Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  The championship was effectively decided on the evening of 18 August, when Imran and Garth le Roux took the second new ball against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge. Needing 251 to win, the home side were 215–9, with their somewhat rotund last-wicket pair of Eddie Hemmings and Mike Bore — ‘Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee’ in one unkind but popular local chant — at the crease. Imran tore in to bowl and Hemmings, raising his bat, extended the pad. There appeared to be some mid-wicket exchange of pleasantries between batsman and bowler. Imran let fly again and Hemmings met him with a forward stroke of irreproachable correctness. A bouncer followed. Hemmings squatted underneath it. It became almost a pas de deux, with Imran consistently aggressive, straight and fast and the tubby tail-ender relentlessly defending. Nottinghamshire survived for the draw. The 16 points of which they deprived Sussex were 14 more than eventually separated the two teams in the table.

  A week later Sussex beat Hampshire by eight wickets at Bournemouth. Imran took four for 50 in the first innings and then showed his all-round ability with a century in two hours. His batting average for the season was over 40. Garry Sobers was visiting England and thought Imran ‘good enough to go in at three or four for any team in the world. In fact I asked him why a batsman as fast on his feet as he was felt it necessary to wear a helmet. He replied that cricket was his living, and he wanted to live long enough to enjoy it.’ Imran contented himself with a cameo of 37 in the next fixture against Middlesex, while returning match figures of ten for 93.*

  Nottinghamshire finally clinched the title by a whisker from Sussex, who were in the process of beating Yorkshire at Hove when confirmation came over the loudspeaker that they were officially runners-up. It was the county’s best finish in the championship in 117 years, and would remain so for another two decades. A season which had begun with Imran sulking in his flat ended in an uninhibited display of irresponsibility, happiness and mass inebriation (though he himself stuck to milk). After seeing off Yorkshire, the entire Sussex squad stayed behind for a party, at the climax of which, led by their two overseas fast bowlers, they stripped off and streaked round the Hove ground. A resident of the adjoining block of flats named Beryl Kenworthy subsequently sent the county a note about the incident. Mrs Kenworthy, who was 83, told the club secretary that it was a sight that would ‘long linger in the memory’.

  Starting just five weeks later, Pakistan’s tour of Australia was an altogether less congenial experience. The actual cricket was bad enough. To quote Imran, ‘On paper a 2–1 defeat was adequate, [but] our solitary victory was on a slow, low Melbourne track reminiscent of conditions back home … The sad truth [is] that the tour magnified our decline.’ In the first Test Imran took four for 66 to help dismiss Australia on a good Perth wicket, but was then party to not so much a batting collapse as a full-scale implosion. As he says, ‘Our first wicket fell as I was taking off one of my boots; our second went as the other one was pulled off and four wickets were down by the time I’d taken off my damp clothes. My batting boots were swiftly found and I walked out with the score 21 for five.’ Not surprisingly, Pakistan lost that match, and went down in similar fashion in the Brisbane Test, where Greg Chappell hit a double century. The tourists’ consolation win at Melbourne was a case of too little, too late. It says something for his colleagues’ generally lacklustre performance that Imran, with 16 Test wickets at roughly 20 apiece and a batting average of 27, was named Pakistan’s man of the series.

  This being Australia, the cricket engendered strong emotions that more than once spilled over into what the tour manager’s report called ‘uncouth and unacceptable’ conduct. Perth saw the infamous clash between Javed and Dennis Lillee. Although they varied when it came to the fine detail, both parties agreed on the basic facts of the saga. Javed, who was batting at the time to an accompanying chant of ‘KILL, KILL, LILL-EE!’, set off for a quick run and collided with the bowler, who then aimed a kick at him. This was the signal for each player to offer to knock the other’s teeth out. Lillee’s subsequent apology to the Pakistan dressing-room was not unanimously accepted. Meanwhile, Javed also found time to fall out with his vice-captain Zaheer, who at one point was close to leaving the tour. According to a first-hand source, the two men had ‘gone mental’ and ‘hurled abuse around’ in the course of a public difference of opinion in the Melbourne pavilion. Imran successfully kept the peace on that occasion, but later added that he didn’t much care for Javed’s captaincy as a whole. ‘It was like a nightmare,’ he notes. ‘Throughout the tour, Javed was complaining that he hadn’t been given the team he wanted, but then why did he accept it?’ The always fickle Pakistani media now again decided that their cricketers were a national disgrace. After the tour was over, the board issued a statement blaming their team’s failure in Australia on ‘a sorry lack of cooperation’ between the senior players and their captain. Ten of the players promptly issued their own statement, in which they declined to play any further Tests under Javed’s leadership.*

