West Indies won the second Test, at Faisalabad. A discreet veil can perhaps be drawn over the specifics: the spinners took all 20 wickets for Pakistan, and Imran’s chief contribution was to drop Viv Richards at long off when he was on 5 — a costly error. Predictably, Pakistan’s first defeat on home soil in 11 years was not well received by the local community. Several thousand fans stayed behind after lunch on the final day to express their misgivings about Javed’s team. A number of those who had celebrated ‘the fulfilment of our aspiration [and] pride’ in the triumphant series against India now tore up posters of the players, burned them in effigy, and attempted to set fire to the team bus. This may be one of the occasions Imran had in mind when he later told the Sunday Times that he had come to trust his own judgement, not that of the crowd. ‘Once, when I went out to bat, I was cheered all the way. I was out without scoring a run. They were shouting at me again, but this time they were telling me I was useless … How can you let yourself be defined by views that change so quickly? If I took notice of what most people said, I’d never achieve anything.’
Javed’s decision to bat first on a wet wicket in the Karachi Test was subsequently the subject of some lively dressing-room discussion; Pakistan were soon 14 for four, with Zaheer hors de combat after being struck on the helmet, producing an echo like that of a gong, by a Croft bouncer. In another keenly debated move, Pakistan had elected to go into the Test with only one fast bowler: Imran. He responded with four for 66 in the West Indies’ only innings, sufficient to ensure a draw. The fourth and final Test, at Multan, had the same result. The match was delayed on the first morning by the late arrival of an umpire and on the second afternoon by Clarke’s action in throwing a brick into the crowd. Play was suspended for 45 minutes by the ensuing riot. Imran took five for 62 in the West Indies’ first innings. Unlike the opposition, he wasn’t afraid to keep the ball up to the bat, even when Viv Richards was in full cry. Richards later paid fulsome tribute to ‘the Great Khan’s’ arsenal of ‘subtlety, accuracy and searing pace, [and to] his ability to regularly get reverse swing with the old ball’. He was the ‘complete player’, even if one Caribbean newspaper was to remark archly of Imran the fielder that he sometimes ‘appear[ed] to be moving with his bootlaces tied together’.
Most if not every series in which Pakistan were involved seemed to result in a debate over the umpiring. This one was no exception. The West Indies had reportedly thought their opponents ‘rather shrill’ in their appealing, which Wisden later characterised as ‘almost a case of affray … The Pakistan way of approaching the umpires en masse, and the filthy language that was used, caused great concern.’ A long-serving home official, Khalid Aziz, took the opportunity to tell the press that on several occasions he felt himself to have been ‘pressurised’ to bend the rules. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of Aziz’s Test match colleagues made broadly the same claim, adding that his health had suffered as a result. He was on ‘pills’ and could ‘hardly sleep a wink for worry’; perhaps not surprisingly, there had been some ‘shocking’ decisions in the Tests. Rather than specifically defend their own officials, Imran and his colleagues instead pointed out that some of the umpires elsewhere in the world were just as bad. By 1981, the Pakistan board had taken up the cause of appointing two ‘neutrals’ for every Test, a campaign Imran vocally championed right through to his retirement.
For the time being, Javed Miandad remained Pakistan’s captain and gave every indication he was in charge. His public persona proved a fair substitute for the Imperial authority of earlier years. Each match day he carried out a routine in which he was driven from his hotel suite to the ground, where a respectful crowd of spectators and journalists gathered to watch him put his men through their paces in the nets. Anyone incurring Javed’s displeasure was subject to a stinging reprimand, as Zaheer, among several others, could attest. The captain’s own form was steady if not spectacular, as shown by a Test average of 32 against the West Indies. For all that, there was growing pressure from the board both to reverse the recent downward trend in the team’s fortunes, and to do so with ‘the grace befitting our sporting culture’. Pakistan were to fall somewhat short of these ideals in their coming tour of Australia, which culminated in a players’ revolt. ‘Soon,’ Imran recalls, ‘there was much speculation about who was going to be the next captain. Matters became rather complicated when Javed and Zaheer both made it known that they would not play under each other.’ At that, word came down from the highest level of government for the board to appoint a figure of ‘national stature’.
