For all that, Imran was back. In contrast to other recent series, the Sri Lanka Tests were well subscribed by home fans, more especially so by the young and female ones. A professional appreciation for the ‘Lion of Lahore’ often brought with it a more personal component. Judging from the various slogans on display at the Tests, a significant proportion of Pakistani women related to Imran in much the same way their opposite numbers in the West had done to the Beatles or their various doe-eyed successors. Banners held aloft at subcontinental cricket grounds were nothing new, but it’s hard to imagine them having been quite as enticingly customised in the past as they were now. Predictably, not everyone was delighted by this renewed outbreak of the ‘cult of Khan’, as it was called in Dawn. Just as he had three years earlier, a religious leader, Dr Israr Ahmed, complained that mosque attendance suffered when cricket matches were shown on television. He went on to note that Imran’s practice of rubbing the ball on his trouser leg ‘had a sexually stimulating effect on the feminine populace’. Dr Ahmed’s reproach was one of several reactions to the man who had become the most polarising public figure in Pakistan. By around 1986, a wide gap had opened up between what could be called the cricket establishment and the mass of ordinary fans who actually paid to watch the game. To many of the professional administrators and others, Imran had simply become too important for their own good. It was an axiom among the press, generally reflecting a Lahore-Karachi split, to be either ‘proKhan’ or ‘anti-Khan’. Only the public, it seemed, could hold in its head simultaneously the ideas that Imran had grappled with the unique challenges of Pakistan cricket; that he was occasionally wilful; and that, on the whole, he deserved all the credit he got.
Shortly after the home Test procession against Sri Lanka, Javed again opted to resign the captaincy in Imran’s favour. Here some small discrepancy exists between the two men’s versions of events. Writing in his autobiography All Round View, Imran notes matter-of-factly, ‘Javed had faced severe criticism for his handling of the team in the three one-day defeats to India early in 1985: he chose to go and I was appointed in his place.’ Javed’s own account seems to imply a notably less consensual process. ‘I had the chance of continuing as captain, but decided against it,’ he says. ‘I did so because Imran didn’t give me his full cooperation in that [Sri Lanka] series, and it was a great disappointment for me … As captain, I would tell Imran to bowl a certain way, but he refused … He didn’t observe cricket discipline … After that experience, I decided never to captain Pakistan if Imran was also playing. What would be the point if I couldn’t rely on my leading bowler to fall in with my plans?’ Neither of these versions, it’s fair to add, entirely squares with what Imran told me in 2008, which was that the whole thing was down to the BCCP, ‘who basically treated the captain like their employee, and generally hired him for only two years … There was no such thing as job security.’ As before, Javed resigned after a winning Sri Lankan series and, as he puts it without any pretence of enthusiasm, ‘fell in line’ behind his successor; a somewhat strained transition.
As captain, Imran nonetheless did a creditable job of leading a team who frequently seemed to be fighting among themselves as much as they were against the opposition. Sarfraz and now Zaheer had both retired, but in players like Abdul Qadir and Qasim Omar, as well as the twice-deposed Javed, Pakistan were blessed with men as individually opinionated as they were talented. Although Imran made no intimate friends, he had ‘good working relations with nearly all the side’, with the significant exception of Salim. (Shoaib Mohammad would be rested pending a recall to tour India in 1987.) Imran’s primary challenge remained dealing with the home board. Rafi Naseem was perhaps the most obvious but by no means only example of the amateur-hour approach that seemed to typify the BCCP in its various duties: this was the man whom Imran twice evicted from the Pakistan dressing-room, as he wandered about fecklessly trying to cheer up the players, the second time nearly leading to a fist-fight. The metallic voice of General Butt called the shots on matters of ‘pressing strategic urgency’ (his team’s pay among them), while a constantly replenished pool of retired lieutenant generals, many unburdened by any knowledge of cricket, issued fussily annotated lists of the players and officials selected for each match. Another BCCP functionary chose a moment when Imran was sitting padded up waiting to go in to bat in a one-day international to walk up with his son and ask his team’s captain to ‘be a good fellow and collect everyone’s autographs’ for the boy. Imran signed his own name, but declined the larger request. The official reported him to the disciplinary panel. At the end of the series, Rafi Naseem appeared once again and handed Imran a piece of paper which stated that he was no longer captain.
