Australia won the last Test at Sydney by 10 wickets, and took the series 2–0. Imran paid a gracious tribute to the better side, making particular reference to Chappell, Lillee and Marsh, all of whom retired from representative cricket. Zaheer then flew back to England, saying that he needed to prepare for his benefit year with Gloucestershire. A semi-regular column continued to appear under his name in the Karachi-based Dawn, recording Imran’s many alleged defects as a captain. Zaheer again reminded the board how positively he would respond to any approach they might care to make to him in the matter. Meanwhile, Imran stayed on in Australia to lead the team in 10 one-day internationals, nine of which they lost. The whole protracted saga finally ended in early February, when Imran and his men flew back to a muted reception in Pakistan. Perhaps predictably, the home board was toppled in a coup and replaced by a rival group headed by General Safdar Butt, a keen mountaineer with no known prior interest in cricket. Their first act was to appoint Zaheer as captain. The board then falsely informed the press that Imran had ‘diverted’ money from some of the junior players in Australia, a smear several of the Karachi papers saw fit to report in regular banner headlines over the coming weeks.
In March 1984, Zaheer’s Pakistan beat England 1–0 in a three-Test series. England had warmed up for the event with a brief tour of New Zealand, where they, and Ian Botham in particular, were accused of converting their dressing-room into an alleged ‘opium den’, to quote one local paper. Peter Smith of the Daily Mail would remark that he ‘still didn’t know what Both thought of the “investigative” press at this point’ (’the scums of the earth’, he later discovered), but confirmed that it was an obviously ‘edgy’ relationship. In the event Botham flew home early from Pakistan for knee surgery. While convalescing in London he gave a radio interview in which he spoke of the respective charms of various Test-playing countries. Pakistan, he concluded, ‘is the kind of place to send your mother-in-law for a month, all expenses paid’. The TCCB swung into action and set up a full-scale disciplinary hearing, which fined Botham £1,000. Like millions of other people in Pakistan, the staff at the Lahore Hilton soon got to hear of the interview and showed their displeasure by briefly going on strike against the English cricketers still in residence there. Sarfraz Nawaz conspicuously failed to lower the emotional voltage of the whole affair when he referred to Botham as a ‘drug-crazed opium pusher’. It’s fair to say, then, that some mutual coolness existed between the Pakistanis on one side and England’s most famous sportsman on the other, a situation that lends context to the drama of what happened 12 years later.
On General Zia’s authority, Imran flew to London in April 1984 for experimental surgery on his leg. The initial procedure involved the doctors exposing his shin and clamping on a small metallic device which passed therapeutic electrical currents down the bone. The basic clinical facts somehow don’t quite convey the stakes involved. Although the operation itself was a success, Imran was told that he would be in plaster for six months, and that even then his days as a professional sportsman would almost certainly be over. Back home, several of the more regionally fanatical Karachi papers tacitly celebrated the news. Having first built up the ‘great Khan’, they were ready to chop him down again. On some days, when a particularly venomous article appeared, even his parents were forced to endure the catcalls of the small mob milling around outside their home in Lahore. ‘This was the most difficult period of my life,’ Imran remarks. Like so many Pakistan captains before him, it seemed his career would end in pain, recriminations and failure.
* The county chairman who signed off on Imran’s fine, Tony Crole-Rees, coincidentally had a vote of no-confidence passed against him later in the season, but refused to resign. It was symptomatic of a stormy year in the Sussex committee room.
* Mark Nicholas recalls going out to bat for Hampshire that season in a Benson and Hedges tie at Hove. ‘For some reason I came in without a helmet, sporting a wide-brimmed sunhat. Imran reacted with glee, relish and amazement. After the laughter had died down, he proceeded to bomb the hell out of me.’
* Amid the various ructions taking place in Australia, there were moments of light relief. The tourists’ habit of shouting frequent encouragement to their young offspinner Ijaz Faqih, as in ‘Faqih, you’ve got him!’ or ‘Faqih, yes!’ was always a popular talking point.
* Abdul Qadir formed a particular affection for his captain and mentor, and named his first son after him. Years later, as the proprietor of a Lahore Marriage Hall, Qadir began to worry about Imran, who remained a bachelor into his early forties. ‘He should get betrothed as soon as quick,’ Qadir said, ‘otherwise there is a question mark.’
