Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  By nature, Imran was a ‘disruptive element’, Wasim Raja believed, to the men in blazers who administered Pakistan cricket. A source then close to the head of the national government refers to it as a case ‘enjoyably like that of Dr Frankenstein and his monster’. It seems fair to say that Imran made little attempt to conceal his sense of superiority over the faceless bureaucrats, most of whom had never risen above club level, if even that, as players. There was also the fact that, unlike Javed, he was a university-educated product of the professional classes. Somehow this still seems to be more of an asset for the captain of a cricket team than might be the case in other sports. As Imran’s friend the journalist Fareshteh Aslam says, ‘He had the education and, perhaps more fundamentally, the self-confidence to take on the board when he had to.’ As a result there was to be a ‘steady drumbeat of official criticism’ of Imran’s tactics, even as these helped transform Pakistan’s cricketing fortunes. ‘The man we appointed,’ in the austere words of one 1983 memo, ‘remain[s] totally unwilling to bend or compromise with [his] employers.’ It was the same with the players, to whom Imran gave some individual leeway, ‘although ultimately all the leashes [were] held in his hand’. Wasim Raja was to characterise the team’s reaction to their captain as one of respect and trepidation, rather than warmth, ‘which was probably no bad thing’.

  It’s a truism that a captain is only as good as his resources, but, unlike Javed, Imran went out of his way to ensure that he at least got the team he wanted. The most obvious case in point was the gifted but enigmatic leg-spinner Abdul Qadir, who at that stage had played 11 Tests without ever threatening to impose himself on the side. Although his claims to a place on the England tour were impressive on purely cricketing grounds there was a general perception that the 26-year-old Qadir was, to quote one colleague, a contrarian of ‘uneven mood’ — in short, trouble. Imran not only insisted that his fellow Lahorite be on the plane to England. He allegedly phoned Qadir and personally invited him to tour; reportedly Qadir said nothing, but 20 minutes later rang back, accepting, explaining that he had lost his composure, ‘Because, captain, no one has ever asked me to do anything for my country. You are the first one.’ Imran similarly assured his mercurial predecessor that he had a full part to play in the side. In the event Javed had an indifferent series, managing just 178 runs in three completed Tests, but that was arguably more due to technical deficiencies than any man-management issues. Imran described Javed to me as ‘a great player in his day, who really became just a nudger from around 1982 [in] part because he didn’t believe in weight-training, or even training, too hard’. A third member of the awkward squad, Sarfraz Nawaz, also went on the tour and gave no cause for complaint.*

  On the downside, even Javed was to question Imran’s treatment of his cousin and senior batsman Majid Khan, whom he ‘ignored for the first two Tests … It caused a good deal of tension, which affected team morale. It got to the point where Majid wouldn’t join the team for practice sessions. While the rest of us worked away in the nets, Majid could be seen in some corner of the ground, sitting around in street clothes, showing no indication that he was part of our outfit.’ A quarter of a century later, Imran conceded that his ‘tough decision’ to omit Majid from the first Test had been badly handled. ‘I got the tour manager to give him the news’ — which, not surprisingly, Majid received ‘without enthusiasm’.

  While most of the Pakistanis performed well enough in England in 1982, Imran himself was the weapon of destruction. He took 21 Test wickets — more than twice as many as his opposite number and fellow pace bowler Bob Willis — and enjoyed a batting average of 53. These were figures that effectively settled the debate about whether or not he would rise to the challenge of being both the team’s captain and its star turn.

  The Pakistanis arrived in June as firm underdogs to an England side that had memorably won the Ashes the year before. Defeat in both one-day internationals when the frailty of their batting on damp, green pitches was exposed, typically dour resistance in the Tests by Chris Tavaré, who took nearly seven hours over his 82 at Lord’s, and a series of disputed umpiring decisions provided a stern examination of the tourists’ character. Gradually, however, as England faltered and Imran’s stature as a leader grew, they showed distinct signs of becoming a team.

