Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Other than maintaining his own form and dealing with the team, Imran had two particular priorities as captain. He spent a large amount of time, every day, studying the press, briefing the press, warning his side about the press, berating the press — and then declaring himself indifferent to the press. In Wasim Raja’s view, ‘Imran saw the media as irresponsible because of the way they treated him. Every match he didn’t take five for 50 or score a ton it was supposedly because he’d been out on the town the night before with an actress. They couldn’t just accept that sometimes he had a bad day.’ Imran’s second preoccupation was with the home board of control. Here his tenure was to mark a clear break from the ‘consensus captaincy’ of his immediate predecessors. He would later characterise his experience of dealing with the BCCP over the years as ‘a nightmare’. Although the parties seem to have co-existed well enough when it came to selecting the side (if only because Imran generally saw to it he got exactly the names he wanted) it would be made increasingly clear that it was the team captain, not the administrators, who ran affairs on the field. When the board secretary once invited himself into the home dressing-room for a ‘chat’, Imran promptly had him evicted. That particular sanctum was a ‘working area’ and not for ‘gossip’, he noted.

  The third Test, at Faisalabad, was another personal triumph for Pakistan’s supremo. On an unhelpful pitch, he had match figures of 11 for 180 in 56 overs against an Indian batting line-up strong enough to include Kapil Dev at No. 8. In reply to the tourists’ 373, Pakistan were 367 for five midway through the third day, when Gavaskar would remember entertaining the hope that his team’s first-innings deficit might be less than fifty. That was until Imran appeared. Over the next session and a half he scored 117, which included nine fours and five sixes. Most of the bowling was done by Madan Lal and Amarnath, a moderate pairing by Test standards, it has to be said, so that Imran at least had an opportunity to play himself in. Even so, he seemed to rise to the occasion. At 5.40 that evening, Kapil Dev came back into the attack. Imran deposited the third ball he faced from him back over the bowler’s head and into a pastry stall. A short time later, he reached his second Test century. There was pandemonium. The game stopped. In due course Kapil Dev strolled up to shake him by the hand, followed by most of the rest of the Indian side. Salim Malik and Imran continued for a while, their partnership producing 207 until Imran succumbed, possibly exhausted. He became only the second player to have scored a century and taken 10 wickets in the same Test match, the other being Ian Botham, also against India, three years earlier.

  Pakistan won the Test by 10 wickets, giving them a 2–0 lead in the series. A ‘quite pleased’ Imran collected his second man of the match award in succession. All that remained now was the traditional umpiring wrangle, which came when the manager of the Indian team, the Maharaja of Baroda, pronounced himself dissatisfied with the ‘bungling’ home officials. There was some passing talk of the Maharaja and a number of his men leaving the tour prematurely. The crisis blew over with the release of a statement by Sunil Gavaskar expressing his personal confidence in Pakistani fair play, which was sufficient, at least, to bring an end to the latest round of anti-Indian rioting.

  January 1983, Hyderabad, was one of those peculiarly Pakistani occasions when a national triumph was soured by factional in-fighting. The bare facts are that after winning the toss Pakistan scored 581 for three declared in two days. Javed Miandad devotes a full chapter of his autobiography to an almost real-time account of his innings of 280 not out, and more specifically to whether or not Imran reneged on a promise to let him, Javed, chase the then record 365. Arif Abbasi, the treasurer of the home board, was one of those who believed that the captain went back on his word. ‘On the third morning, Miandad got nearly twice the agreed number of runs,’ Abbasi claimed, ‘but then Imran declared.’

  Checking the truth behind some of Pakistan’s Test match history, particularly when it took place more than 25 years ago, is a time-consuming business. Javed Miandad declined, or ignored, my request to interview him. Another interested party did speak quite passionately, and on the record, only to apparently have a change of heart, signalled by a one-sentence letter informing me that our ‘arrangement’ was cancelled. Reflecting on the incident, Imran agrees that ‘I told Javed something like “If you get near the target I’ll give you a bit longer”’, but denies having made a specific time commitment. Somewhere in the subsequent spat would seem to be the age-old question of whether cricket is a team sport or an opportunity for individual players to see their names etched up on the pavilion honours board. At the time Pakistan declared, Javed was scoring at roughly 30 runs an hour, and was still 85 short of equalling Sobers. It could be added that there were no fewer than 14 intervening Test scores of 280 or more. None of which particularly troubled Javed, who cheerfully notes in his autobiography, ‘records are certainly important [for] me, and only a fool would say that they’re not’. For his part, Imran remained that strange creature, a world-class sportsman bored by statistics. It’s true he was generally aware of when he had a better all-round match than a Botham or a Kapil Dev, but he never worried about his personal averages. Once or twice, he misquotes these, to his disadvantage, in his own books.

