Curiously enough, while Imran was unimpressed by the ‘old pro’ in general, he had a soft spot for the ne plus ultra of the species, Geoff Boycott. The Yorkshire and England stalwart, then aged 42, was a ‘self-absorbed’ player, to whom making runs sometimes seemed nearly as difficult as making friends, but one possessed of ‘almost incredible’ powers of concentration. Imran would add that swashbuckling stroke-play was all very well, but Boycott ‘was the one I admired over time … I only wish Pakistan had had a few like him.’ Twenty-five years later, Boycott in turn went out of his way to make his views on Imran known. ‘He had a gift from the gods,’ he said. ‘There weren’t many who could do what he did. It’s fucking hard work, fast bowling.’
As if to prove the point, Imran limped through his next half-dozen county appearances following the World Cup. He continued to play for Sussex solely as a batsman, and, Boycott apart, it would be hard to imagine a stronger-minded one on the English scene. The club promoted him to No. 4 in the order, from where he enjoyed a season’s average of 57. Imran eventually resumed bowling in early August, off a shortened run and at an appreciably less fearsome pace than when at full cry. He operated in some discomfort, and his pogoing leap had an unfortunate impact on his damaged leg. Even so, he took six wickets for six runs, including a hat-trick, in a losing cause against Warwickshire at Edgbaston, a match in which he also top-scored in both Sussex innings. There appears to have been some lively interplay between Imran and the home team’s bowlers. The following week, the TCCB ‘severely reprimanded Khan for continuing verbal abuse directed at the opposition after he had been hit on the chest by a short-pitched ball, and warned him as to his future conduct’. The language employed throughout was ‘raw’, according to the report. Sussex were handicapped by a variety of other problems during the season, including a bizarre injury to Ian Greig when he fell from the window of his flat, trying to gain entrance there after apparently misplacing his key. As a result, they finished a disappointing 11th in the table. Imran topped both the county’s batting and bowling averages.
After six years at Hove, Imran and his English employers had come to know what to expect of one another. One of the club committee members would recall his star turn’s ‘amiable haughtiness … [Imran] condescended to us. He seemed to think, and made us feel it, that one or two of the players possibly weren’t quite his social or professional peers.’ The county captain, Johnny Barclay, felt that Imran sometimes chafed under the various rules and regulations, and ‘wasn’t necessarily well suited to the treadmill of six- or seven-day a week cricket’. Another interested party was the Hove groundsman, who was occasionally required to double up as the club’s switchboard operator. Some years later, this luckless man was to tell the Sunday Times that among his most onerous duties had been ‘fielding endless phone calls from girls begging for Imran’s number’.
This was funny, and it had the added value of being factual. Since arriving in Sussex in 1977, Imran had taken a series of comfortable but sparsely furnished rooms close to the county ground. He once remarked that he had ‘basically only ever kept a bed’ at Hove. Now even this small concession to standard club protocol was discontinued. From mid-1983 Imran’s home became a fashionable split-level flat in London’s Draycott Avenue, just off the King’s Road. Taken as a whole, this was not your average county cricketer’s lair. An indoor forest of gaudy statuettes and figurines, ethnic Pakistani rugs, brightly coloured cushions and exotic plants could have doubled as the clubhouse of an oriental cult or the set of a rather heavy-handed Grateful Dead biopic. There were several prominently displayed works by Emma Sergeant on the walls. Among them was a large painting of a burqha-clad Afghan refugee, which hung alongside a series of Mogul miniatures and an arresting portrait of a man holding a teacup in one hand and a woman’s breasts in the other. The living-room took up the whole top floor of the flat. Downstairs was Imran’s bedroom, with a gold-pleated canopy over the bed and two paintings of tigers at its foot. According to one visitor, the ambient smell was of incense. Among subsequent furnishings was a sofa covered in grey-fawn velvet and a vivid oil painting of Imran himself reading a book, the whole bathed by special ‘moody’ lighting. The overall impression was of a sixties art gallery crossed with a Sultan’s harem. Imran seems to have taken a justifiable pride in his new accommodation, which remained his primary residence even after a fire destroyed most of his bedroom a decade or so after he bought the flat.
