It almost goes without saying that Imran remained a popular and diligent county professional, the sort who tended to go out jogging rather than sit around with his feet up during a rain delay. One admiring colleague recalls that he ‘put in longer hours and trained more intensely than anyone else’, even if ‘unlike the rest of us, he chose when or when not to actually play’. Intensity was clearly a theme for Imran, who also worked quite hard at his social life. A chronological rundown of some of the women he was popularly linked with after Emma Sergeant would include the actresses Stephanie Beacham and Goldie Hawn (a client of his stylist Dar), the Thane of Cawdor’s daughter Lady Liza Campbell, the Vogue ‘it girl’ Caroline Kellett, the Duchess of York’s friend Lulu Blacker, Susannah Constantine and a quite well-known journalist. The list isn’t exhaustive.
The intensity occasionally showed itself in other ways, too. For a professional sportsman who describes himself with some understatement as ‘competitive’, Imran had learnt to control his temper to a rare degree, indeed to use his anger as a spur, transforming it into an internal challenge to do better next time. He had a way of turning negative emotions into positive assets. Even so, like most cricketers he occasionally gave vent to his feelings on the field of play. Derek Pringle, the former Essex and England all-rounder, told me ‘Imran was aggressive but fairly straightforward. He did sledge, if nothing witty. I remember he once found himself bowling to a young opener for Essex called Mike McEvoy, who had the gall to face him without wearing a helmet. Immy told McEvoy he was going to “knock his fucking teeth out”.’
As the year wound down, politics heated up. Imran was fighting the board once again over team selection for the home series against the West Indies. The captain is reliably said to have shared his views with the panel about both Qasim Omar, who played in the series, and Shoaib Mohammad, who didn’t. The BCCP also ultimately agreed to Imran’s repeated request to appoint neutral umpires, and took the brave and somewhat quixotic decision to hire two officials from India, who were thought unlikely to be accused of any pro-Pakistan favouritism. In the event the only altercation came between umpire Reporter and the West Indies bowler Malcolm Marshall, who was unhappy about being no-balled in the Karachi Test. After a lively debate on the subject, the board also chose to play the Tests on pitches that were characterised by their uneven bounce, as reflected by the failure of any batsman, Viv Richards included, to score a hundred.
The playing conditions would become an issue as early as the first morning of the first Test at Faisalabad, when, on a minimally prepared pitch, Pakistan found themselves at 37 for five, with the ball skidding around erratically at what Javed Miandad describes as ‘variable’ height. All things considered, among them Salim Malik’s abrupt departure with a broken arm, the odds would have been against the home team reaching three figures. At that point Imran produced a captain’s innings which, on that malevolent trampoline, was as physically courageous as it was technically sound. His 61 off 75 balls began a spirited counterattack which saw Pakistan to the comparative respectability of 159. According to Javed, Imran was less than enthralled by Malcolm Marshall’s policy of bouncing him on average twice an over. ‘When the captain returned to the dressing-room he was fuming, and he told our guys to have a go at Marshall when he came out to bat.’ No one who played in the game or watched it, or who saw it on cable, or who listened to it on the radio, many of them in Pakistan’s most remote outposts, could have been left unimpressed by the subsequent assault. Between them, Imran and Wasim Akram bowled 46 of the most hostile overs imaginable, taking one for 32 and six for 91 respectively. Marshall spent most of his brief time at the wicket ducking under a succession of bouncers, and departed for only five.
To beat a side like that, Pakistan still needed to bat with rather more grit in their second innings. They did. The fightback was epitomised by a chanceless 66 by Wasim, and by Salim, who came out with his arm in plaster to face three overs from Marshall and Walsh. The tourists were left needing 240 to win in four sessions. A beamer from Marshall had split the index finger of Imran’s right hand, which made it painful for him to grip the ball. Despite the handicap, he disposed of both West Indian openers and took four for 30 in all; Qadir did the rest and Pakistan won by 186 runs.