  Imran told me that the wicket at Hyderabad had been ‘stone dead’, and that at 581 for three it was high time to have a go at the opposition. ‘If you have your enemy down then you never let him up,’ he added, in a perhaps revealing overview of his wider management style. In the event, India scored just 189, roughly 400 less than the Pakistanis. Imran took six for 35. The home team won by an innings, with two sessions to spare. Imran received some noticeably tart press coverage for his alleged ‘stab in the back’, ‘act of betrayal’ and ‘insult’ towards his immediate predecessor. There was flak, too, from a well-known state political commentator who described his nation’s Test captain as ‘duplicitous’. No one could possibly be that and survive in Pakistani public life, the theory went. Javed himself eventually ‘forgave’ Imran, whom he describes as ‘the most successful all-rounder of his day’ and ‘the best leader’, although, in Wasim Raja’s assessment, relations between the two ‘never quite recover[ed] their old lustre’.

  A few years later, one of Imran’s female English press admirers was to write that what happened to him in 1983 was a tragedy of literally biblical proportions: here was ‘a great and charismatic man [who] at his hour of triumph sacrificed himself for his people’. That might be pushing it, but the basic facts are stark enough. Imran told me that he had felt so physically fit during his first year or so in charge of the Pakistan team that ‘I often found myself wondering, “How do people get old? How do people slow down?”’ The answer was to come on the second morning of the second Test at Karachi (the one in which he nipped in for eight for 60), when Imran got out of bed and felt a throbbing pain in his left leg. The discomfort would come and go throughout the remainder of the series. Initially ignored, then misdiagnosed, the problem was eventually revealed as a ‘gaping’ crack in his shinbone. After the Indian series he was unable to bowl properly in a Test match for three years. Back in London, Imran would have a ‘tough time’ of his convalescence, according to Jonathan Mermagen. ‘I remember he tended to limp off by himself in the afternoons. He was depressed … I don’t think any of us, Imran included, knew what would happen.’

  Under the circumstances, certain other cricketers might have opted to sit out the last two Tests of the India series, given that Pakistan had already taken an unbeatable lead. Imran played in both matches, both of them drawn. One was curtailed by rain and the other, at Karachi, by riots. Despite visibly limping in his run-up, Imran took five wickets in the final Test, to finish with 40 in the rubber at an average of 13.95. When the time came to name Pakistan’s man of the series there weren’t many contenders, and the verdict was quickly reached. During the closing ceremony, Imran was lustily booed by some of the Karachi crowd. To put this in context, the city’s leading local English-language paper had just
published a stinging (and unsigned) front-page article rebuking the country’s ‘Lahorite captain’ and his alleged cronyism, particularly as applied to Abdul Qadir.

  Not everyone in Pakistan, then, was delighted with their team’s comprehensive defeat of India. At least one highly respected radio commentator called for Javed’s reappointment, an appeal the player himself didn’t actively go out of his way to prevent. There were continued public protests at the board’s decision to hand over the Tests to commercial organisations. Meanwhile, another group with a perhaps narrower focus attempted unsuccessfully to have the series banned from television, claiming that attendances at mosques had fallen away sharply between December 1982 and February 1983. A spokesman for the group, which petitioned the president, noted that the media’s main purpose should be ‘to implement and propagate Islam and not give mileage to a game more British than Asian’. As we’ve seen, certain regional news outlets also got tetchy, making it a point of honour to show their independence by carping. Imran earned himself some of the critical yappings and shin-bitings that invariably seem to greet even a successful Pakistan captain.