In his practical and optimistic way, Imran saw Draycott Avenue as both a convalescent home and a place to party. As his banker and friend Naeem-ul-Haque says, ‘For someone who was thought aloof, he loved a good “do”. He and Emma would hold court at his place or hers, usually with about 12 or 15 people sitting around on the floor. Lots of gossip. On Sundays we returned the favour, and they came to dinner at our house in Wimbledon.’ Jonathan Mermagen adds that Imran was in the habit of returning with various man-of-the-match champagne awards, several of which were on ice in the Draycott Avenue bathtub at any given time. Imran’s guests would enjoy the fruits of his labours, while their host stuck to milk — ‘There were a lot of pissed English girls as a result.’ Mermagen confirms that ‘women in general tended to like Imran’, whom he now told, ‘You’re a growing brand, mate.’ Although in every other way the model professional, Imran sometimes struggled to balance his full social life with his playing schedule. One of the Sussex team remembers being amused at the way ‘the great Khan would tear out of the ground and fling himself on to the first train, still wearing his tracksuit, at the close of play, then return again with minutes to spare in the morning’. British Rail being what it was in the 1980s, Imran’s brinkmanship occasionally went awry. A colleague told me a story to illustrate this, although it’s only fair to add that two or three other Sussex players I mentioned it to couldn’t remember it. The story goes that Imran once arrived at Victoria station only to see that a particular train was delayed due to the familiar ‘essential engineering work’ on the line. As a result, he reached Hove a few minutes late for a group photograph with one of the club’s commercial patrons. Feeling snubbed, a Sussex marketing executive later took the opportunity to lecture the entire squad on the importance of the brave new world of corporate sponsorship. Imran had ‘bridled a bit’, recalled a participant. ‘It took five minutes to get through that situation … [The official] was not pleased.’
There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that Imran’s affair with Emma Sergeant was anything other than a respectful, mutually fulfilling relationship. But it’s conceivable it may not have been an entirely exclusive one. Imran’s Sussex team-mate Tony Pigott remembers that there was always a ‘large female crowd’ waiting outside the Hove pavilion door on match days. Of course there’s not a shred of evidence that they were specifically there for any one player, though Pigott detected ‘a heightened sense of alert’ whenever Imran appeared. Another colleague remembers leaving Hove at seven o’clock one evening ‘sometime in the early eighties’ (and thus possibly before Imran met Emma Sergeant) to drive to Cardiff, where Sussex were playing Glamorgan the following day. ‘Just as I was starting off, Imran appeared and mildly enquired if I minded detouring to London on the way to Wales. He had a certain quite well-known actress with him. I said that was fine, so we drove to London, where the young lady in question alighted. Imran and I then continued on to Glamorgan, where we arrived at around two the next morning.’
Imran’s friend Fareshteh Aslam was struck at how ‘open and direct’ he was with women, though, to her knowledge, his socialising never affected his cricket. ‘Whatever the distractions, he was supremely dedicated.’ Nor, by all accounts, would anyone promised a romantic night out by Imran have had much cause for complaint under the terms of the Trade Descriptions Act. Romance was somewhere he was very much at home. One knowledgeable source assured me that ‘he wasn’t one to make love by shouting “Phwoar” and taking a long running leap to join his mate on a bed which then collapses. You tended to get rather more in the way o
f candles and conversation than that.’ Another party adds: ‘You can forget about what you hear about all his womanising. He wasn’t macho at all … he courted me. Imran was a very, very sweet guy. You’d laugh all night with him, sleep in a canopied bed and in the morning you’d sit in a flower-filled conservatory, where he served you breakfast. What’s not to love about a man like that?’