* In November 1998, Imran told a commission looking into allegations of impropriety in Pakistani cricket of a curious (though perhaps entirely innocent) event prior to the Bombay Test, ‘when our captain Asif Iqbal told his Indian rival that he [Gavaskar] had won the toss without looking at the coin’. As a result, India elected to bat first, thus depriving Imran of another day’s rest for his pulled muscle. As noted, Pakistan lost the Test.
FIVE
The Downhill Struggle
In 1981, just as Imran was being manoeuvred into Pakistan’s most coveted job, not excluding that of the state presidency, he came close to being sacked by Sussex. The problem was nothing to do with his on-field performance. What seems to have concerned the club was their star player’s relaxed approach to certain contractual details, or more specifically what his newly appointed county captain calls his ‘flexible timekeeping’. At the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, a broader cultural factor may have been at work alongside any personal idiosyncracy. As often noted, there tends to be less emphasis in Pakistan than elsewhere in the world on a strict adherence to the conventions impinging on the individual’s total freedom of movement, and a disdain for most forms of centralised authority. Anyway, Imran appeared two days late for the start of the new English season. Sussex fined him £400 and issued a very public ‘firm reprimand’. He says that he came close to leaving the club as a result, whether by mutual consent or at his own insistence, and spent 48 hours alone in his flat brooding on the matter. One well-positioned source with a vivid command of simile says that it was all down to Imran’s ‘chronic disorganisation, and the club’s heavy-handed reaction to it … He was invariably 30 minutes late wherever he was supposed to be … When he made appointments his hotel room became a bottleneck — it was like a Mexican brothel, so one gathers, with people queuing up outside his door for hours. I don’t mean that it was in any way a knocking shop, just that there were constantly mobs hanging around.’ Nor can a touch of vanity be completely discounted. In his first autobiography, Imran writes that ‘Sussex said that the rules applied to all the players, but to me that seemed ridiculous … The club felt that I was just the same as anybody else on the books, but cricket is not like that. We should never be categorised in the same way, because one player’s value is different from another … The club treated me like a schoolboy. It hurt my pride.’*
Imran’s vocal displeasure may have been fuelled by the relative severity of the fine, which resulted in some hardship — £400 was a significant slice of his basic annual salary, which in 1981 rose to £5,450. (For purposes of comparison, the Survey of Hours and Earnings puts the average pay for a male ‘unskilled or minimally skilled’ manual labourer in the UK of the day at £5,800 p.a., rising to £6,340 in London and the South-East; as Kerry Packer remarked, most county pros were in the game ‘strictly for sandwich money’.) On a point of principle, Imran declined a lucrative offer early that summer from Dr Ali Bacher, the former Springbok Test captain and future administrator, to play a season’s cricket in South Africa. There was some initial confusion when Bacher referred to the sum involved as ‘the sort of money Paul Newman makes’. The only Paul Newman with whom Imran was personally acquainted was the young Derbyshire all-rounder of that name, who would have been earning even less than he was. After the error had been discovered, it transpired that Bacher had had in mind a figure close to £20,000 for three months’ cricket, which would have been ‘irre
sistible’ in other political circumstances.
Later that season, a mutual Indian friend introduced Imran to an entrepreneurial English designer and budding sports marketeer named Jonathan Mermagen. Imran told Mermagen that he was seeking to ‘significantly enhance’ his income by taking commercial or sponsorship work. By now the need to support an increasingly vibrant London social life placed additional strain on an already precariously balanced budget. But Mermagen was able to offer only limited immediate prospects. ‘Most firms at the time wanted to do business with an Ian Botham or some other specifically English player,’ he told me, ‘and even then the sums on hand weren’t astronomic — £10,000 for a Weetabix ad was considered good going.’ Imran, who seems to have had a clear-headed understanding of market realities, then met an expatriate Pakistani businessman named Naeem-ul-Haque, who headed the London branch of the Oriental Credit Bank. He, too, was unable to offer much in the way of a personal financial lifeline. ‘While I was happy to be Imran’s bank manager, it was all pretty basic stuff. The sad fact is that he was being paid peanuts.’
