Shaukat Khan eventually succumbed to her disease on 10 February 1985, aged 63. Imran seems not to have dwelt on his loss with any of his cricket colleagues in Pakistan or Australia, apparently preferring a process of internal grieving. Over the coming weeks he continued to show what a close friend calls the ‘most flagrantly unfashionable sense of self-restraint’. Back in Sydney, one team-mate claims that Imran didn’t even mention the matter to anyone until a radio reporter happened to enquire about his parents in the course of an interview. ‘I’ve just lost one of them,’ Imran said quietly. The team-mate reports that he ‘nearly fell off [his] chair’ at this revelation. Imran would remark that for the next two years he blotted out the memory of his mother’s illness, at which stage he decided to build Pakistan’s first public cancer hospital in her honour. In time this was to provide him with a somewhat different focus in life from the standard retired cricketer’s lot of doing commentary or running a pub.
Despite the obvious distractions, Imran enjoyed his one and only season for New South Wales. He was to compare the working environment (‘like me, passionate about cricket’) favourably with that of the English county championship. The state won not only the Sheffield Shield but also the 50-over McDonald’s Cup, a notable double for a team the Sydney Herald had greeted in a banner headline as ‘LOSERS’ just a year earlier. From a cricketing point of view, he achieved everything that he and his employers could have hoped for. Off the field, the reviews were perhaps more mixed. Richie Benaud felt that Imran did all that was expected of him, and was ‘always happy to pass on to his team-mates the valuable information of the correct positioning of the seam and the shiny side of the ball’ to effect the mysteries of reverse swing. One of the team-mates in question, the 19-year-old Steve Waugh, remembers rooming with Imran on a six-day trip to play Queensland in Brisbane. ‘I wondered if I had been chosen as a promising all-rounder or a potential secretary,’ Waugh recalls. ‘Imran really was a legend, to the point that I was so busy answering enquiries about his availability that I didn’t have time to get nervous about the match.’ (In the event it rained almost continually.) With some restraint, Waugh adds merely, ‘I wasn’t a priority for Imran.’ He was perhaps more attentive to his senior colleagues, with one or two of whom he would occasionally sit down to exchange technical chat. But what he chiefly seems to have enjoyed off duty was going out and being seen in public. At the end of the season, Imran threw a star-studded party which moved from a downtown Sydney restaurant back to his penthouse flat in the city’s exclusive Connaught apartment complex. Steve Waugh watched as ‘for the first time in my life, I saw people using marijuana’.
Meanwhile, Zaheer captained Pakistan in a brief home series against New Zealand, another international relations debacle. Several of the Kiwis were later to remark that, so bad was the umpiring, they had effectively had to bowl the opposition out twice every innings. The visitors had to be persuaded not to leave the field after one particular decision went against them in the Karachi Test. A month later, the same teams met in yet another series, this time in New Zealand. The BCCP reappointed Javed as captain. In the course of a zonal match with Wellington, words were exchanged between Zaheer and Abdul Qadir when the latter made no attempt to stop the ball as it trickled past him to the boundary. The details of what followed are unclear, but it seems fairly certain that Zaheer remonstrated with his younger colleague, and that the two fell into a noisy quarrel. Qadir was then sent home from the tour. When Imran finally rejoined Pakistan in late February for a limited-overs competition in Australia, he found team morale ‘pathetic … There was no commitment or spirit left. Everyone was playing for himself because no one had any confidence in the selection process, and players were only interested in retaining their own places.’
On 22 March 1985, Imran appeared under Javed’s captaincy in the Pakistan team taking part in the four-nation Rothmans Cup in Sharjah. The press release touted this as a ‘unique’ and ‘thrilling … duel in the desert, featuring some of the world’s most finely honed athletes’. (This might have come as a surprise to the ‘willing but flat-footed’ 45-year-old Norman Gifford, who was captaining the England side.) To the former Test captain and latter-day sports writer Tony Lewis, by contrast, the tournament was all about teams composed of club cricketers with one or two superstars thrown in, ‘playing each other for a lot of money on a rough wicket. The whole event was run by what a well-placed Bahrain journalist described to me as the “spiv” element in Gulf sport.’