  Twenty-eight years earlier, the English captain Len Hutton had taken the decision to drop his long-serving bowler and friend Alec Bedser, who was 36, minutes before the side went into the field against Australia at Sydney. The first Bedser knew of it was when the tour manager pinned the team sheet to the dressing-room door. Hutton told me that ‘in the flurry of events’ — a late arrival at the ground, dealing with the press, changing, tossing up — he’d simply ‘failed to have [the] quiet word with Alec’ that protocol demanded. ‘These things happen in cricket,’ Hutton added phlegmatically. Indeed, something very similar took place between Imran and Majid shortly before the first Test got under way at Edgbaston on 29 July 1982. The new ‘Pakistani strongman’, as the Daily Mail called him, had slept poorly and was understandably edgy at leading out a team which had mutinied against its previous captain and which contained no fewer than six former captains or vice-captains in its ranks. It’s arguable that Majid, then 35, deserved to be dropped purely on form: his 11 previous first-class innings on tour had been 12 not out, 0, 8, 88, 16, 47, 8, 23, 5, 42 and 6, giving him a distinctly modest average of 25.50. Rival candidates such as the 22-year-old all-rounder Tahir Naqqash would seem to have been more in line with Pakistan’s renowned youth policy. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the case, there were fireworks in the visitors’ dressing-room. The ‘bloody stab in the back’ was carried out in a way Majid himself clearly found unacceptable. Thereafter a perceptible coolness descended between the two cousins for the next decade or so, with a gradual thaw later in the 1990s.

  Quite apart from that, Imran’s introduction to the captaincy was a baptism both of fire and water. The ground was a quagmire, with heavy rain sweeping from end to end only hours before the start, before drying out nicely just in time for Randall to score a century. A few isolated but vocal elements of the crowd then took it upon themselves to barrack the tourists, whose dressing-room, according to Wasim Raja, ‘frequently appeared to be in volcanic eruption’ as a result. ‘We were reacting to racial abuse and to certain other language’ which, in Raja’s assessment, was ‘ripe’. Adding to the already combustible atmosphere were the now somehow familiar-seeming umpiring controversies. In the Pakistan first innings Mudassar was lbw in unusual fashion when he turned his back on a ball from Botham and was given out in what Imran calls ‘one of the poorer decisions’ in Test cricket. Earlier in the season, England had hosted India in a three-Test series which the home side won 1–0. The Indians had asked that David Constant be struck off the list of match officials for the tour, a request the TCCB agreed to. It would be fair to say that Imran and his men were unenthused to learn that Constant would return just a month later to officiate against them.

  England had made 272 in their first innings at Edgbaston, with Imran, although rumoured to be carrying a thigh strain, taking seven for 52. As it frequently would on the tour, the visitors’ batting let them down. When they went to grab their chance, midway through the match, it evaporated as quickly as it had appeared; maybe it had never really existed. Earlier, it was thought that Imran had betrayed some tactical naivety by keeping his tired opening pair on against the English last-wicket duo of Willis and Taylor, who were able to survive and even engage in a relatively free-scoring partnership. Their stand of 79 was effectively the difference between the two sides. After an hour or so of this, even Imran was reduced to using the weapon of more mortal fast bowlers when frustrated — the bouncer. One can perhaps imagine his emotions on being slashed for four over the slips by Willis, a man whom he seems to have believed guilty on at least one occasion of using unduly provocative language to an opponent. Eventually set 313 to win, Pakistan on the fourth morning slumped to 98 for seven,
with only Imran, who scored 65, delaying the inevitable. Mudassar was out for his second nought of the match, causing his captain to ‘speak’ to him, an experience the self-effacing batsman would ‘not soon forget’. England won by 113 runs.