Within this particular limitation, Imran was to have a comparatively happy and successful fifth season at Sussex. The county had the best championship run in their history by playing purposeful, attacking cricket, with Johnny Barclay, in his first year as captain, positive and challenging in his attitude, and open to the occasional whimsical declaration in pursuit of victory. At 28, Imran was now at the senior end of the playing staff. In the group photographs taken each April, he’d edged ever nearer the centre chair, and at one point had been in contention for Barclay’s job. He remained one of the less naturally effusive members of the team. Imran’s usual practice both at Sussex and elsewhere was to offer advice, like a constitutional monarch, only when asked. ‘He was a less warm guy than, say, le Roux,’ one of the players adds. ‘You wouldn’t call him a barrel of laughs. But he could still gently take the piss out of everybody, including himself. [A colleague] once went nuts in the dressing-room after a match we lost and informed Imran that he was a fucking bouffant-haired ponce. Punch-ups have broken out for less. And Imran looked up and said, “Well put, sir. Spot on. Let me shake your hand.”’
Imran’s policy with women wasn’t all that different from that with men whom he wanted to charm: he flattered them, listened to them, teased them and generally threw in some self-deprecating wit. Added to his looks, intellect and ‘Oxford urbanity’, as Today put it, it was a potent formula. His impressive train of girlfriends came to a temporary halt in 1981 when he met the 16-year-old Reynu Malla, a Nepali princess. Although apparently serious, the relationship ultimately foundered in the face of determined opposition by Reynu’s mother. Where the likes of Marshall, Garner and Croft had failed, Mrs Malla had successfully ‘intimidated’ Imran, according to a close friend. ‘He basically retreats into himself with anyone he doesn’t know well. I often told him he was brilliant, unique — he wasn’t pained by such suggestions — but also that he could perhaps make breaking the ice with people less obviously an effort.’
Umpires aside, the one issue inextricably linked to Pakistan cricket over the next decade was that of ball tampering. Imran was first to hear the mutterings about so-called ‘anomalies’ during the 1982 tour of England, when at least one newspaper took the opportunity to display a diagram of ‘balls identical to those used in the Test’, with arrows helpfully locating ‘the seam’ and ‘shiny side’. Following another muckraking headline which managed to conflate a technically flawed analysis of seam bowling with the broader innuendo that ‘the Pakis’ were bad sports, a group of tabloid journalists and TV reporters with cameras in tow had taken up position behind the Lord’s pavilion in order to await Imran’s appearance at the close of play. He came out and went straight past them, causing one member of the posse to write accusingly of him ‘wearing a blazer and flared slacks, calmly sauntering off towards his girlfriend, seemingly unconcerned about the claims against his team’. But the implied attack on his integrity had cut deeply, and Imran would find himself regularly challenged on the subject of ball abuse right through to 1996, when it became an issue in the libel case brought against him in the High Court.
Reverse swing, tampering’s entirely legitimate and much envied distant cousin, also came to public view in 1981, when the TCCB introduced a new standardised ball for use in first-class cricket. The ball’s thicker seam acted as a rudder for fast bowlers who, under the right conditions, now began to make certain deliveries apparently defy the laws of physics by sliding through the air in either direction, with no apparent change in the bowling grip. As a further (again legitimate) aid to the process, one side of the ball would generally be allowed to roughen with use and the other would be vigorously polished with sweat from the bowler’s brow, or perhaps other agents. The theory and in some cases the practice was that the ball would then swerve towards the shiny side. A potent visual symbol of reverse swing was the hapless batsman who, having spectacularly misread the flight and declined to play a shot, was left surveying the total ruin of his wicket. As we’ve seen, Imran was among the first to master the art, and in particular the extravagantly curving ‘banana ball’ that was to bring him a rich harvest of wickets in 1981 and beyond. He told me that he’d first successfully applied the technique in the Melbourne Test of January 1977, when ‘towards the middle of the match the pitch had gotten so hard it began to take lumps out of the ball, which then behaved like a boomerang’. Seeming to illustrate the point, Imran returned figures of none for 115 in the Australian first innings and five for 122 in the second. This was sometimes the only way to make the ball swing on the arid pitches in Pakistan, he added, ‘where even club bowlers knew how to do it’. In later years, Imran became perhaps understandably tetchy when his critics continued to speak of reverse swing ‘as if it were some kind of black magic’, whereas ‘really all you need are dry wickets and the right degree of skill’.