In time, the BCCP convened an inquiry committee, reportedly to look into the ‘breakdown of leadership and discipline in Pakistan international cricket’, while, it should be noted, acknowledging its star player’s contribution with the bat and ball. Its conclusions, in no particular order — they were interchangeable — were: ‘arrogant individualism of Imran Khan Niazi … un-cooperative … discourtesy … never known the necessity of following orders … inflexible … brazen … reputation … rumours … activities at night.’
Despite calling on an impressive number of witnesses and eventually producing a thick draft report, the inquiry committee failed to find a viable alternative to Imran. Javed was apparently sounded out about a possible third term in office but refused it. The 30-year-old Mudassar similarly declined the job. Most if not all the Karachi newspapers kept up a relentless drumbeat against Imran (as a captain, that was, not a player), summarised by one daily’s headline, ‘OUT!’ For all that, no one could actually come up with any specific allegations against the national captain, apart from his impossibly tasteless lapse of having an attractive English girlfriend. Perhaps that was enough. In Pakistan, cricketers are more than just cricketers. Pakistanis look to their sports heroes not simply for excitement and entertainment, but for a way of life. The clerics provide an unfailingly rigorous definition of good and evil. But it’s in the rare men like Imran that Pakistanis find their role models, people who are meant not just to play better but also to be better than ordinary mortals.
In the end Imran survived not only the BCCP inquiry, but most of the board officials. General Butt and several of his senior colleagues stood down in February 1988. Imran’s bte noire Rafi Naseem lasted only until 1986. On retiring he became an occasional journalist. Seventeen years later, Naseem himself fell foul of the BCCP’s successor, the PCB. In May 2003, the board council issued a writ against their former secretary claiming damages of Rs50 million (roughly £36 million) for ‘tarnish[ing] the reputation of the officials and officers by writing articles against them’. Naseem claimed free speech. Among other things, he was alleged to have called the chairman of the PCB a ‘petty dictator’.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case, whose outcome, if any, would remain sealed, and which elicited no further public comment, Imran perhaps had the last word in the matter. In July 1999, the PCB announced sweeping administrative reforms in which, among other steps, a council of professional officers, chosen by ballot, effectively replaced the old patronage system. Imran had campaigned for the abolition of the closed shop and the introduction of ‘free and fair’ elections more than a dozen years earlier.
Under Imran, Pakistan beat India but lost to the West Indies in the three-nation Rothmans Cup (not to be confused with the bi-nation Wills Series, or indeed the four-nation John Player Gold Leaf Trophy, both of which followed over the coming weeks) in Sharjah. Javed had broken his thumb shortly beforehand and had to be persuaded to make the flight. ‘The medical advice for me was not to play, but the captain would have none of it. He made a huge fuss about how I was indispensable to our batting. I, too, was conscious of my batting responsibilities and relented,’ Javed shyly admits. He scored 53 runs in the tournament.
Pakistan lost the subsequent home one-day series with the West Indies 3–2. It was a moral
victory of sorts, given that the visitors had just completed a ‘blackwash’ of England in one Test series, and were about to do so in another. Imran went straight from the awards ceremony to an appearance in front of the BCCP inquiry committee. Although the board had to be satisfied with passing a rule that allowed their officials access to the home dressing-room whenever they wanted, they were ‘a nasty lot of political manoeuvrers’, according to the former captain Javed Burki. In early January 1986, the writer and broadcaster Omar Kureishi raised an all-star team to undertake a brief tour of Bangladesh. Kureishi’s son Javed recalls that ‘Imran immediately agreed to go, which caused the president of Bangladesh to remark, “Oh my God, we’ll have to lock our women up.”’ Pakistan were due to make a two-month, three-Test tour of Sri Lanka starting in February. Despite feverish press speculation, the board did not decide to dump Imran; nor did they immediately decide to keep him. Instead they delayed their selection of the captain and players until just four days before the team’s departure. While awaiting developments, Imran happened to meet his old bowling partner Sarfraz Nawaz, who was by now both the husband of a Bollywood actress and an elected member of the Punjab provincial assembly. According to Sarfraz, ‘Immy was cheesed off with all the aggravation’ and at least tentatively considering an offer to play in Australia. It was almost as if the home board enjoyed the thrill of keeping both their team and the public in a state of suspense. On 12 February, Imran was formally reappointed as captain, and went to see the relevant BCCP committee in Lahore. When he returned from the meeting, one of the board officials, speaking on background, remarked to a journalist that ‘there was some lack of warmth’.