  A fortnight later, the two teams met at Lord’s. England were led by David Gower when Willis dropped out at the last minute with a sore neck — he could still barely move his head as a result of facing the Pakistan bouncer barrage at Edgbaston. In his absence, Robin Jackman and Ian Greig did much of the bowling for England. Despite this stiff challenge, the tourists scored 428, with Mohsin Khan making a double-century. England replied with 227; extras top-scored with 46, including 10 wides by Imran. One of the Englishmen recalls having to face this ‘increasingly flamboyant’ attack while simultaneously dealing with the problem of Javed making ‘high-pitched bird noises from his position a few feet away at silly point’, all part of the ‘quite extensive’ Pakistani psych-ops programme. There also seemed to be a generous amount of appealing, much of it conducted from the direction of long leg. Ian Greig was later to remark that one of England’s batsmen had been ‘clearly out’, caught off Qadir. The batsman survived because, on that occasion, ‘none of the Pakistanis said anything’.

  While batting, Ian Botham was to have the first of what became a series of run-ins with Imran and the Pakistanis broadly related to law 42.5, dealing with tampering. ‘[I] could see that the quarter-seam was coming up and had been picked at. I took the ball to the umpires and asked them to have a look at it, and they were clearly worried by the state it was in. At the end of the over I had a word with Imran about it and he said, rather ambiguously, that the English bowlers might get it to swing a bit more if they “looked after it a bit better”.’ While there’s of course no reason to doubt Botham’s version of events, it’s also true that Dickie Bird, one of the umpires in question, denies ever having had a problem with the Pakistanis in general or Imran in particular, whom he calls ‘a gentleman’.

  After Tavaré and the rain frustrated Pakistan on the fourth day, the tourists were left to make 77 runs to win. At a critical stage Imran had thrown the ball to Mudassar and suggested that he perhaps make amends for his pair at Edgbaston. Mudassar, an occasional seamer, took six wickets. Pakistan got home, in a steady drizzle, with less than five overs to spare. It was only the second time they had beaten England (the last one was in 1954), and the first time they had done so at Lord’s. The result marked perhaps Imran’s greatest personal triumph in the captaincy, and unleashed another round of both official and wildly spontaneous celebrations in Pakistan.

  Obeying the unwritten rule which seems to demand that every Pakistani success be followed by a setback, they met with what Imran calls ‘crushing disappointment’ in the final Test at Headingley. Things began poorly for the tourists when both Sarfraz and Tahir pulled out with injuries shortly before the start. As a result Imran was forced to enrol the portly part-timer Ehtesham-ud-Din from the Bolton Association side, Daisy Hill. The 32-year-old seamer promptly pulled a muscle, took one wicket in the match and scored no runs. He did not play Test cricket again.

  Imran having won the toss and chosen to bat, the tourists perhaps failed to make the most of a pitch that started untypically firm and flat. Their 275 was summarised by their captain, who top scored, as ‘50 below par’ for the conditions. It was still too much for England once Imran had swapped bat for ball and taken five for 49 in 25 zesty overs. There was to be a ‘regrettable lapse of decorum’, to quote the late Sir Gubby Allen, in Pakistan’s second innings, when Sikander Bakht was given out, allegedly caught by Mike Gatting at short leg. Neither Sikander nor his partner Imran seemed actively to relish the decision. And not just because the umpire was David Constant. As the television replays appeared to show, Sikander’s bat had never remotely been in danger of making contact with the ball. Vic Marks, the bowler in question, told me that ‘it was probably not a great call [and] one which seemed to colour Pakistan’s view about English officials for years to come — the feeling was mutual’. A few hours earlier, the same David Constant had turned down a sustained Pakistani appeal for a catch at the wicket against David Gower when he had made only seven. The batsman went on to score 74. Gower recalls ‘a very thin edge and the highly vocal displeasure of virtually the entire opposition. Imran didn’t necessarily stand out in that department at the time but most of the words directed at me were in, I guess, Urdu, with the odd Anglo-Saxon epithet thrown in.’ He adds that ‘given the relations between the two teams in that era — strained at best — not walking was not hard to do. In fact, it was compulsory.’ The subsequent feeling in the visitors’ dressing-room was that between them these two decisions had cost them the match. England were left 219 to win, which always looked reachable, although at one stage they slipped to 189 for six, with Imran in full flow, coming around the wicket because the footholds on the other side had broken up. In another quite versatile performance he was to claim eight victims in the match, as well as to enjoy a batting average of 113. Pakistan lost the Test by three wickets.