The West Indies managed to score just 218 in the second Test at Lahore, with Imran taking five for 59. It was still enough for them to win the match by an innings, with two days to spare. Pakistan were bowled out for 131 and 77. Imran was soon back arguing with the board about his team’s batting line-up. To others, the captain himself was the issue. No deep psychological exercise was needed to predict that the Karachi press would again weigh in by calling for a change at the top, with Javed Miandad’s name being floated by the Star. Javed’s masterly batting at Lahore was a sparkling counterpoint to the domination of the West Indies fast bowlers. In the end Imran survived to take eight wickets, including a spell of five for 10 in six overs, in the third and final Test, which was drawn. It was another finish of such protracted drama that there were subsequently riots — of relief, presumably — in the streets outside the National Stadium. On the last day Imran was at the wicket with his side at 125 for seven, chasing 230, when bad light brought proceedings to an early conclusion. It was perhaps fortunate for Pakistan’s sporting reputation that it was the Indian umpires who took the brave, if justifiable, decision to call off play with nine overs still to be bowled.
A tense and somewhat schizophrenic series ended 1–1. Imran reports that he was ‘particularly proud of our performance [in] holding the strongest side in the world’. In other countries that might have been enough. In Pakistan, the three-way in-fighting between the board, the press and the team captain seemed almost automatic. The controversy took another twist following the West Indies series when the Kenyan-born batsman Qasim Omar went into print accusing his team-mates of discrimination, among a host of other offences. Omar was subsequently banned for seven years after making hotly denied charges of drug abuse against Imran. Equally unproven claims that ‘senior colleagues’ had both engaged in match-fixing and accepted prostitutes as bribes resurfaced some 15 years later. ‘The other Pakistan players couldn’t cope with my popularity,’ Omar informed the BBC.
Spurious allegations from inside the team were the least of it. Just weeks after the West Indies series, Imran was in Australia to take part in the four-nation Benson and Hedges Challenge, a 50-over tournament designed as a sideshow to the America’s Cup. Pakistan lost to England in the final. As he came off the field in Perth, Imran was told that the BCCP had announced the squad for the coming full-scale tour of India in his absence. He was not pleased. ‘I was sorry at how Imran and the board went at each other,’ a well-placed source remarked. ‘It was a total communication breakdown [and] not just about team selection. There was a basic personality clash. Imran thought the board were inept, and they thought he was a control freak compared to previous captains. And in a sense, they were both right.’
* One popular advertising billboard prominently displayed in Pakistani bus and train stations in the late 1980s showed a chiselled-looking profile of Imran with dozens of men, women and children lying prostrate at his feet. Although not sanctioned by him, it wasn’t untypical of the personality cult at the time.
SEVEN
The Contrast Principle
Pakistan’s five-Test tour of India in early 1987 was the fourth series between the arch national rivals in as many years. On this occasion, there seems not to have been any falling off in public interest in the result. When the Pakistanis arrived in Faridabad on 23 January, there were more than a thousand students milling about, shouting derisively, carrying unwelcoming signs, and raising a regular cry of ‘Death to Islam’. As Imran led his team into the Mayur Stadium, those in the rear of the crowd began throwing oranges, coins and the odd small rock. Not for the last time, the police were called on to ensure the visitors’ safe passage. The tour in general became a rallying-point for critics of Pakistan’s disputed claim to
Kashmir, and for an assortment of other long-term grievances. According to Wisden, ‘The touring team were subjected to a harrowing time by the crowds in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, where any convenient missile was thrown at the Pakistani players. However, the captain’s sporting approach to the niggling problems which occur on a tour of India helped keep matters from getting out of proportion.’ Another journalist would watch in admiration as, some 10 weeks later, Imran, having disposed of the few specific cricket points, then fielded questions of a broader cultural nature in the tour’s final press conference at Jamshedpur. ‘He was a model of good sense and statesmanship. Everything was fine. India was a wonderful country … Although [the interview] itself was eminently civilised, that was not true of the streets outside. Spit, fruit and pebbles again rained down on the building.’ It would of course be quite wrong to say that the entire tour took place in a hostile working environment, or that the relations between the two teams were generally anything less than cordial. But even so, the combination of diplomatic, tactical and playing responsibilities was enough to reduce Imran’s weight by almost a stone.