  Javed confesses that he felt ‘something amiss’ even before reading the players’ views, several of the team having refused to speak to him (always a potentially ominous sign) during a training session held at the Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore, in February 1982. The following week, the Sri Lankans appeared for a brief tour of Pakistan. One of the visitors says that a senior Pakistani opponent had greeted him by asking, ‘Are you here for the death-watch?’ Later that same night Imran and his nine colleagues publicly confirmed that, while ‘patriotic professional cricketers’, they were not necessarily committed to the current regime, and would thus withdraw their labour. (Two of the signatories, Iqbal Qasim and Wasim Raja, later returned to the side after being pressurised by National Bank, their domestic employers, to reconsider their position.) The board backed their captain, with the result that Pakistan appeared for the first Test at Karachi with a somewhat unfamiliar look to their team. Four players made their international debut, and others like Haroon Rashid were recalled some time after their representative days had seemed to be over. In due course Ijaz Butt, the chairman of selectors, resigned as a protest against what he reportedly called the ‘degradation’ of his nation’s cricket. Even with a second-string side, Pakistan won the first Test and drew the second, albeit helped by a number of hotly disputed umpiring decisions.

  Not for the first time, Pakistan’s cricket management seemed to be directionless, and no one immediately came forward to seize the wheel. As one Karachi news outlet complained, it had become ‘quite impossible’ to find anyone to explain exactly what was going on behind the scenes. In Javed’s version, the air had begun to go out of the rebels’ balloon as early as the end of the first Test, ‘when I received word that Imran was very keen to return to the team and have a bowl at the Sri Lankans. However, the organisers of the revolt [put] immense pressure on him to stay put.’ Another theory is that the board became alarmed by the prospect of their having to send a weakened team to England later that spring, particularly in the light of what had happened under similar circumstances in 1978. Imran himself recalls that ‘there was a very real threat of crowd disturbances’ should Pakistan have taken the field for the third Test at Lahore without their senior men. ‘I think the tipping-point was reached then,’ Wasim Raja told me, ‘when people began throwing rocks at the committee room windows.’ Shortly afterwards all parties were to announce a somewhat strained compromise: Javed would lead the side at Lahore, but resign the captaincy immediately following the match. As a result, the eight dissenters now found that they could play under him after all, if only for one last Test.

  Javed won the toss at Lahore and decided to field. Imran had one of his more notable Tests, returning match figures of 14 for 116. Despite the loss of a day to rain, Pakistan won by an innings.

  Imran’s capacity to keep the different sides of his life ‘oddly separate’ from one another was something that struck at least one of his young team-mates at Hove. ‘He’d turn up for pre-season training, and I’d say, “How was your winter?” He
’d say, “Boring.” I’ve just spent six months reading about brawls in Australia, and players’ revolts and riots and God knows what, while I’m living at my Nan’s house in Worthing. And to Imran it just wasn’t worth mentioning. No one, nothing, impressed him that deeply.’