  Then again, most public reaction was everything he could have hoped for. The celebration of Imran started like the feting of other Pakistani folk heroes of the day — generals, macho film stars, squash champions and so on. But it acquired a quality of its own and far outstripped the others. Omar Kureishi, the Asian equivalent of John Arlott, remarked that Imran’s status as a combined sports star and sex god was especially noteworthy in a country that was ‘frequently seen as a dour, sad and corrupt place. Things got particularly bad during Zia’s early period when Pakistan went through one of its puritanical phases’, relieved only by ‘a sort of collective frenzy for our national cricket captain’. Omar’s nephew, the British-born writer Hanif Kureishi, had a taste of this phenomenon in the mid-1980s when, on his first visit to Karachi, he came across an ‘18-year-old kid strung out on heroin, danc[ing] around and pointing to his quite prominent erection, which he referred to as his “Imran Khan”’.

  Clearly, something unusual was going on. Even in that relatively recent past, Test cricketers tended to be the poor relations of the international sports scene. As a whole, they were badly paid, travelled around the world in economy class on flights or steerage on boats and existed on match-day meals of cheese sandwiches and tea rather than the latest upscale steroids. Imran may not have been the first player to enjoy his own cult following, but he was more or less single-handedly responsible for sexualising what had hitherto been an austere, male-orientated activity patronised at the most devoted level by the obsessed or the disturbed. And he did so on the basis of rather more than just a fetching haircut. Imran took 88 Test match wickets in 1982. It seems reasonable to say that the figure would have been higher had he made himself available for all three home Tests against Sri Lanka, given that he took 14 wickets in the one game he did play. Two months after they lost the series to Pakistan, the Indians under the captaincy of Kapil Dev began a tour of the West Indies. They were again comprehensively beaten. The journalist Dicky Rutnagur covered the series and believes that India ‘were still both shellshocked and intrigued as to how Imran destroyed them’. He effectively ended whole careers. Within 12 months, four of the Indian top order including the veteran Gundappa Viswanath would be permanently dropped, or have retired. Along with England’s Ian Greig and certain other players, so the Jang believed, they ‘never quite recovered from their going-over at the hands of the “Orient Express”’.

  Even Richard Hadlee paid Imran the compliment of comparing their bowling philosophies, in ‘see[ing] every ball as like a bullet. There are six balls in an over, and six bullets in a chamber. Each one is a chance to hit.’ Considering this tribute came from an arch rival, one can begin to appreciate the sheer depth of Imran’s popularity at home in Pakistan. There was something akin to a civic nervous breakdown when it was announced that he might not be fully fit for the 1983 World Cup in England. New X-rays taken that spring showed that the bone in Imran’s shin was not only cracked but close to shattering completely. A specialist named Peter Speeryn advised him against bowling for at least three months, but left open the possibility that he could play in another capacity. In time General Zia involved himself personally in Imran’s treatment, insisting that the state would provide him with whatever facilities he needed or, failing that, fly him to England for surgery. The president’s initiative was widely reported in Pakistani newspapers, at least one of which speculated that Khan would ‘retire from the fray and accept a government position’. Imran appears to have had no particular political interest at this stage in his career, although both Jeffrey Archer and Johnny Barclay recall that he admired Margaret Thatcher for her sense of resolve, if not always for her specific policies. Imran eventually accepted a request from the BCCP that he play in the World Cup solely as a batsman.

  In the factionalised society of Pakistan, even this compromise excited strong emotions. ‘I had become the target of a planned campaign by certain journalists,’ Imran recalls. ‘A leading Karachi daily, the Star, carried a headline that I had sold out to the bookies’ by allegedly faking his injury. Imran chose not to sue on that occasion, Pakistan’s libel laws generally being less than congenial to the plaintiff. Many of the home press, in fact, seemed to be gripped by an advanced form of schizophrenia when it came to reporting on the nation’s most famous citizen. On the one hand, there were constant editorials rightly remarking that Imran had smashed the inferiority complex affecting Pakistani cricket. On the other hand, these same proponents of national unity felt able to engage in an almost psychotic discussion of whether or not ‘the great pilot’ was in reality a Lahore partisan who viewed the rest of Pakistan with barely concealed contempt. In January 1983, it reached the point where Imran’s attempts to discourage a pitch invasion at the National Stadium were seen by the Star as ‘blatant discrimination [against] Karachi crowds’.