On his first appearance at Sharjah, Imran took a seemingly match-winning six for 14 against India. Back in Pakistan the hurriedly produced Karachi AP headline read, ‘The Lion of Lahore is back: Official’. Unfortunately, so were certain other characteristic aspects of Pakistani cricket. Set 126 to win, Javed’s team could manage just 87. Overnight, the once upbeat domestic news stories had to be hastily rewritten. To the AP, Pakistan’s ‘abject collapse’ was a ‘blot [and] a disgrace on a once proud escutcheon’. For the next two days, crowds in Karachi and Lahore took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction, and burn posters of the senior players.
As early as the first morning of Imran’s first home match back for Sussex, which happened to be against the Australians, colleagues noticed that he had ‘something about him’. For one thing he’d altered his bowling action, which now featured less by way of a whirling right arm as he went into his climactic leap. More significant, perhaps, Imran came back a more determined player than ever. ‘That was the first thing I marked,’ a senior colleague recalls. ‘Then, he’d usually wanted to win. Now, he always wanted to win.’ One of the earliest conversations he remembers that summer was one in which Imran factually remarked, ‘At 32 you’ve got more cricket behind you than in front of you. It’s no use even playing unless you put body and soul into it every time.’ He was as good as his word. Not many bowlers hope for glitzy figures when operating uphill into a stiff breeze, but in 21 overs of sustained hostility that day at Hove Imran took three Australian wickets, and would have had three more had the Sussex slips done their job. One had to admire the dignity and cool self-possession he showed when the various catches went down. Although in the heat of the Test match arena Imran had exposed his inmost feelings to the public gaze with an emphasis and frequency rare even for a Pakistani cricketer, now he just turned around and walked smartly back to his mark. The only visible hint of emotion was when he then adopted his pre-run crouch, always a sign that he meant business. One or two of the opposition looked distinctly put out to be bounced quite as often as they duly were, and, once again proving the cyclical nature of cricket, Imran wasn’t spared by the Australian quicks when it came to his turn to bat. Despite the barrage, he top-scored with an unbeaten 44 in the Sussex second innings, allowing his side to hold on for a draw with their last pair at the crease.
The Somerset batsman Nigel Popplewell attests to Imran’s ‘well-developed sense of competitiveness’ and ‘total lack of sentiment’ on the field, both characteristics which seemed to grow more pronounced the longer he went on. It’s a side of him several of his county colleagues recall fondly from the mid-1980s. ‘With Imran “good enough” wasn’t good enough,’ one team-mate writes. ‘“Show me a good loser,” Imran told two or three of us, “and I’ll show you a loser.”’ There was more in the same general motivational-talk vein. ‘Imran said it was all a question of “being willing to pay the price”. After a loss, he would say, “You’ve got to remember this feeling, because it’s not something you want happening again. You’ve got to hate to lose, and that means that once you do, then you fight harder.”’
Which brings us back to Popplewell, who at 28 was retiring from first-class cricket to go into the law. Nearly 25 years later, he would recall his swansong for Somerset, which came in a late-season Sunday league match against Sussex at Taunton. The visitors went into the game first equal in the points table. ‘The highlight of my day came when the Sussex fielders did me the honour of clapping me all the way to the wicket.’ Fro
m this gratifying start, ‘things seemed to go downhill from the minute I took guard [and] looked up to see Imran crouching into his run in the mid-distance. Something about his body language suggested that I shouldn’t expect any favours. Sure enough, the next few seconds confirmed that he wasn’t interested in giving me a generous final run. None of your typical “one off the mark …” Even though Imran was coming off a shorter run, he was still lightning and bowled me a couple of overs of absolute jaffers. Fortunately, I was so out of nick that I never got anywhere near them, and somehow managed to hang on for a few with Viv Richards to win the match.’ Another participant confirmed that Imran had given all the Somerset batsmen ‘the full treatment — inswingers, yorkers, bouncers, everything. He almost went berserk when Viv once stepped back and hooked him for four in the direction of the river.’ But, the same source adds, ‘Immy was also the first to saunter in and congratulate [Somerset] after the match, despite the fact that as a direct result, Essex, not Sussex, won the league that year.’