The travel writer Mark Shand accompanied Imran in India and thought him a born leader, who kept himself somewhat apart from his men. ‘I always felt he was a proper sort of captain, a bit aloof with very strict ideals. He was a jot higher than the others in the dressing-room.’ A general consensus was that Imran could be stubborn to the point of obduracy when it came to his preference for some players over others. An obvious case in point was that of his protégé Abdul Qadir. The Lahore spinner had appeared in 41 Tests, turning in some undeniably deft performances without ever quite threatening to become a consistent match-winner, and simultaneously running up a disciplinary record of some note. Conversely, Saeed’s brother Younis Ahmed, the 39-year-old batsman who had last represented his country in 1969, now returned to play twice in India. After his second appearance he complained of a sore neck and was ordered back to the team hotel to rest. Instead, Younis went to a disco. Imran ensured that he never played for Pakistan again. Javed Miandad recalls another occasion on the same tour when even his captain’s single-mindedness apparently gave way in the face of a sustained debate. ‘Before the Bangalore Test Imran had determined to play Qadir rather than Iqbal Qasim. I knew that Qasim would be far more effective on that track, and urged Imran to change his mind. It became a testy exchange and I finally ended up invoking God and country before Imran relented.’ Qasim took nine wickets in that match, which Pakistan won.*
For the most part, the first four Tests of the series had reflected the largely sullen atmosphere in the stands. Anyone familiar with the facts of England’s tour of India under Keith Fletcher five years earlier, once described as the cricketing equivalent of a coma, has only to think of that grim series, but played on even worse pitches, to get a feel for the occasion. The basic pattern was for the Indians to run up huge first-innings totals which would put pressure on Pakistan batsmen forced to cope with slow, turning wickets and umpiring that was not of the very highest calibre. Just 21 wickets fell in the course of the first, drawn Test at Madras. Imran scored a deliberately paced century, his third and highest in Tests to date. Wasim Akram came in to join his captain when the latter’s score was in the upper twenties. An hour and a half later Wasim was out for 62, by which time Imran had moved on to the mid-forties. His eventual 135 not out included five sixes and 14 fours and took six-and-a-quarter hours in all, which suggests he thrashed the bad balls and otherwise put up a brick wall of Boycott-like solidity. Three days later, the teams regrouped in Calcutta, to produce the same result. Sunil Gavaskar declined to play because of his past treatment at the ground, bringing to a close his run of 106 consecutive Tests. If the home crowds were thought hostile to India’s greatest batting hero, they were unlikely to be well disposed to the Pakistanis. The visitors duly came under a continual shower of asterisked abuse. Imran was not at his best, taking none for 93 in India’s one completed innings.