* To add to the already Byzantine arrangements, the former Test captain Intikhab Alam remained the Pakistanis’ official manager. Fortunately, the easy-going ‘Inti’ harboured no professional or personal ambitions, a rarity on that tour.
SIX
Captain and Crew
Imran was 31, an age by which even a fit fast bowler has normally begun to review his career options. He had played 51 Tests, leading his country in 14 of them. While initially successful, his captaincy had conspicuously failed to unite Pakistan’s cricket establishment behind him. One English friend called in at Draycott Avenue shortly after the patient’s release from the Cromwell Hospital. Imran’s condition was worse than he had been led to believe. ‘He was in the truest sense of the word a pathetic figure.’ An unshaven Imran ‘sat with his leg propped up on a chair, an orthopedic walking-stick by his side’. Equally worrying was his mental state, which seemed to border on full-scale depression, though there were as many opinions about this as there were of Imran’s performance as a captain. To Naeem-ul-Haque he was ‘down, obviously, in a funk, often wondering aloud if he had a future in cricket’, but still managed to exercise daily and thus ‘keep himself remarkably fit, if not cheerful, under the circumstances’. Another visitor to Chelsea thought his host ‘distraught’ and ‘completely cut off from the world’. Not so, says Jonathan Mermagen, who remembers Imran hobbling home in the afternoons, but remaining the life and soul of the party in the evenings. One of his Pakistani colleagues, who hadn’t seen him since Australia, nevertheless now pronounced him ‘in good health and spirits’. Writing in his autobiography three years later, Imran himself admitted, ‘I was extremely depressed and bitter … For six weeks I hardly left my flat in London. I stopped following cricket in the newspapers or watching it on television. I did nothing but read and wallow in self-pity.’
Over time, one or two respected commentators would find greater significance in Imran’s injury than was apparent in other cases. To Ian Wooldridge of the Mail, it was a morality story. A man ‘who[m] the gods seemed to have touched’ was mortal like the rest us, after all. A few of Imran’s enemies went further, and positively gloated at recent developments. One aggrieved Pakistani Test player remarked, ‘The situation [in Australia] was impossible. Imran was up on his high horse. I wasn’t the only one in the team happy enough to accept a new captain.’
By now, Emma Sergeant was enjoying some success of her own in the art world, and was instrumental in snapping Imran out of it by introducing him to a life outside cricket. One night she decided it was time he became acquainted with opera, and took him to see Carmen. As she recalled, ‘Imran saw the shattering end when Carmen was murdered, put his finger up in the way an umpire does and said, “That’s out! That’s back to the pavilion.”’
Although Sergeant kept her own flat in Kensington, friends remember her as more or less a fixture at Draycott Avenue. She enjoyed her role as hostess, and generally left an impression on visitors. Johnny Barclay recalls that she was ‘bohemian, talented, and probably the one person who could tease Imran and get away with it’. A more cynical colleague found call to criticise Sergeant’s wardrobe and figure, which in his opinion made her look ‘like a brightly coloured tapeworm’. There was also, perhaps more damningly, a ‘touch of [the singer] Stevie Nicks’ to her ‘floaty-scarf-and-b
angle’ ensemble. To Naeem-ul-Haque, by contrast, she was ‘beautiful and charming with it’. At the conclusion of one dinner party, Sergeant made a gift of her family piano to the Haques’ six-year-old daughter. Acknowledging that she was visually over the top, with ‘various ribbons, baubles and bits of bone hanging off her frock’ and a tendency to ‘possibly overdo the makeup’, another visitor, a well-known radio personality, judged that Sergeant was ‘self-consciously arty’, adding rather grudgingly, ‘Imran was obviously taken by that whole Chelsea scene fill[ed] by authors who never seemed to write a word and film-makers begging for money.’ Geoff Boycott also happened to meet Imran one day when the latter was hobbling around with the aid of a cane. In his inimitable way, the Yorkshireman looked his sometime opponent up and down and remarked, ‘You may be in plaster, son, but don’t tell me you’re not still getting your leg over.’