In an age when English county professionals were known to play as many as 120 days’ cricket of various sorts every summer, it seems almost wilfully eccentric that the world’s foremost all-rounder should appear in only a dozen county matches and a handful of one-dayers. Imran’s captain Johnny Barclay is one of those who thought him a ‘rhythm bowler’ who ‘need[ed] regular and prolonged competition to be at his best’. Another interested observer saw it slightly differently. ‘Like a carefully preserved vintage hot rod, Imran was still firing on all cylinders. You just don’t take a car like that out of the garage when you want to pop down to Tesco.’ In his abbreviated season, Imran took 51 first-class wickets at 20 apiece, and enjoyed a batting average of 68. A highlight came in early July, when he scored an unbeaten century and fired out half the Warwickshire side at Hove; after being worked over by Bob Willis and the rest on their previous meeting, he had a score to settle with them. Sussex finished seventh in the championship table and were never in the running in the knockouts.
No wonder, then, that the county committee wrote to enquire if Imran would perhaps ‘increase [his] playing commitment’ to the club in 1986. Most of his team-mates seem to have felt the same way. By now it must have borne in on them that, while he was never likely to be the first one down to the pub at the close of play, Imran remained a forceful and on the whole benign presence in the dressing-room. To the 19-year-old Neil Lenham, ‘Immy wasn’t a barrel of laughs, and lacked the nonstop heartiness of certain other players. He was intelligent. He read books. That isn’t to say he couldn’t gently take the piss out of you.’ Lenham remembers Imran appearing on the first day of the new season and ‘gravely informing the follically challenged Garth le Roux, “Don’t worry, my friend. Over the winter, I discovered a cure for baldness.”’ According to another Sussex player, ‘Imran made a little humour go a long way’.
The Chelsea bachelor pad and the glamorous friends were trappings of a lifestyle that marked Imran out from the field. Even other contemporary Test players were able to slip back into private life more or less unnoticed. Not him. Naeem-ul-Haque joined his friend and several other cricketers to watch a day’s tennis at Wimbledon that summer. ‘Coming out, Imran was surrounded by a crowd of several young women and had to break into a run to get away from them. It was all but a riot. My abiding memory is of Imran disappearing through the gate while the Australian bowler Geoff Lawson muttered, “Christ, it’s never like this when I go out in public”.’ For all the new-found sense of perspective his mother’s death and his own injury seem to have brought, there was still a trace of a self-confident, occasionally cocky nature when he was around people he had no particular need to impress. In the mid-1980s, the Sun briefly engaged Imran to contribute a wide-ranging series of articles on the state of world cricket. His ghostwriter on the paper considered him an ‘imperious bugger’.
The Test team that Imran rejoined in 1985 was a sorry sight.
Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the overall state of Pakistani cricket, and more particularly its administrative arm, left something to be desired. General Butt was to prove an only moderately capable president of the BCCP. Tacitly confirming that he cared little about cricket, and knew even less, he once asked Abdul Qadir why he bowled off such a short run when West Indians like Michael Holding and Joel Garner took such a long one. There seemed to be a perennial financial crisis at the top, and regular umpiring controversies on the field. The new board secretary, one Rafi Naseem, was a former soldier turned poultry farmer who was only partially successful in his alternative role as cricket administrator. Imran describes him as ‘a small-minded, self-righteous man [who] loved to throw his weight around’. When Pakistan played Sri Lanka that winter, Naseem had a friend of his appointed to umpire in the Test at Sialkot. Entirely coincidentally, Pakistan won by eight wickets.
