Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Debate about the Pakistanis and, more specifically, their ‘dishy’ and ‘gym-honed’ crumpet of a captain was everywhere in Britain. Newspapers, television shows and private conversations were awash with speculation about his social life. Not since Keith Miller 30 years before had a touring sportsman had so electrifying an effect on female spectators wherever he played. Unlike Miller, however, Imran was to be regularly splashed over the tabloids, part of a process he describes as ‘journalists writing me up as some sort of playboy figure breezing through the staid world of cricket’.

  It’s perhaps possible to discount some of Imran’s protests at his subsequent public image. Anyone who chooses to appear in the Daily Mirror’s centre-page spread ‘stretched across his hotel bed wearing only a petulant expression and a pair of tiny, black satin shorts’, to quote the paper’s feature writer Noreen Taylor, is at least complicit in his own downfall. The news coverage as a whole deteriorated from then on, with pages of ‘analysis’ in broadsheets and tabloids alike, accompanied by endless gossip and supposedly intimate profiles, enlivened by various young women brought forward to attest to Imran’s astonishing virility. Although he went along with it, much of what was written at the time struck even the Mirror’s (and later the Sun’s) cricket correspondent Chris Lander as toe-curlingly inept. ‘It was prurience,’ he noted, ‘masquerading as news.’

  Interesting scenes followed, often at the back doors of various English pavilions, where Imran demonstrated to foreign throngs some of his home appeal. He was frequently mobbed at the close of play, not least at Lord’s, where Lander once saw him step outside into a waiting crowd of ‘literally scores of journalists, news crews and a veritable chorus line of hopeful young women [while] a row of assembled schoolchildren waved Pakistani flags’. Imran easily entered into the hyperbole of tabloid fame; he was well aware that many of his interviewers knew little or nothing about cricket, but was too polite ever to say so. More than a quarter of a century later, one of his colleagues was to recall his impressions of that tour as ‘a vast Imran love-in all the way … tossed flowers, cheers … constant flashbulbs’.

  Though he would later become famous as a champion of the indigent and socially disenfranchised, at this point Imran still tended to prefer dating well-connected English girls with names such as Susie Murray-Philipson, Lady Liza Campbell and one Lulu Blacker, an intimate of the future Duchess of York. Another young woman from an immaculately smart family in Worcestershire went out with him several times in July and August 1982. ‘Imran looked like a god, and was rather treated like one,’ she reflects. ‘People would approach him in the middle of a restaurant with that half cheesy, half apologetic grin that meant they wanted an autograph, if not something more. I seem to remember there was also a procession of bimbos slipping him notes, some of which I saw, with quite complicated messages like “My parents are in the country — ring before 10.30”.’ In between dealing with the interruptions, Imran was ‘very solicitous’ to his companion, asking what she planned to do with her life and what she thought of various issues. ‘It was heady,’ she recalls.

  Another testament to Imran’s trans-cultural charm was a recent boarding-school graduate who then found herself cooking directors’ lunches in the City of London while waiting to be discovered by Hollywood. Now in her mid-forties, she speaks warmly of their few, ‘strictly platonic’ dates together. ‘Imran gave new meaning to the phrase “playing the field”,’ she admits, ‘but oddly enough you always felt you were the only girl in the world when you were with him. Very few men 30 years ago actually listened to women. Imran treated you seriously and was never one of those guys you sometimes met who told you your face was your experience and your hands were your soul — anything to get those knickers off. Your big rival, of course, was cricket, [where] sometimes his enthusiasm ran away with him: this was a man who thought it OK to plonk you down on a damp rug for eight hours to watch him take part in what, for me, was a meaningless encounter between two sets of men dressed like loony-bin orderlies.’

  The setting of many of Imran’s social encounters from around mid-1982 was Tramp, the private nightclub in London’s Jermyn Street founded by a former Brighton bookie named Johnny Gold. Jonathan Mermagen put his friend up for membership when the Pakistan team was passing through London that summer. ‘Johnny G was delighted and immediately started doing bowling actions, which I took as a yes,’ Mermagen says. ‘After the likes of the Lahore Gymkhana, Tramp was a natural habitat for Imran, who virtually lived there for a time. He tended to be a fixture on the nights when he had a game anywhere within about 80 miles of London.’ In its prospectus, the club offered its clientele the alluring promise of all-hours drinking and dancing. Oddly enough, Imran himself avoided both these activities. ‘He tended to anchor himself at a table in the main dining-room where he could watch the action,’ says Mermagen. ‘As you know he never touched alcohol in general, let alone champagne. At some stage, though, he must have at least tried the stuff. I once asked him if the reason he didn’t drink it was a religious thing. “No, I just don’t like the taste,” he said.’

