players made a visit to the Middle East. In Dubai they came up against a combined IndoPakistan team including Imran. Notwithstanding his baptism of fire some five months earlier, Mark Nicholas recalls that ‘I somehow got a few runs this time … Imran was delightful, encouraging me to make the most of my talent and telling people I could play a bit. He was the most generous of opponents in that way. Not what you’d expect.’ Imran’s hostility might be professionally unnerving, but he had a sense of duty to promising young opposition players. A second tourist broadly concurs with Nicholas, adding that ‘this seemingly aloof Pakistani’ was only too ready to offer technical advice and coaching if approached by a suitably deferential junior. ‘See Imran about it’ became a by-word on the tour, he reports. ‘In just about twenty minutes in the nets, he taught me more than the official management team, who were more concerned about what sort of blazer we wear at dinner.’

  A small and touching example of Imran’s celebrity status in Pakistan came later that winter when his father took him to inspect the harvest on the family farm in the rolling hills of Mian Channu, some 240 kilometres (150 miles) west of Lahore. This was not exactly a hotbed of pop culture, and most local inhabitants came by their knowledge of the outside world only from what they read in the weekly six-page newspaper. ‘My father insisted that we ate at a crowded restaurant near the rest-house where we were spending the night,’ Imran says. ‘Next morning we were woken up by a panic-stricken chowkidar who insisted that unless I came out the front door would be broken down. When I did so, I found that there were thousands of people waiting outside. My father was genuinely bewildered.’

  Some of the same general passion, as expressed by players and spectators alike, went into the always exuberant, frequently disputatious, albeit not invariably distinguished world of Pakistani domestic cricket. By common consent, the prevailing atmosphere was competitive bordering on the pugnacious. In particular, the sporting reputation of the Quaid-e-Azam trophy, the local equivalent of the county championship, was an unenviable one. As Zaheer Abbas remarks, many of the fixtures went ahead against a background of ‘chair-fights, stone-throwing and ugly skirmishes with the police’. Relations between the players tended to be brittle, and displays of truculence were a way of life. The level of strife varied, but many of the encounters bore little relation to a game of cricket in the traditional sense of the phrase. Disparaging references to an opponent’s immediate family remained a popular playing tactic. Sometimes satire gave way to more explicit observations on an individual’s regional or ethnic origins. Many Pakistani umpires came to look on a degree of verbal or other abuse as an occupational hazard. I was told of one particularly heated exchange taking place in the 1980–81 season in which a player had ultimately seen fit to menace one of the match officials with his bat. After cooler heads intervened, there was a subsequent attempt to make amends during the tea interval. The umpire did not immediately accept the batsman’s apology, and the two men ended up rolling around on the pavilion floor, discussing the matter. The incident could have just been ‘one of those things’, as the umpire himself later chalked it up, part of a ‘regrettable failure of understanding, [a] mutual loss in perspective’ engendered by the heat of the battle. This was to show commendable generosity on his part, although, with the best will in the world, it’s hard to imagine quite the same level of animation being seen at, say, the Saffrons, Eastbourne. Wasim Raja offered still another explanation, years later, that may have been closest to the mark. The batsman in question, he opined, was, like all too many of his colleagues, ‘a jackass’.

  Imran made another of his comparatively rare appearances in the Quaid-e-Azam that winter, prior to the arrival of the West Indians for a four-Test tour. Appearing for PIA early in October in a three-day match against the House Building Finance Corporation, he took three for 31 and three for 20 in what was officially described as a ‘decorous’ contest. A fortnight later, PIA were involved in a perhaps more typically spirited affair against Muslim Commercial Bank (MCB) at the Bakhtiari Youth Centre, Karachi. PIA enjoyed a first-innings lead of 125. Imran bowled just four overs in MCB’s second innings, during which the bounce of the ball is reported to have grown ‘increasingly low and devious’, though with the odd lifter that, by contrast, ‘shot vertically towards the chin’. After one such delivery the opening batsman Anwar-ul-Haq retired hurt for the remainder of the proceedings. The next morning the MCB team declined to leave their dressing-room, although the umpires declared the wicket to be fit. PIA won by default. Needing to take their last two games they could manage only a draw against Habib Bank, and finished as league runners-up. Curiously, just three weeks later the same MCB team conceded another match, at Lahore, on the grounds that nine of their players were injured and unable to field.

  Fresh from their successful tour of England, the West Indies reached Pakistan later in November. If the visitors’ batting was solid, it was for its bowling — not always a thing of beauty, but rich in intent — that Clive Lloyd’s side was most remembered. Once Michael Holding was injured, the attack consisted of four men, Marshall, Garner, Croft and Clarke, who between them claimed 54 out of the 65 wickets which fell in the Test matches. One can only wonder what they might have done on pitches which actually helped them. By contrast, Imran toiled in virtual isolation; as he says, ‘For much of the series I was bowling with a spinner at the other end, which, apart from anything else, doesn’t give you a lot of time to recuperate between overs. [I] was exhausted.’

  The first Test, at Lahore, was a rain-affected draw. The ignominy of an early home defeat had loomed on the first afternoon when Pakistan collapsed to 95 for five, which brought Imran to the wicket. It could fairly be said that he rose to the challenge. Such was his temperament for the situation that he not only scored 123, his maiden Test century, but put it in a personal context by completing his international double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in the process. Every report of the match makes much of the fact that these landmarks occurred on Imran’s birthday. One Pakistani journalist wrote, w
ith perhaps a touch of hyperbole, that this was ‘only befitting the nation’s greatest sportsman, and perhaps her greatest citizen’. General Zia was to send a telegram noting the ‘happy coincidence’ of the date, something Imran himself seemed to endorse when he later wrote, ‘I recorded my first Test century on the day I turned 28.’ Under the circumstances it seems almost a churlish technicality to mention again that he was actually born on 5 October, and had thus celebrated his birthday some seven weeks earlier, in the less rarefied atmosphere of a pre-match practice session for PIA held at the Gymkhana Ground, Karachi.