After paying his fine and settling his differences with his county committee, Imran had no further complaints about the 1981 season. By early August, while England were playing out their unforgettable series with Australia, the championship had come down to a race to the post between Sussex and Nottinghamshire. Once again, the festive Eastbourne ground, flag-strewn and filled to capacity, was the setting for a game of extraordinary fluctuations and drama when the home side took on Derbyshire. To quote Wisden’s account of the match, ‘In a thrilling climax, Imran, who had earlier in the day taken four wickets in five balls, hit a swashbuckling unbeaten 107 to take Sussex to victory with five balls to spare. He hit three sixes and eleven fours, reaching his 50 in only 36 minutes, and his century in 88 minutes as Sussex chased a tough target of 234 in just under two-and-a-half hours.’
Wisden being a chronicle, this was certainly a fair and balanced statistical summary of the proceedings, but it hardly begins to do justice to what happened. The sides were effectively level on first innings. An untypical local heatwave appeared to sap the energy from the match, and both sets of batsmen were offered only cut-price bowling, which they treated with exaggerated respect. A draw seemed inevitable when, shortly after lunch on the third day, Derbyshire stood at 226 for five in their second innings. Seemingly desirous only to serve the batsman, Geoff Arnold and Colin Wells were wheeling away to David Steele, who by then had accumulated 59 in a shade over three hours. Johnny Barclay remembers that at this point ‘Imran tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I can stand it no longer. Let me have a bowl.” I said it was all right by me as otherwise we were all going to fall asleep, and at that Imran ran off and an over later ran back on again, having changed from his trainers into his boots.’ There was a brief conference among the fielding side. As a result Imran took over from Arnold, and the immediate rise in pace was calculable in dozens of miles per hour. Derby lost their last five wickets for one run, with Imran returning figures of four for one. As Barclay adds, ‘Perhaps still high on adrenalin, he then asked to be promoted in our batting order, and under the circumstances I
was happy to oblige.’ Imran went in at No. 4 and promptly erupted, smashing 45 off five overs before Derbyshire called for drinks, including a huge pull for six off Oldham which cleared the crowd and disappeared in the direction of the Town Clock, and then finished the job with two minutes to spare. I was there, and the general impression was as if a tornado had appeared out of a clear sky and touched down in the Sussex countryside, which in a way it had.
Imran’s colleague Paul Parker adds one perhaps salient detail to what happened that sunny Friday afternoon. Whether or not it detracts from an extraordinary all-round performance is for others to say. Parker told me that, after running back on the field before his devastating final bowling spell, ‘Imran said to me, “Watch this”, whereupon he took a bottle-top from his pocket and roughed up one side of the ball a little bit.’ If true, Imran’s initiative might seem to contravene the spirit of Law 42.5, which states that ‘No one shall rub the ball on the ground or use any artificial substance or take any other action to alter the condition of the ball.’ It’s worth mentioning here only because the match in question took place a fortnight or so before Sussex played Hampshire in a late-season championship fixture. Of the latter game, Imran would famously tell his biographer Ivo Tennant, ‘I have [sometimes] scratched the side and lifted the seam. Only once did I use an object. When we were playing Hampshire, the ball was not deviating at all. I got the twelfth man to bring on a bottle top and it started to move around a lot.’ One or both of the players’ memories may be playing tricks on them, but it does seem as though they are talking about two separate incidents. Without condoning them, it’s perhaps these isolated lapses which make Imran engaging; at almost all other times he was the embodiment of cricket’s elaborate rules of gallantry and fair play, a man whom the umpire Dickie Bird calls ‘the most honourable player’ he ever saw.
Imran Khan Page 19