  In the series, incident-prone, certainly, but over time elevated into some mythic triumph of English fair play over Pakistani whingeing, there was roughly a cigarette paper between the teams. Or perhaps a disputed caught-behind decision. Although Pakistan narrowly failed to press home their advantage, the tour was widely seen — at least by them — both as a moral victory and a watershed in the country’s cricket history. They would not lose to England in another series, home or away, for 19 years.

  Chosen as the man of the series (and not exactly seething with excitement when Tom Graveney presented him the award), Imran generally lived up to his reputation and his own exacting standards. At nearly 30 he remained one of the world’s fastest bowlers — ‘the briskest’, in Wisden’s account — as well as strengthening his claim to a place among the world’s top all-rounders. One of the delights of the tour, in this context, was watching Imran take on Ian Botham: two robustly self-confident players at their peak. Some 15 years later, Botham was to say that Imran had ‘bowled beautifully’ in the 1982 series, but had perhaps made something of a meal of his issues with David Constant. ‘If Constant made a mistake, it was a genuine error, the kind that all umpires make because they are human,’ Botham added.

  Writing immediately after the England series, Imran would pay a reciprocal tribute to his ‘friend’ and ‘opposite number’. ‘I admire Ian for getting to the top while still remaining true to his individualistic instincts … He’s a dynamic cricketer … He attacks in his bowling as well, giving the batsman a chance by pitching it up and trying to experiment.’ Alas, instead of improving over time, Botham’s bowling languished. ‘Although he’s supposed to have a bad back,’ Imran was forced to conclude, ‘I don’t believe his action has suffered because of that. His main problem is that he’s overweight.’ Several years later, Imran summarised Botham to me as an ‘extremely competitive player [who] was already in decline in his late twenties’, at least in part because ‘he lacked the training discipline’ of certain other all-rounders. When I contacted Botham he told me, rather clearly, that he had nothing to say about Imran.

  Although he did well with the bat and ball, the outstanding recollection of Pakistan’s new captain would probably come not on the field of play but in the hour or so immediately following the end of the Headingley Test. After managing a somewhat wan smile on the pavilion balcony, Imran promptly went on from there to share some views about the English umpires. ‘Constant cost us the match,’ he told a press conference. ‘Everybody knew that Gower was caught behind in the first innings … Then came the decision against Sikander. I was at the other end and couldn’t believe it.’

  From roughly this point on, relations between David Constant and the Pakistanis began to deteriorate rapidly. Imran soon let it be known that his side had ‘no confidence’ in the umpire. Constant was reportedly keen to give his side of the story, but was prevented from doing so by his employers the TCCB. The mutual ill-
will turned in fair part on personalities, as do most cricket controversies — few turn on cheating. Imran told me that it was Constant’s ‘high-handed manner’ the Pakistanis had most objected to. Perhaps inevitably, this could, and did, lead to ‘occasional grief’ with a team always alert to the slightest hint that they were being condescended to. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ Imran conceded, ‘but I felt that David’s personal likes and dislikes were too near the surface. The man was uncouth on the field. In my hearing he once shouted out, “Oi! Get on with the game,” after refusing an appeal.’ Constant himself declined to comment, but one of the players recalled a ‘small but vivid’ incident in the second Test at Lord’s when Abdul Qadir had enquired for lbw against Ian Botham, who had played all round the leg-spinner’s straight ball. Qadir had been in ‘a frenzy’ and ‘continue[d] to jump up and down and scream “Howzat?”’ long after Constant’s verdict of not out. The bowler eventually went into ‘a war-dance of fury’. At length Constant had strolled across to consult his colleague Dickie Bird, and then ‘quite clearly’ announced that he would suspend the proceedings should such behaviour continue. ‘Hold on, Conny,’ Bird had muttered, whereupon he conferred briefly with Imran. Imran in turn spoke to Qadir, who then ‘immediately turned around [and] bowled without further incident for the rest of the day’.