  Tramp was and remains a high-visibility haunt that attracts celebrities such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joan Collins, Jerry Hall, Elton John and the late George Best, the last of whom virtually became its in-house mascot. As a result there tended to be a lively tabloid interest in the club, with paparazzi routinely in attendance at the door. So even as he remained an ‘intensely private’ man, one who didn’t bare his soul to others, Imran sometimes found himself in the limelight as a result of his social life. Another woman who met him in Tramp in 1982 assures us he was ‘the most charming and courteous host’ (although, as later became apparent, ‘a snorer’) who remained ‘incredibly modest’ given his achievements and connections: ‘I only realised how famous he was when General Zia started leaving him messages.’ Similarly, one of the Pakistan team reports to being impressed by the number of hats his captain wore while on tour. ‘Next to Nelson Mandela, he was the most interesting man I ever met,’ his colleague raves. ‘He was surrounded by a fascinating aura, a magnetic field, and whoever he turned to, great or small, was energised [as a] result.’

  One hot evening in August 1982, Imran made his way through a crowd of admirers and out of the Grace Gates at Lord’s. After eventually hailing a taxi, he was off to a playing-fields fundraiser in central London. He was the star of the event, signing scores of autographs and telling one of the organisers that he also wanted to line up behind various environmental causes, which he later did by generously supporting the World Development Movement and Friends of the Earth.

  At eight that same evening, Imran was at a gala to raise money to buy sports equipment for disadvantaged schoolchildren. Again, there were long queues for autographs. At ten he was at dinner in the West End with two male friends, one of whom remembers the ‘innocent glee Imran took in hearing all the gossip about people’s love affairs’. Around midnight he was listening attentively to a spectacularly pert young woman seated next to him at a low-lit corner table in Tramp. A famously androgynous-looking British rock star and his entourage were sprawled around. Imran was very probably the only person on the premises to be drinking milk. Less than six hours later, one of the embedded Pakistani journalists would glance out of his hotel window to see his team’s captain, clad in a green tracksuit, setting off for his early morning run, ‘plough[ing] off into a steady grey drizzle with only a passing milkman or two for company’.

  It was vintage Imran.

  ‘When I reached the age of 30 I felt that the time had come for me to settle down,’ Imran writes in his book All Round View. ‘Just as I was becoming reconciled to the idea of an arranged marriage, I became involved with an English girl.’ Although he fails to identify the woman in question, she was a 22-year-old artist named Emma Sergeant. They met at a small London dinner party given while the Pakistanis were touring England. Not long into the meal Imran had turned to Sergeant and said that he wanted to get to know her better, an underst
andable desire. At least two authors have since paid tribute to her ‘dreamy, pre-Raphaelite beauty accentuat[ed] by lashings of golden brown hair’, as well as to her ‘arresting figure’. Smart, well read and socially ambitious, Sergeant, the daughter of a prominent City journalist, would cheerfully admit that she knew nothing about cricket. Johnny Barclay, Imran’s Sussex captain, recalls, ‘Emma was a bit aloof, which I think he probably liked. She certainly didn’t fawn over him. I remember him once scoring a magnificent century at Eastbourne, and then coming through an adoring crowd at the close of play to find Emma sitting with her back to the field, putting the finishing touches to a painting of the pavilion clock. She possibly hadn’t even been aware he was batting.’

