It’s worth dwelling on Imran’s stature once more, if only to show the contrast between the scale of the stage he occupied internationally, and the one he operated on back in Sussex. After playing in front of a full house in the gladiatorial atmosphere of Bombay or Bridgetown, it was always going to be difficult to rise to the occasion on a wet afternoon in Horsham. In the event, the county offered Imran a contract which bound him to one-day games but to only a handful of championship matches of his own choosing. ‘It soon became something of an embarrassment to the club,’ reports Wisden. One of his senior Sussex colleagues put it to me more strongly: ‘By then, it was pretty clear we were just a pit stop on the grand prix of Imran’s career. He handpicked [his] appearances, which was probably better than his not playing at all — he was still a great all-rounder — but wasn’t an absolutely genius move in terms of team morale.’ Compounding the problem, Sussex were in a state of some disarray, having changed their captain, coach and club secretary and lost Garth le Roux, Dermot Reeve and no fewer than five other first-team players over the previous 15 months. As Imran remarks, ‘The side I came back to in 1988 wasn’t a shadow of the one I left two seasons earlier.’ In retrospect it might have been better for all parties had he made a clean break from the club immediately after their winning the 1986 NatWest Trophy, thus ensuring he left English first-class cricket while still at the top.
Among others on the county circuit, attitudes were mixed. Although an ‘imperious bugger’, as his ghostwriter remarked, Imran could also be the charmer, gliding smoothly across the social classes. ‘Educated at Aitchison and Oxford, equally at home in Islamabad’s presidential palace as at Tramp, he can mix it with all sorts,’ according to the Sunday Times. If you were a player, an official or even an ordinary fan at another English county, the chances were that Imran would be friendly, considerate and interested in you individually. To a long-serving ground supervisor at Lord’s named Gus Farley, who’d ‘seen it all’, he was ‘alert, sharp … he looked good, very vigorous, very strong’, but, more importantly, he was a ‘diamond’ who ‘remembered people’s names and signed their autographs’. A self-styled ‘security consultant and VIP courier’ who sometimes took Imran to and from the airport told me:
Most people, after arriving off a long-haul flight, come in the terminal like zombies. They can barely make it to the door … Now, here’s a guy, you had to move when he moved. And he moved fast! He’d trot by with a couple of bags, and you had to catch up. I knew when I met Imran I had to be on my toes, because otherwise he’d be out the door and probably jogging half-way down the M4 before you’d missed him.
Imran returned to Sussex in time for a Sunday league game against Gloucestershire in early May. It was raining. Opening the Sussex batting he scored 6, and then took no wickets in the abridged Gloucester innings. After that he was in action against Middlesex at Lord’s, where David Constant was one of the umpires. Imran made 71, but was again wicketless. ‘The sting had gone,’ one of the opposing Middlesex batsmen assured me. ‘I couldn’t believe how much he’d lost from only a year earlier. He still had the model action, but he was about as fiery and hostile as my granny.’ Imran was back at Lord’s for a county match at the end of May. He took five for 50 off 22 overs in the one Middlesex innings, ‘bowling’, said the Cricketer magazine, ‘with a speed and skill that tested all the batsmen, and physically damaged at least one of them’.
Still, Imran’s all-round prowess was unpredictable, and his chutzpah now sometimes fell a bit flat. On 19 June, Sussex narrowly won a Sunday league game against Leicestershire at Grace Road. Imran under-performed. Three days later Sussex hosted Derbyshire in the NatWest Trophy first round at Hove. Tony Pigott remembers Imran drawing him aside on the way into the ground ‘and announcing with great conviction, “Forget about [Leicester]. I’ll get a hundred here today.”’ In the event, he was to fall somewhat short of his boast. Imran came in to bat at 11.07 and departed again at 11.09, not having troubled the scorers. The destroyer was his old rival Michael Holding, whose return of eight for 21 was then the best in any English limited-overs competition. It was a poignant moment, according to Pigott, ‘because you sensed Imran couldn’t just turn it on at will any more’.