If so, the atmosphere turned positively glacial when the Pakistanis arrived in Sri Lanka, which happened to be undergoing a civil war. On the first morning of the first Test, the umpire Allan Felsinger turned down a spirited lbw appeal by loudly advising the tourists to ‘shut up’. He added that this was ‘not Pakistan’. The umpires later walked off the field, taking the players with them, after the hard-hitting Sri Lankan batsman Arjuna Ranatunga had been called a cheat by the Pakistani slips while on his way to a brief but action-packed score of 18. When Ranatunga then appeared in the visitors’ dressing-room to discuss the matter, he asked Imran to apologise on behalf of his team. Imran said that he would if the Sri Lankans also agreed to do so for their ‘provocative’ behaviour. Outside, the crowd grew restless. When the match eventually resumed, the tourists’ first four batsmen were then given out lbw with just 52 on the board. The on-field exchange of pleasantries continued, with numerous references both to the players’ parentage and to their female relatives. Pakistan’s eventual victory was made possible by their spin bowlers, who hit the stumps eight times in the Test, a feat beyond even the umpires’ ability to quibble.
In the second Test, Ranatunga was back in action, having mellowed somewhat in the intervening fortnight; this time he scored a match-winning 77 in a shade over five hours. With the third Test drawn, the series ended one-all. Imran took 15 wickets. ‘The hostility was unrelenting,’ he remarked. ‘Even the waiters in the hotel and the people in the streets were rude to us … The souring of a series due to an uncertain political situation wasn’t new to me, but on this tour it was as bad as it could possibly have been.’
Politics aside, Imran’s return as Pakistan captain was among the more successful second acts in the history of a nation whose secular idols, whether military or sporting, rarely seemed to retire gracefully. It also came at exactly the right time, given the nature of the forward-fixtures list. After the Sri Lankan trip Pakistan would host the all-conquering West Indies, then in short order tour India and England before taking part in the fourth World Cup, which was to be held in the subcontinent. In between times, Imran had commitments to play in a seemingly endless series of tobacco-sponsored one-day carnivals as well as a contract to fulfil at Sussex. A relentlessly full schedule for anyone, let alone a fast bowler approaching his mid-thirties. By the spring of 1986, Imran had achieved his immediate goal of seeing off the home board and its inquiry committee, and had re-established himself as a public personality. His picture was on patriotic posters. Everyone in Pakistan had heard about him as the comeback kid — ‘almost a case of reincarnation’, in General Zia’s only half-facetious view. People had read about his injury and seen pictures of him hobbling in and out of hospitals in London. Now they saw him back in Pakistan colours, and he looked just fine. He was aggressively resilient and unburdened by self-doubt; the image held for the rest of his cricket career — and beyond, into politics.
Imran’s immediate priority was a five-nation limited overs cup, played in Sharjah in April 1986 as part of the Cricketers’ Benefit Fund series. Pakistan won off the last ball of the final against India. An estimated television audience of a billion people were watching as Chetan Sharma ran in to bowl to Javed Miandad, with Pakistan still three runs adrift. Javed carted the ensuing full-toss over the midwicket boundary. The subsequent reaction back in Pakistan was, perhaps understandably, a trifle warm: a public holiday was declared, presidential telegrams were dispatched and, according to Omar Noman, ‘thirty-six songs were released on the theme of Javed’s six’. The batsman reports that on his triumphant return to the dressing-room, ‘the whole team was there. Everyone had tears in their eyes, including Imran. Two of the youngsters, Mohsin Kamal and Zulqarnain, were openly bawling. The atmosphere was enough to make anyone speechless, and I was.’ The winning team drove away in a convoy of honking cars with an ad hoc honour guard of several hundred motor-scooters intermingled with jogging pedestrians. It was another notable high on the emotional roller-coaster that Pakistani cricket had become.