  In the ‘fiercely independent [but] loyal’ Sergeant, Imran had met the woman who would come to eclipse the charms of a contrived marriage in Pakistan. The result was a true and time-tested relationship. For domestic consumption, however, Sergeant would remain merely Imran’s ‘acquaintance’. In the elaborate protocol of Muslim life as it was familiar to the Khans, single men and women were generally allowed to meet only under closely controlled conditions, and sexual relations outside marriage remained a criminal offence, albeit one that required four witnesses to prove. The President’s ‘Zina Ordinance’ of 1979 had gone some way to further formalising the rules on the subject. By the autumn of 1982, Imran had acquired a devotional status in his home country. In particular, for his team to have beaten England at Lord’s struck some as a feat of almost folkloric proportions, one which ‘in more mortal terms, stands beside the glorious march on Palestine [of AD 637]’, in the words of one of those military-sporting analogies frequently heard on state radio. A degree of discretion was thought appropriate when dealing with the motivating force behind this coup. Even in England, the papers usually referred to Sergeant, if they did so at all, as ‘one of Imran’s companions’ or, at the tabloid end of the spectrum, as a ‘good’ or ‘close’ friend. This concession to Pakistani sensibilities, often at the whim of individual editors, was only partly successful in conveying the impression that their nation’s cricket captain led a blamelessly celibate life while in England. ‘If I was written about in the gossip columns in London my parents sent me letters immediately,’ Imran notes ruefully. ‘I hated being portrayed as a playboy. I wasn’t one — cricket was always my obsession.’

  In the 12 months to September 1982 Imran had played seven Tests against three countries, quite apart from his prominent role in the ‘gruelling’ act of regicide that led to Javed’s departure and his own appointment as Pakistan’s captain. The timing of a three-Test visit that autumn by the Australians was unfortunate. Both Imran and his opposite number Kim Hughes were to remark that they and their men needed a rest, something not readily available in the gladiatorial atmosphere of the six-week series. Hughes threatened to end the tour almost before it had begun if any of his players was hurt by the repeated stone-throwing at the National Stadium in Karachi, which led to two walk-offs during the first Test. Trouble had seemed to be brewing as early as the pre-match knock-up, when the crowd had set fire to a boundary marquee. A month later, the third and final one-day international, also at Karachi, was abandoned after less than an hour’s play, by which time at least three of the Australians had been struck by missiles. Hughes led his team off and declined all requests to return, at which point a full-scale riot erupted inside and outside the stadium.

  In between these events, Pakistan comprehensively won all three Tests and both the completed one-day matches. It was their first ever whitewash of an opponent. Imran and his protégé Abdul Qadir were the main destroyers, with 13 and 22 Test wickets respectively. Compounding the public-order problems were the now regulation umpiring controversies. The Australians formally asked that the officials for the first Test not stand again in the series. Despite apparently ‘solemnly agree[ing]’ to the request, and issuing a statement to that effect, when the time came the Pakistan board reappointed the two incumbents. In the third Test, at Lahore, Imran took four for 45 and four for 35, as well as contributing runs from the middle order. Pakistan won by nine wickets. The Australian captain was to remark that if this was Imran when he was tired, he would hate to meet him when he was fit and rested.

  Just 22 days after the Australians’ abrupt departure, the Indian side under Sunil Gavaskar arrived for a 10-week, six-Test tour. For Imran there was a personal point to prove. Three years earlier, in India, the general consensus was that his younger rival Kapil Dev had decisively won the battle of the all-rounders. For a variety of reasons, the two men weren’t personally close. ‘The press had been very harsh on me and how I had clearly been eclipsed by Dev, sometimes forgetting that I had been injured,’ Imran remarked. Although not a man in thrall to statistics, it would be fair to assume that he had a healthy awareness of his rightful place in Test cricket’s pecking order. No one, it might be said, makes a living out of professional sport for 20 years without a certain inner competitiveness. In the event, Kapil Dev took a respectable 24 wickets in the series. Imran took 40.

  For days beforehand, the home press had wondered if there would be any play at all in the first Test at Lahore. It was a reasonable question; for much of the preceding week the pitch was under water. As it was, the match was sparsely attended. There were just 955 paying customers on hand for the first session, the men and the women segregated in their own stands — disappointing in a stadium then seating some 38,000. Before the match the BCCP had sold the sponsorship rights to the series to the Paasban Finance Corporation, and between them had then raised the price of a five-day enclosure ticket from 400 to 1,500 rupees, or some £100, exclusive of handling fees. For real skinflints there were a few ‘restricted view’ bargains at 1,200 rupees. A couple earning 75,000 rupees a year after the now-mandatory zakat (income tax) would have to spend a fortnight’s salary to watch the match without the aid of binoculars. Admission prices gradually fell, but the series was pathetically badly attended given the two teams involved. At Lahore, Zaheer scored a double-century in the soggy draw. Imran took three for 68 in the only Indian innings. Earlier, one of the junior Pakistan players had watched his captain practise alone in the nets during one of the lengthy rain delays on the first day. ‘Imran bowled three successive balls which hit off, middle, leg. Then he reversed the order. Next he called for a volunteer to come in, and promptly uprooted his centre stick. The ball shot off the greasy turf and dipped in about a yard. It was literally unplayable. I speak with some authority because I was the batter.’