He did a bit better the following Sunday, scoring 50 and taking three wickets against Warwickshire. On figures he was just about holding his own in the county side, although that may not have been his main value to Sussex. Exact totals are hard to establish, but a well-placed source at Hove believes that ‘there were still at least two or three hundred extra bums in seats whenever Imran was playing, most of them female’ — statistically significant for a ground only holding some four thousand. On 24 July he was in the side for a one-day tie against Northants, who included the 39-year-old Dennis Lillee in their ranks. Imran took one for 24 and Lillee managed one for 18. Two days later, the same teams finished a miserably wet championship match at Northampton. Although no one knew it at the time, it was to be Imran’s last professional appearance in England, coincidentally against the same opponents as his first one had been 17 years earlier.
As county cricket grew less riveting, dealing with the media became a positive chore. It sometimes seemed that Imran was more concerned about and angry with the press than with his on-the-field opponents. In England, the continuing obsession was with what Today called the ‘swarthy Khan’s’ love life. Quite apart from taking the opportunity to run a whole series of pictures of young women in short skirts, the press generally spun their headlines to depict an England that was fine with multiculturalism — ‘many of his best friends are fledgelings from our oldest established families [and] fully respect his beliefs’, an anonymous insider assured one Sunday paper. At the same time, some of the more sneering coverage was designed to imply that Imran, a mere cricketer with no great financial prospects, was supposedly getting above himself in ‘openly seeing toff author Susannah Constantine, the on-off flame of Viscount Linley’. Many of Susannah’s well-heeled friends were ‘amused’, it seemed. Clearly there was only so much goodwill to go round, and now that the likes of Today were becoming so laid-back about race it was apparently still all right to raise ‘the inevitable questions [about] circumstances and compatibility’, which might just conceivably have been taken as the code for ‘class’. In Pakistan, of course, Imran had long since grown used to being treated as everything from a secular saint to a national pariah. No wonder that when his friend Fareshteh Aslam announced she was thinking of becoming a cricket writer, he told her, ‘You have no idea just what a filthy business it is’, and, having said that, ‘supported and encouraged me by giving me access to the Pakistani team’.
In the summer of 1988, Imran became the latest celebrity to invade his own privacy by publishing what the accompanying handout called his ‘full and shockingly frank’ memoir All Round View. It sold some 23,000 copies in its hardback edition, which is around 20,000 more than many cricket autobiographies. Imran’s views on the English establishment in general and more specifically the Test and County Cricket Board probably weren’t improved when the latter formally reprimanded him and banned his book from sale at certain outlets on the grounds of its ‘unacceptable’ criticism of David Constant, among others.
On 31 July, Sussex were due to play a 40-overs Sunday league match against Glamorgan at Eastbourne. Some small discrepancy exists as to why exactly Imran arrived at the ground as late as he did. Jonathan Mermagen told me that it had been down to a combination of ‘making a punctual start from Badminton, but then running out of petrol on the way’. Tony Pigott, who was playing at Eastbourne, believes his sometime team-mate ‘had been at a party in Gloucester the night before and, not untypically, misjudged the time’. Imran himself recalled that ‘it was the middle of a bank holiday weekend’ (which wasn’t the case) ‘and the road was busy’. Whatever the cause, the result was that the Sussex players went out on to the field without their star all-rounder. Just as the first ball was about to be bowled, Tony Pigott looked up to see ‘a r
ed-faced Immy chugging across the ground carrying his cricket bag’ to confer with his captain Paul Parker — who told him that he wouldn’t be playing. Although Imran’s ‘unreserved’ apology was accepted, the following morning the club announced that he would not appear again until the last match of the season. In the event he missed that one, too, owing to injury. It was the end. In his 11 years at Sussex, Imran had scored 7,329 first-class runs and taken 409 wickets, as well as putting several thousand paying customers in their seats.