  Pakistan had little trouble in disposing of Sri Lanka in their first World Cup group match, before losing to Richard Hadlee’s New Zealanders. Things really started to unravel against England at Lord’s, where the 34-year-old Sarfraz and his seam bowling partner Rashid Khan took just one wicket between them on a green pitch. All Imran could do was to watch impotently from mid-on as his side was thrashed with some 10 overs to spare. Three days later Pakistan played Sri Lanka for a second time. Midway through a rain-affected morning they were 43 for five, with the ball swinging around ‘square’ according to The Times. Imran won the day by scoring 102 not out. Pakistan then lost again to England but beat New Zealand thanks to an unbroken stand of 147 in 75 minutes between Imran and Zaheer, during which they took 47 off Hadlee’s last five overs, enough for them to qualify for the semi-final.

  The match produced two heroes, one on either side. Pakistan’s opener Mohsin Khan held one end for 57 of the alloted 60 overs on what Imran calls a ‘damp and uneven Oval wicket’ (but which Wisden curiously describes as a ‘good, firm pitch’) to account for nearly half his team’s 184. For the West Indies, Richards batted with a nuggety determination, first withstanding an onslaught from Rashid while he played himself in, and in the latter stages taking the battle to the enemy for an accomplished, unbeaten 80. Once again Imran could only watch passively, resisting any temptation he might have had to bowl, as his team crashed out by eight wickets.

  In the glory-and-shame culture of Pakistan, this was another national humiliation, all the more so as India then somehow beat the West Indies in the final. One Lahore-based journalist reached Imran by phone in London a day or two later. Although ostensibly an interview, their conversation had some of the trappings of a therapy session. ‘I appreciate how you handled the business of the injury,’ Imran said, referring to an earlier article in the man’s paper.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ the journalist assured him.

  ‘No, I really mean it,’ Imran protested. ‘It means a lot. I’m very grateful.’

  Fearing that Imran was ab
out to turn maudlin, the scribe asked him if he would be available for that winter’s tour of Australia, and Imran replied merely that he hoped to be. There was a ‘very obvious tone of frustration and fatigue’ in his voice. Back in Karachi, the Star was busy attacking Imran’s captaincy and tactics, while remaining noticeably silent on the fact that he had topped the Pakistan batting averages. One prominent state television commentator then blasted ‘King Khan’s’ team selection, and in particular his decision to play Abdul Qadir in the one-day side at a time when these rarely included a leg-spinner, or indeed a spinner of any sort. This would seem to have been another case of selective criticism. Qadir had figures of four for 21 against New Zealand and five for 44 against Sri Lanka, and could have turned the semi had Richards not been dropped off him when still in single figures. He topped the Pakistan bowling table.

  In a frustrating, difficult time, Imran was as exasperated by certain aspects of county cricket as he was by his injury. Meaningless late-season fixtures played in front of a few hundred spectators would cause his eyes to glaze over. He needed the stimulus of the big occasion. After 12 years’ experience of the personalities involved, Imran had further refined his views on what he called the ‘old pro’ syndrome. For these individuals, of whom every club had its share, ‘cricket [was] a job, and they have played for so long that they’re basically bored by it … Because of his understanding of the game, the old pro spots talent very quickly, but is then envious, rather like the old man Salieri is of Mozart in Amadeus. They always told me not to experiment with my bowling action lest I lose whatever I had. A draw is a good result for them.’ (Somewhere in the above, as well as a canny overview of the county circuit, would seem to be a healthy self-appreciation on Imran’s part.) One such Sussex player was known to report to the ground in the morning dressed in a dark business suit and carrying what looked suspiciously like a briefcase. Imran, for whom cricket, while competitive, was ‘fun — the world’s greatest game’, would never be mistaken for a bank manager. Nor, as noted, was he exactly ‘one of the lads’, eschewing, for instance, the spirited farting competitions that remained such a popular item among at least one element of the home dressing-room. Rather, he remained a ‘princely cunt’, in the view of one of his possibly less admiring and jaundiced county colleagues. By the time his teammates made for the nearest pub at the close of play, Imran was typically on the fast train to London for a night at Tramp or dinner at some equally chic restaurant. This detachment, or limited involvement, became an increasing part of his life at Sussex, for whom he would play on a more sparing basis from the 1983 season onwards.