  Imran’s Aitchison contemporary Yusuf Salahudin met up with his old schoolfriend on the eve of the second Test at Karachi. Salahudin told me that they had stayed out perhaps later than was wise before a match of that importance, particularly as Imran was reportedly suffering from a mild case of flu. The team doctor had apparently advised plenty of rest. ‘I was quite worried, because we’d rather overdone it,’ Salahudin added with a chuckle.

  A few hours later Imran captained Pakistan to the biggest victory over their arch rival in their Test history. He took 11 wickets in the match, which saw him pass 200 in Tests. It was a rout. The Indians got off to a less than ideal start after being sent in on a green pitch by losing Gavaskar, run out from a direct hit by Imran, who then accounted for Vengsarkar with a rare away-swinger. One of the Indians remarked that the very sight of the opposition captain ‘eventually got to us, [and] when he came in to bat the next day I saw one or two of the guys quietly take a step back in the field. Actually, several steps back.’ Imran scored a run-a-ball 33, part of a Pakistani total of 452, which gave them a tidy first-innings lead of 283.

  What happened in the last session on 25 December 1982 is part of Pakistan history. Bowling with a familiar sea breeze at his back, Imran took five wickets in the space of 25 balls for seven runs. Asif Iqbal was in the pavilion and confirms that this was ‘high speed bowling with all the trimmings. I’ll always remember the ball he bowled to Viswanath, which swung in a yard to flatten the off stump as
the batsman shouldered arms. The crowd was beside itself with glee. Vishy looked stunned.’ Imran’s second-innings eight for 60 was Pakistan’s best individual analysis against India, and among the best returns in Test history. In the past, great fast bowlers had tended to be either the sort who had pace or those who had control, a Trueman or a Statham respectively. At Karachi, Imran combined both these ideals, while again exploiting the dark art of reverse swing. India’s agony ended early on the fourth morning, when they lost by an innings. By the time the tourists arrived at Faisalabad for the third Test, spectators were holding up banners likening Imran to the F-16, the American-built jet fighter, 40 of which were then being delivered to the Pakistan air force. Unfortunately, the aircraft in question were to prove distressingly difficult to maintain to full operational level, another analogy to the national cricket captain over the next two years.

  As usual where these particular teams were involved, the matches went ahead in a spirited atmosphere, with constant, loud, ball-by-ball vocalisations from the fielding side, as well as a generous amount of straightforward sledging. Javed Miandad remained the master, though by no means the sole proponent of what a former England Test captain euphemistically calls the ‘gentle art of social interplay’ between the players. As a rule, Javed’s muttered remarks to the batsman on strike tended to be blunt and not necessarily distinguished by their Wildean wit, although, as noted, he also periodically varied the routine with some quite accomplished bird and animal impersonations. One Indian player said to me that before the series Gavaskar ‘had told us just to ignore any abuse that came our way. The captain’s advice proved to be easier [given] than taken. You have to imagine facing Imran Khan hurling reverse swinging thunderbolts at you while also dealing with a noise like an angry bee buzzing around your ear to get an idea of the challenge.’ A well-directed radio microphone picked up a classic reciprocal bit of repartee on the first day of the Karachi Test when one of the Indian fielders greeted an incoming Pakistan batsman with the time-honoured enquiry, ‘How’s your sister?’ For the most part, Imran himself remained above the unseemly taunting of opponents, though he seems not to have actively discouraged the practice among others. It’s reasonable to say that the Pakistan players would have listened to him had he done so. By his eighth Test in charge Imran was proving himself to be a hands-on captain whose attention to detail was rightly legendary. His team-mates did not nickname him ‘the General’ (of particular resonance in a military dictatorship) for nothing.