In time, the board further overextended itself by seeking to meddle in Imran’s social life. Emma Sergeant made her second visit to Pakistan in late 1985, ostensibly to paint while her partner was playing cricket. Much fur was to fly over a published story that on the night before a subsequent one-day international with the West Indies in Peshawar, Imran and his guest had stayed in the same hotel room. A number of the reports were to quote a ‘senior board official’ as their source for this, to some, shocking exposé. In the months ahead, there were to be various other articles about Imran’s nocturnal activities, the most complete if not always balanced analysis of which was to be found in the Karachi Star. No doubt Naseem, not a man endowed with natural ambassadorial tact, and who was about to be forcibly banned from the Pakistan dressing-room, had an axe to grind. By most accounts, he and the other board members hadn’t even been staying in the hotel in question. However, the secretary at least seemed to have known his man in general terms, and little about his specific allegation, including his reported claim to have heard about it from another player, fails to make sense, unless one is flatly determined to refuse to believe that Imran at any stage in his playing career spent the night with a woman.
Whatever the merits of Naseem’s personal moral crusade, Emma Sergeant did apparently ‘tend to flag a bit’ when confronted by the sheer intensity of the emotions Imran stirred in the Pakistani public as a whole. These ran the gamut from near-religious adulation to the regular issuing of kidnap and death threats.* Another cricketer recalls seeing her standing by the door, while Imran worked a crowded reception room full of dignitaries and well-wishers, as if afraid to venture in. Even that small incident struck him as a sign that the couple were perhaps drifting apart. From Sergeant’s perspective, Imran might not have been ideally suited to the artistic but ordered home life to which she aspired. She wanted a partner, not a legend. Then there was the whole matter of the press and its ‘constant obsession’ with them, even in the laxer moral climate of Britain. Shortly after her return to London, Sergeant was to conclude that their cultural differences were too great. ‘The things that mattered to him didn’t matter to me, and vice versa,’ she remarked. After a suitable interval, Imran would be seen with the 27-year-old fashion guru Susannah Constantine, among others, whom he typically entertained at Tramp. As Emma Sergeant has good-naturedly observed, gossip columnists like Nigel Dempster ‘didn’t need to ring Imran, since he was usually sitting at the next table’.
In October 1985, the Sri Lankans arrived for a brief three-Test tour of Pakistan. While not in itself, perhaps, a sporting occasion of the first rank, the series was still marked by feverish domestic press interest and wildly enthusiastic crowds. On 15 October, the night before the first Test at Faisalabad, a mass meeting was held outside the Iqbal Stadium ‘to give expression to popular gratitude to one player — the King of Swing, for his signal services to Pakistan Test cricket in conducting the mighty Stars to victory’, in the muted report of the Daily Asas. At 33, some 21 months after last playing at that level, Imran was set to attempt the most difficult trick in sport — the comeback.
Although Sri Lanka were on something of
a roll, having just won a home series against India, the official opposition hardly mattered. Not for the first time, the Pakistan team were to prove their own worst enemies. Captained by Javed, the target of a players’ revolt three years earlier, the side also contained Shoaib Mohammad, whose selection had become a resignation issue for the home panel prior to the ill-fated Australian tour, as well as the now seemingly permanently disgruntled Zaheer (currently on the outs with his colleague Abdul Qadir), and Salim Malik, who after several well-publicised misunderstandings with Imran was to remark that ‘with no superstars in the side, we are happier’. A fairly representative Pakistani fighting unit of the time, in other words. They did well to beat the Sri Lankans 2–0. Imran took nine wickets in the second Test, and 17 in the series at an average of 15.94. It comes as no surprise to report that there were to be a variety of umpiring controversies. The visitors went home deeply aggrieved, a feeling the Pakistanis came to know all too well when they, in turn, toured Sri Lanka just three months later. At one stage in the latter series Javed was given out in what he considered a ‘pathetic’ decision, and then promptly ran into the crowd to remonstrate with a spectator who had thrown a rock at him. Salim later appeared on the field of play with a copy of Wisden in order to draw the officials’ attention to the current lbw law. After that General Zia had to get on the phone to both the team manager and the president of Sri Lanka to ensure that the tour continued.
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