  Quite apart from his more exotic off-season life, there was a widely held view among his Sussex colleagues, and one or two others on the county circuit, that Imran was ‘different’; as one player told me, that there was a ‘day-time Khan’ and a ‘night-time Khan’. The former was an unrelenting, resourceful, somewhat austere and utterly dedicated professional who could be relied on to give his all for the side. The latter was the gregarious, Oxford-educated smoothie who tended to go directly from the cricket ground to the latest scene. Somerset’s Nigel Popplewell had occasion to see both Imrans at work. ‘I’d go and stay with Sussex’s Ian Greig, who I’d been chummy with at Cambridge, and Imran was often there. He was extremely courteous, and along with Greiggy and le Roux, always great company. Fun guys. But you could forget about getting any bowling concessions out of them simply because you bought them a beer the previous night. Ian Gould, when keeping for Sussex, had a ruse to fire up Imran and Garth. He would stand a couple of yards closer to the bowler who was bowling more quickly so that he took the ball above his head, or at least on the rise. He’d then shout to the other one who he thought wasn’t bending his back enough, trying to get them to hit the gloves just as hard. The result was a blitzkrieg.’ When Popplewell came in to bat in Somerset’s first game of the new season, against Sussex at Taunton, he found five men around him with hands outstretched, as if expecting him to faint. His friend Imran promptly bowled him a bouncer and his university chum Greig held the catch.

  Another Cambridge man, Alastair Hignell, was part of a Gloucestershire side that came up against Imran that month. In Procter’s absence, the Gloucester attack looked ‘grotesquely thin’ when confronted by the world’s leading all-rounder at full sail. Sometimes the only way to get him out was by boring him. ‘Imran belted a four or two and was starting to look dangerous,’ Hignell says. ‘Anything could happen. After a hurried conference, we hatched a plan in the belief that he’d be so insulted by Phil Bainbridge’s (very much) slower ball that he would want to hit it for six over square leg. The catch was that deep square was the longest boundary, and we reckoned that if we could get a fielder into that area without Imran noticing, he might just hole out. Accordingly at the changeover before each of his overs, Phil would mutter to me which delivery was going to be held back and, as he was running in for that ball, I would, as unobtrusively as possible, back-peddle to the boundary …’ The plan seems not to have worked, because in that particular innings, Imran was caught Stovold, bowled Shepherd, having hit 31 in a shade over 20 minutes. At the close of play he sauntered into the Gloucester dressing-room, thanked them for a fair fight, raised a glass of milk and then apparently slipped off alone for a quiet night in at his flat.

  Some time later, Air Marshal Nur Khan, the urbane if, to his critics, somewhat feckless PIA president and chairman of the home authority, rang to offer Imran the captaincy of Pakistan. Despite pressure from General Zia, the board’s decision hadn’t been easily reached. ‘Imran’s name was suggested but many people were opposed to him,’ the Air Marshal revealed. ‘Some felt his performance would suffer while others thought he was too irresponsible. His playboy image didn’t help.’ In fact, until recently Imran’s only backer of any importance had been the Pakistani team doctor, who was his cousin. A number of the senior players envied his widespread name recognition but thought his star quality would quickly fade in the heat of a Test campaign. For his part, Imran, too, had certain misgivings about the post. The general consensus in May 1982 was that the Pakistan side, though talented, were close to unmanageable; also, that the honour of captaincy tended to come with compensating personal drawbacks, as had apparently been the case in Ian Botham’s unhappy term in charge of England in 1980–1.

  Imran thought about it for two days, and then decided to accept the board’s offer. He made it clear to them that he would expect complete freedom of action and a ‘full voice’ in selecting the team. Over 11 years, his progress through the ranks hadn’t been easy. Alternately fawned on and knocked by the press, at the forefront of two players’ revolts and tainted by World Series Cricket, he rose to the top through hard work, undisguised pride and an utter unwillingness to mince words. His principal conviction was that ‘I knew I could do a better job than [Javed on] our dreadful tour of Australia’, when the team had sometimes seemed to be competing against themselves more than the Aussies. Among the first to call Imran on his appointment was Zaheer Abbas, who ‘didn’t hide his disappointment’ at again being passed over.