For all that, Imran still hadn’t quite got back to fulfilling his principal function of bowling lightning fast for extended periods, which is why he readily accepted a tenth annual contract offered by Sussex. As his county captain had remarked, he was a ‘rhythm bowler’ who needed prolonged exposure to the three- and five-day versions of the game to perform effectively. Imran now embarked on what could be termed his Late Period at Hove, which may have brought his most personally fulfilling season at the club. Although lacking a yard of pace the sheer variety of his arsenal, which now included every known kind of cutter and swinger, made him a true attacking bowler, astute at adapting to conditions and capable, also, of containment. His colleague Tony Pigott remembers an early-season championship match against Middlesex at Lord’s.
Imran came in off a short run, and still fairly hurled it down. He had two of their guys out lbw off successive balls. After the second one we went into a team huddle, in the midst of which Immy looks up with a mischievous grin and enquires, ‘What shall I bowl next, guys?’ ‘Exactly the same again,’ we promptly tell him. The clear implication was that he could have just as easily sent down one of about half-a-dozen different balls, each of them as lethal as the next one. Meanwhile, over my shoulder, I can see the new Middlesex batsman coming in. He happened to be playing his first or maybe second ever match at that level, and let’s just say he didn’t look happy. The word ‘apprehensive’ would just about cover it. At that Imran strolls back, turns, takes a largely perfunctory run, and bowls the guy a devastatingly fast inswinging yorker. It’s totally unplayable. My memory seems to be of the middle stump cartwheeling out of the ground and nearly hitting our keeper on the way back. As we go into another huddle, Immy trots up and says, ‘Thanks, guys. I was thinking of giving him a bouncer, but that seemed to work.’
Imran took eight for 34 in the Middlesex second innings; Sussex won the match by seven wickets.
As we’ve seen, Imran generally rose to the occasion when playing at Lord’s. He seems to have enjoyed Edgbaston almost as much, it being the ground where he’d gone to hone his craft in the indoor school some 15 years earlier. Sussex appeared there to play Warwickshire in their last county match of the 1986 season. One of the fringe benefits of Imran’s shin injury was the opportunity his enforced layoff from bowling had given him to make
himself a better batsman. His innings on an overcast September morning at Birmingham was a case in point. He opened his account at a clip, driving Small straight for four with a full pendulum swing, and in the same over lashing him first bounce into the Thwaite scoreboard. Next he pulled the evergreen Gifford for six and, seemingly within moments of arrival, passed his 50 amid generous home applause. In all Imran scored 135 not out. Memory had to grope back a long way to recall an innings as simultaneously violent and classically correct as this was. Imran’s batting average that year was 48.66, on top of which he took 37 wickets in his nine first-class matches. Despite his all-round contribution, Sussex finished a dismal 14th in the table. Johnny Barclay retired, aged 32, and the captaincy passed to the wicketkeeper Ian Gould, who resigned after only one full season in charge, noting that the county needed two or three international-level seamers, a couple of top-quality batsmen and a class spin bowler if their position was to improve.
Sussex did, however, go all the way in the NatWest Trophy, beating if not actually trouncing Clive Lloyd’s Lancashire in the final at Lord’s. It was another of the pomp and circumstance affairs, with a capacity crowd and a television camera perched precariously on a crane at the Nursery end, that seemed to bring out the tiger in Imran. He certainly flung the ball at the wicket with impressive speed if, for once, no particular pretension to subtlety. Meanwhile, at the other end Dermot Reeve took four for 20 with his hitherto innocuous seam. The Lancashire batting was somewhat thin on paper, and never quite recovered from Lloyd being out for a third-ball nought. They managed 242 from their sixty overs. Imran came in to bat when Sussex, largely thanks to Paul Parker, had reached a solid but heavy-going 156 for two. The authority and power he immediately brought to the scene shook the match awake. He began so aggressively, carrying Allott high through the covers, that umpire Bird, standing at the bowler’s end, ‘thought it was all too good to last’. It did; Imran scored 50 not out, seeing Sussex home by seven wickets, with two overs in hand. Bird added that this was batting ‘of the top rank … Imran saw the ball early, had a nice sense of timing and was very straight. That match may have been the best I ever saw him play.’
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