In the summer of 1984, Imran briefly attached himself to a visiting tribal warlord from the Balochistan region of western Pakistan, named Sher Mohammad Marri. Marri and his personal guard of four parari (fighters) spent a month in London as part of a European fundraising tour. On arrival they were put up for several nights at a sympathetic diplomat’s house in Hampstead. The neighbours’ view of the group enjoying a traditional Balochi feast of a roast sheep served in a makeshift barbeque on the back lawn was the village’s major talking-point, although the sight of Marri and his men calmly strolling up Hampstead Lane in their native regalia also made a strong impression. He was to cut something of a similar swathe on his more formal public appearances. According to one observer, Marri ‘donned the mantle of warrior-scholar with great elan’. At public meetings, ‘he railed against western decadence, read his rather florid poetry, and propounded Maoist political philosophies with more fervour than reflection’. Also known as Babu Shero or the ‘Balochi Tiger’, he favoured an armed struggle for independence from the government in Islamabad. Only then, he wrote (in translation), would come the ‘happy day, all despots subdued, all tyrants slain … What object could be more compelling than the universal ambition to see Freedom live and reign the monarch of the world? Supreme consummation! Hail, righteous cause! Glorious revolution, all hail!’ A week or so into the visit, Naeem-ul-Haque took Imran and Marri to dinner at a suitably discreet restaurant in central London. He reports that it was an ‘enjoyably spirited’ occasion, and one which was apparently to have long-term consequences. ‘Imran was totally fascinated by what he heard. Marri was this wonderfully colourful, ferocious character, and he obviously left an impression. To me, that was the moment Imran first began to think seriously about politics.’
Meanwhile, Johnny Barclay captained Sussex to a respectable sixth in the county championship, though they made an early departure from both knockout tournaments. In Imran’s absence they found it hard to dismiss opponents once, let alone twice. Barclay himself led from the front. He said that he wanted to win more games, acknowledging that this could mean losing more — about which he was right. Twenty years later he added that, like Tony Greig before him, he’d ‘tried to make the players feel appreciated, [and] to give each of them a certain leeway’. Barclay’s relaxed style of leadership — amateurish in the best sense of the word — worked well when Sussex were reasonably successful, but, as he was the first to admit, ‘we rather missed having the world’s greatest all-rounder in our ranks’.
On 1 October, new X-rays showed that Imran’s leg had healed completely. It was just under two years since he had limped out of bed that morning in Karachi. His London surgeon was cautiously optimistic that he could now play again. One long-time colleague met Imran at Draycott Avenue and went out with him on a celebratory run through Hyde Park. ‘He left me standing,’ his companion reported. Although less than match fit and evidently still in pain, Imran handled it in typical fashion: ‘He pushed himself even harder.’ For the rest of the month he alternated between the indoor nets at Lord’s and playing host to his parents. Shaukat Khan had developed colon cancer and flown to London for surgery. Along with his own injury and his exposure to the neo-communist musings of Mohammad Marri, this event was to mark a seminal change in Imran’s life. For 15 years he’d essentially lived only for cricket and sex, generally in that order. As a result, he now became — philosophically, intellectually, politically — a radical in the truest sense. He developed a marked aversion, for instance, to the sort of society that left the vast majority of Pakistani cancer patients to die, and a privileged few either to seek treatment in one of the clinics reserved for the ruling elite or to fly to the West. Such things are never other than devastating. After one wrenching hospital visit, Imran reportedly put his head on a friend’s shoulder and wept. Only he knew how lucky he was to have had Shaukat for a mother, only he could guess at how much he owed her.
On 9 October 1984, just as Imran was going through his paces in Hyde Park, the Indians arrived for their now annual winter Test series against Pakistan. Even by recent standards, it was a disaster. In the words of the Pakistani commentator Omar Noman, ‘Meaningless hundreds and double hundreds proliferated … There was unpleasant acrimony over umpiring, with the generally mild Sunil Gavaskar issuing a strongly worded statement that the adjudicating in the Lahore Test was “preplanned and malicious and it was a miracle that we escaped with a draw”.’ Zaheer, the home captain, suffered a stiff neck during his first innings of the series, and this proved to be a painful experience for his team. Both completed Tests were ill-attended draws. Indira Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October led to the abrupt abandonment of the tour, which one critic likened to a ‘case of euthanasia’. Zaheer’s generally defensive captaincy came in for widespread abuse, particularly when compared to that of his predecessor. Even some of the Karachi press appeared to have revised their opinion of Imran. One four-page weekly paper, which only a year earlier had given over most of its space to publishing an article under the headline ‘Khan an embarrassment in Australia’, was now eagerly calling for his return and proclaiming him ‘a strategic genius’. Almost as if he were running for political office, the press again covered his every move. If he was spotted, walking in or out of Lord’s or jogging up Brompton Road in his Pakistani tracksuit, it was in the paper the next morning. Meanwhile, the requests for him to play cricket were coming in from all over the world. One in particular caught Imran’s attention.