  Zaheer was also not alone in having reservations about his new captain, whose only other first-class leadership experience had been at Oxford University. (Not necessarily impressive credentials, for a whole variety of reasons, to some of his more aggressively populist colleagues.) Only in retrospect does the appointment appear to have been a stroke of genius. At the time many people wondered what would happen to the already fissile Pakistan team now that the tough-talking, libidinous Pathan was in charge. Since around 1976, a consensus had formed about Imran that wasn’t always that complimentary. He was, as one close friend allows, ‘opinionated’. Compared with Javed and his other predecessors and successors, Imran was an anomaly in arguably the most insecure office in Test cricket: a fiercely proud but personally unaffected man who, when teased by a colleague that he would rather be right than captain, replied, ‘I’d rather be anything than captain.’ On top of that he was intelligent, gruff and kissed up to no one, including the home board. On the face of it, this would not necessarily seem to be the man to ‘heal our national wounds’, as General Zia put it a touch floridly.

  As noted earlier, Pakistan had done well in the 1978–79 series by beating India twice in three Tests. It should have been the beginning of a process that created a united team of strong minds and a clear sense of self-worth — both as individuals and as a unit. Instead the side had gone on to be losers in four series and winners in two, with one drawn. It was hard work and they stuck to it well enough, but there was rarely that all-important sense of authority from the top. This was perhaps the great failing of Mushtaq Mohammad. A supremely affable man and an Anglophile, he had become an increasingly defensive captain who tended to treat Test matches as though they were all part of the county championship. As Imran says, ‘Mushtaq would use the phraseology of English team captains about “pitching the ball up and let [ting] it do the work”, even when this was courting disaster.’ It was part of a larger mindset that had seen successive Pakistan touring sides be almost absurdly deferential, both on and off the field, to their British hosts. Under Imran, the first order of business was to slay the inner Mushtaq and ‘impress on the world that we were as good as anyone’.

  The defining characteristic of Javed’s tenure had been not so much excessive modesty as it was the captain’s apparent inability to get along with most of his team. Here, too, Imran was to signal a clear break with the past. Although not immune to playing favourites, he was to prove a unifying force who was at once open to suggestion — ‘a good listener’ according to Intikhab, the new team manager — and swift to put an end to the practice whereby there had often ‘seem[ed] to be 10 or 11 Pakistan captains all muttering away’ in the field. It would be fair to say that Imran came to enjoy the loyalty if not always the unbridled affection of his men in a way hitherto unknown in his country’s 30 years of Test cricket. Essentially a federalist who saw the many diverse elements of Pakistan as a single entity, he was to rally the various troops under his command into a ‘lean [and] cohesive fighting unit’, in much the way that Frank Worrell had moulded the West Indians into a world-beating side in the early 1960s. The cricket-loving author Jeffrey Archer believes that the more obvious comparison is with England’s Mike Brearley, albeit with one critical distinction not los
t on Imran himself. ‘When the chips are down, the players want someone to come out and actually score runs or take wickets,’ he remarked. ‘In a war, the last thing the troops need to see is their general lying dead at their feet.’ Geoff Boycott adds that Imran was a ‘thinking man who was very clear about what he was doing — I would have played for him in a flash’, rich praise coming from one who has mixed views on most modern Test captains. Imran combined mutual respect with a certain detachment from his team. Wasim Raja said that one or two of the side had been ‘healthily afraid’ of him, and that Imran’s otherwise ‘highly polished’ pep talks had often featured a ‘bollocking’ of any under-performing players. During his tenure few serious rivalries arose in the Pakistan dressing-room. Imran was also among the first to make extensive use of video and other modern coaching aids, was readily approachable at least up to nightfall, when he tended to vanish, and struck most of the foreign press as a breath of fresh air — to quote Peter Smith, long-serving correspondent of the Daily Mail, it was like ‘talking to an Archbishop who dressed like Mick Jagger’.

  Within 12 months Imran had emerged, partly through circumstances, partly through his own playing ability and his own character, partly through the patronage of General Zia and other parties desperate for success on the field, as the unquestioned tsar of Pakistan cricket, and the object of a rapidly growing personality cult. In time even Javed would come to recognise certain unique qualities in his immediate successor. ‘When Imran became the captain, he led from the front and created an atmosphere in which there was no room for mediocrity. He made selection strictly performance-based. Everyone feared for their place in the side, and it motivated them to give of their best. Secure in his own abilities, Imran feared no one. This made everyone, the players as well as the cricket establishment, fear him even more.’