Gavaskar returned for the third Test at Jaipur, marching out under a huge electric sign proclaiming ‘10,000 RUNS — AND MANY MORE TO COME’. He was out, off Imran, first ball. The Pakistanis’ reaction to the dismissal was not notable for its restraint, with at least one reported reference to the outgoing batsman’s immediate family. From this point on, the playing atmosphere began to deteriorate rapidly. There were a number of incidents of gamesmanship, with both sides apparently competing to be the more flamboyant in their appeals. When the Pakistanis arrived for play on the third day, which followed the rest day, they found that rain had seeped under the covers. There was a ‘football-sized’ damp patch to one side of the pitch on a convenient length for the Indians’ left-arm spinner Maninder Singh. Elsewhere the wicket appeared to have been sprinkled with sawdust, which the Pakistanis claimed had been used to dry the turf, in contravention of the Laws. The ground authorities countered that the ‘foreign matter’ must have been blown there by the wind. It was possibly this sort of thing that Wisden had in mind when it referred to the ‘niggling problems’ that can occur on a tour of India. In the almanack’s account, ‘the umpires then dragged their feet over a resumption as Imran threatened to refuse to bat, and eventually defused the situation by abandoning play for the day’, thus condemning the match to another draw. Perhaps unsurprisingly, crowd trouble ensued in the fourth Test at Ahmedabad, where the Pakistani outfielders were pelted with rocks. Six of them subsequently took the field wearing crash helmets. Imran had earlier scored a three-and-a-half-hour 72. Quite apart from his bowling, he was now about as solid a batsman to be coming in at No. 7 or 8 as anyone in recent Test history. His first-class average in India was a shade under 60. After the Ahmedabad Test — another draw — Kapil Dev issued a statement blaming his opposite number for ‘negative cricket’. An indifferent Imran replied that Kapil was just deflecting criticism of the Indian team’s failure to force a result. In his private rebuttals, he laid it on a bit thicker, labelling some of the playing conditions ‘subnormal’, and remarking that even good home umpires were no substitute for neutral ones. A Pakistani cricket figure familiar with both players provided a blunt and critical assessment of the Imran-Kapil relationship when he told me that the latter, though a fine all-round performer, didn’t care for the ‘constant gibes about how good-looking Immy was compared to himself’.
The final Test, at Bangalore, coincided with the Hindu ritual of Holi, or spring festival. To enliven the proceedings several of the Indian players took the field in beads and brightly coloured face paint. The cricket was also appreciably more vibrant. After nets the previous evening, Imran had reportedly taken Iqbal Qasim aside and told the Karachi spinner that his services wouldn’t be required in the match. ‘I thought it was the end of my Test career,’ Qasim remarked, ‘and asked the captain if he would at least turn up at my benefit games. He said he would.’ After a muscular debate with Javed, Imran reversed himself, apparently, just 20 minutes before play began. Qasim took five for 48 and four for 73 in the match, which Pakistan won by 16 runs to record their first series win in India. It was one of the great unifying moments in the nation’s 40-year history. An estimated quarter of a million fans were jam-packed on to the streets of central Lahore, screaming and tearing at their hair, to welcome their cricketers home. It was a scene of Beatlemaniacal proportions. As far as it could be judged, the crowd’s consensus favourites were Imran, Javed and the ‘destroyer of nations’, Iqbal Qasim. Whether the reported chanting of ‘Death to India’ was apocryphal or not, it summed up the sentiments of many of those present.
Two days after the Bangalore Test, Imran informed Qasim that he would not be included in the tour of England that summer. Or, at least, not in a playing capacity. Instead, the captain offered to find him an administrative role as what was officially called ‘assistant manager’, and which was reliably described elsewhere as a ‘net wallah and bellboy’. In the event he never played a Test under Imran again. ‘I felt disappointed,’ Qasim remarked with some understatement. ‘I was
never sure why Imran did not have much confidence in me. I admired him greatly … Abdul Qadir is a good friend and a great spinner and I was always very happy for him and the faith Imran had in him.’
In the round-robin Sharjah Cup which followed the India tour, Pakistan again beat their eastern neighbours in the match billed as the final. Thanks to the tournament’s inscrutable rules, it was actually the unfancied English who won the trophy by virtue of their superior run-rate. On the flight back to London, Imran sipped milk and savoured his recent triumphs. After Bangalore, even the Star had taken to billing him on its back page as ‘Super-Khan’. Elsewhere, he was variously ‘the lion’, ‘the king’ or ‘the miracle worker’. At 34, and about to enjoy his benefit year, Imran was clearly nearing the end of his international career. Under his captaincy, Pakistan had seen off both India and Australia and tied a series against the West Indies. After he landed at Heathrow, Imran told waiting reporters that he had just two small sporting ambitions left. ‘I want to beat England and win the World Cup,’ he said.
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