It came from New South Wales, a side which had finished a disappointing fourth (out of six) in the previous Australian season’s Sheffield Shield. A contact from the Packer days made the arrangements, which reportedly called for a modest salary on top of ‘distinctly generous’ accommodation and travel allowances. Imran flew in to Sydney on 2 November, the same day as Gavaskar’s Indians were making their own rapid departure from Pakistan. Although apparently just one representative from the club was at the airport to greet him, there were several dozen ordinary fans on hand to enliven the occasion. One of them, a then 24-year-old zoology student named Jan Harris, remembers waiting with the sort of lively, clock-watching anticipation that sometimes precedes a rock concert: ‘At exactly 4 p.m., an hour late, the glass door slid open and there, dressed in black trousers and an unbuttoned white linen shirt, hand outstretched in greeting, was Imran.’ The next day he was in action playing Grade cricket for Sydney University, thus resuming his career within a mile or two of where it had left off nine months earlier.
Imran chose to make his full State debut the hard way, appearing for New South Wales against the touring West Indies. Batting at No. 6, he scored 30 and 9, but perhaps more to the point bowled a total of 19 overs in only mild discomfort. In answer to their enquiries, Imran assured everyone, including the team doctor, that he was ‘fine’. The New South Wales captain with the name of a 1950s action hero, Dirk Wellham, prudently used his shock weapon in controlled bursts of three or four overs at a time. Wellham later reported himself ‘well pleased’ with the results. Imran, by contrast, remembers staying up all night during a match against Tasmania in order to analyse what was going wr
ong with his bowling action, which he estimated to be at ‘around 70 per cent’ of its pre-injury effectiveness. Deciding that his newly shortened run was the problem, he slipped himself in the Tasmanian second innings, taking four for 44 as a result. In the Sheffield Shield final between New South Wales and Queensland at Sydney, a tactical duel broke out between Imran on one side and Allan Border on the other. At the time the latter had scored 45 in an innings of calculated savagery, and looked set for many more. As he came in to bowl his first ball of a new spell, Imran abruptly halted in mid-run, ostentatiously studied the field and then loudly requested his captain, Wellham, to ‘just move that man there’ — John Dyson — ‘a foot to his left’. Everyone waited while Dyson fractionally altered his position at third slip. Seemingly as an afterthought, Imran then called down the pitch for the man in question to take an additional half-step backwards. Meanwhile, Border continued to lean on his bat, watching the manoeuvres going on in front of and behind him with a show of disinterest. After two or three further minute adjustments, the field was eventually set to Imran’s satisfaction. The next ball he bowled slanted across the left-handed Border, took the edge of his bat and flew directly to Dyson, who held the catch. New South Wales went on to win the final by one wicket.
In between his playing commitments, Imran regularly flew home to Pakistan, where his mother’s condition had worsened. It did not help that she had been misdiagnosed as having only a ‘mild stomach bug’ when initially seeking treatment in Lahore. Sadly, Mrs Khan’s case wasn’t untypical of a country where cancer was widely regarded as the ‘great dread’. Treatment was often late, usually faulty and almost always primitive; thanks to government fiat, painkillers such as morphine, even used medicinally, remained illegal. ‘It was the most traumatic and painful period of my life,’ Imran repeated in several interviews. ‘My mother was sick for six or seven months and suffered terribly at the end.’ In the next bed in the hospice where she was eventually taken lay an old man, also suffering from cancer. He was visited each night by his brother. Imran made enquiries and learnt that the brother, himself in his seventies, was working as a labourer to be able to pay the medical bills. The system itself was ‘sick’, Imran concluded.
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