In mid-September 1983, Imran accepted an invitation from Shell, the festival’s sponsors, to turn out for an International XI in a series of three one-day matches against the West Indies in Jamaica. In retrospect, he might have been better advised to spend the time with his feet up at home in London, particularly with Pakistan’s five-Test tour of Australia starting just a month later. When Imran returned to England, X-rays showed that the fracture in his left leg had opened up again. There was a serious risk of his being left crippled should he take the decision to bowl at any time in the forseeable future.
In Imran’s absence, Zaheer had captained Pakistan on a short tour of India. Having once declined to play one another for 18 years, the two sides had now met in four out of the last five seasons. On this occasion Sarfraz was absent for disciplinary reasons, and Abdul Qadir was omitted owing to a financial dispute. All three Tests were drawn. Imran then informed the BCCP that he was available to play in Australia as a batsman, an offer they accepted. They further asked him to captain the side. Imran pointed out that in that case he expected to be allowed to choose his team. This tested the board’s patience too much; over Imran’s reported objection they announced that the young opener Shoaib Mohammad, Hanif’s son, would be included in the squad. The subsequent dispute led to the mass resignation of the Pakistan selection committee. Meanwhile, Imran was already enthusing about a whippy 17-year-old fast bowler and lower-order batsman named Wasim Akram. He would make his international debut 12 months later, taking 10 wickets in his second Test. Like Abdul Qadir before him, Wasim became something of an Imran protégé; it wasn’t lost on certain sections of the Karachi press that all three men came from Lahore. For its part, the Star was lobbying for Imran to go to Australia as a batsman under Zaheer’s captaincy. Another Karachi-based daily assured its readers that the ‘pernicious Khan’ was paying the price for once having kicked a local boy who ran on the field during a Test when he was batting. The boy had thereupon put a curse on Imran’s leg, which would remain hors de combat until its owner sought out the boy and apologised. This was quite rich stuff even by the standards of the Pakistani tabloids. I asked Imran if he remembered the incident. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I kicked the boy with my right leg and it was the left one that had the fracture.’
On 17 October, an already largely unfancied Pakistani tour party arrived for four months in Australia. On his first full day there Imran consulted a specialist, who told him not to even pick up a bat until after Christmas. A second opinion confirmed the diagnosis. At that Zaheer assumed the responsibilities of captaincy, and promptly issued a statement bemoaning the fact that the team was not the one he would have chosen. With Imran immobilised, the tourists’ fast bowling would be largely in the hands of relative newcomers like Azeem Hafeez and Rashid Khan, men who had acquitted themselves well for the likes of Allied Bank, but who were now faced by batsmen of the calibre of Greg Chappell and Allan Border. Midway through the tour, the Pakistanis called up the now 35-year-old Sarfraz Nawaz, who after a three-day search was eventually located in Bombay. The great contrarian undoubtedly enlivened the dressing-room, but like his colleagues was unable to do much about the Australian batsmen. Even the highly touted Abdul Qadir finished the series with a Test match bowling average age of 61. In something of an understatement, Qadir later remarked that he had been ‘outmanoeuvred’. His failure in Australia was seized on by the Karachi press as evidence that he was only in the team as Imran’s pet, or an ‘apple-polisher’ who never missed a chance to play up to his captain — an obvious and vile calumny, not that there was any telling his critics that.
On doctor’s orders, Imran sat out the first Test at Perth, which Australia won by an innings. There were to be heated words in the visitors’ post-match inquest. Zaheer, perhaps reasonably enough, asked whether, under all the circumstances, Imran might not prefer to fly home to London rather than to sit glaring at the team from the players’ balcony. Imran said that he wouldn’t. A two-day thunderstorm saved Pakistan in the second Test at Brisbane, which Imran also missed. From their bunker in Lahore, the BCCP then issued an invitation for Zaheer to assume the ‘full and unfettered’ captaincy of the side for the balance of the tour, though Imran would remain on hand as a potential player. To some surprise, Zaheer declined the board’s offer. He would captain the team on a Test by Test basis, but nothing permanent. The belated arrival in Australia of the BCCP chairman added yet another layer of perplexity and rivalry to the tour hierarchy. Disgruntled players knew that they could lobby either the chairman or the formally designated captain, Imran, to reverse decisions by the caretaker, Zaheer. Wasim Raja, who was on his 10th overseas tour, later called the whole administrative set-up a ‘rolling disaster’.*
It seemed to be more of the same in the third Test at Adelaide, until Javed remembered why he was there and started hitting Lillee back over his head on his way to a century, one of three in Pakistan’s first (and only) innings of 624. It wasn’t enough. The tourists’ attack, a farrago of the up-and-coming and the over-the-hill, failed to capitalise, and Australia were able to bat out time for a draw. Imran then had another X-ray, which showed no significant improvement after his two months of enforced inactivity. However, it was felt that his mere presence on the field was worth ‘a gift of 40 or 50 runs’ in Wasim Raja’s unscientific, but reasonable estimate. There was a full meeting of the Pakistan committee on 15 December, the eve of a four-day match against Tasmania at Hobart. In his best peacekeeping mode, Intikhab reportedly asked if everyone would be happy if ‘the Skip’ now made his tour debut, but with no promises about his possible return to the Test side. Various batting options were discussed. Zaheer hemmed and hawed. Finally it was left at this: Imran would go in at No. 3 against Tasmania. When Intikhab so informed Wasim Raja, the latter ‘actually sighed with relief’. As he later said, he felt this was ‘the end of all our worries in Australia’.
Not quite.
Imran scored 13 and 19 in the match against Tasmania, which Pakistan narrowly won. As a result there seem to have been two schools of thought on what to do about team selection for the fourth Test, which started at Melbourne on Boxing Day. There were those who saw a non-playing captain staring at them from the pavilion as necessarily being something of a spectre at the feast, and thus not exactly a boon to team morale. On the other hand, Imran could hardly ask another batsman to make way for him after the Pakistanis’ huge total in the previous Test. The tour committee eventually came up with a compromise solution. Imran would captain the side at Melbourne, where he would appear as one of no fewer than seven specialist batsmen. The committee elected to drop the 36-year-old off-spinner Mohammad Nazir, sometimes known as Nazir Junior, who had achieved a return of one for 217 in the first three Tests. ‘I felt his absence wouldn’t make much difference,’ Imran notes, accurately if perhaps a touch clinically. In the event, the veteran bowler never played for his country again.
Pakistan batted first at Melbourne and made 470, thanks largely to a century by the opener Mohsin. Imran scored 83, which took him all but four hours. Lillee once told me, ‘We thought he could make 50 every time he went to the wicket.’ Imran had done so often enough when Pakistan were in trouble to lend force to that argument. He had ample time to reflect on his injury during the Australian reply of 555, in the course of which even Zaheer was forced to bowl 22 fruitless overs. Imran had previously taken the opportunity to warn his predecessor as captain that he ‘might have to turn his arm over’. Abdul Qadir took five for 166, over four sessions, in the latter stages of which he reeled about like a dazed flyweight boxer. In their second innings the tourists collapsed to 81 for fi
ve, which again brought Imran to the crease. He scored 72 not out and effectively saved the match. The pain in his leg returned about midway through the day, causing him to eschew the quick single and hobble somewhat between the wickets. Although he didn’t yet know it, his stress fracture had opened up to something approaching twice its original size. As in the first innings Imran was again unchivalrously encircled, with some of the sledging not so much making note of his infirmity as seeming to actively revel in it. The word ‘hopalong’ was used. In all he batted for some seven hours in the course of the match, compensating for his imposed limitations with a dour, Boycott-like concentration.
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