‘It was a sad way to go,’ says Wisden, a view broadly endorsed in the press as a whole. But was it? Imran himself saw the break as the ‘natural and inevitable’ outcome of a growing disenchantment with English county cricket that had set in as far back as 1981, when Sussex had finished as runners-up in the championship. A theme throughout his time at both Worcester and Hove had been his low boredom threshhold and aversion to merely going through the motions in certain late-season matches. He’d found the playing atmosphere altogether more congenial in Australia, where the domestic competition was geared more towards producing results than long-term job security. ‘When I finally finished in England, I asked myself why I hadn’t done so years before,’ Imran recalls. ‘Cricket was my passion, and the idea of it being a routine job just didn’t appeal to me.’ Paul Parker also discounts the ‘Eastbourne saga’, which he sees as only the last milestone of a ‘very long road both for Imran and the club … By then it seemed to me that although the committee wanted him around for the gate money and the sponsors, it was a step backwards to actually play him in the team. What happened was a natural winding down of a great career.’
Had he wished, Imran could have gone into the political bully-pit in 1988, nearly a decade before he actually did so. In discussing various sinecures late that spring, President Zia had given a colleague to understand that ‘the country’s number one hero’ was of old Pathan stock, the son of a hard-working father and a late patriotic mother, that he was a fresh face in Pakistani party politics and, not incidentally, ‘was known himself to be an honest and honourable man’. Strong credentials under any circumstances, but ideal for what the president had in mind when he decided to form a committee of ‘intellectuals, scholars, ulema, journalists and distinguished others’ to act as a national brains trust, answerable to himself. Imran in turn described the president as ‘not exactly a friend because he was the Head of State’, but plainly someone for whom he felt a mutual respect. It’s unclear whether there was ever a formal job offer, and if so whether Zia saw his national cricket captain as a ‘real executive [or] just as window dressing’, as a Pakistani team rival put it. According to one biographer, in the weeks following his de facto retirement from Sussex, Imran went to the trouble of consulting a clairvoyant, who told him that he would be assassinated if he went into politics. Later that month, on 17 August 1988, a military plane carrying Zia, as well as most of his senior generals and civilian advisers, and the American ambassador to Pakistan, crashed shortly after take-off from the airfield at Bahawalpur, south of Islamabad. There were no survivors.
In somewhat strained circumstances, Australia’s sixth tour of Pakistan got under way a fortnight later. Imran declined to participate. In explaining his decision he told the press that it was absurd to play cricket in September’s summer-monsoon conditions simply because it suited the two boards; and, besides, he didn’t think that the Australians were good enough to win a series in Pakistan. He was right: Javed’s side took the three-Test series 1–0. There were umpiring rows and crowd disturbances throughout. In Imran’s absence Iqbal Qasim returned for Pakistan and was his team’s leading wicket-taker. After that, he would never represent his country again.
In private, a number of the Australians expressed the view that Imran had been a touch de haut en bas (I sanitise somewhat) in refusing to come out and play against them. The Pakistani public, meanwhile, were as confused and divided as were its cricketers. A widely quoted opinion poll of 12 October showed that 53 per cent wanted Imran to return as captain, while 44 per cent were opposed. At least one elderly Lahore man in the former camp was prepared to illustrate his views by going on hunger strike. In Karachi, only 13 per cent favoured replacing Javed. Given the contradictions of their national selectors, it was small wonder the public were nonplussed.
In due course the domestic media again dusted off their career obituaries. As many of them were at pains to point out, competitive nerve tends to be a wasting asset. At 36, Imran was thought unlikely ever to return to his peak form, and what’s more he apparently wasn’t going to give himself the chance. In Pakistani sport, however, things are rarely as straightforward as they first seem. ‘The board asked me to continue after the Australian series,’ Javed insists, ‘but Imran wanted the job back. Things could have turned ugly. I had stepped aside before to accommodate Imran and I did so again.’
A measure of the Imran manner and outlook was the way he conducted his irregular but lively meetings with the BCCP, generally speaking one of the more memorable events in the bureaucrats’ diaries. ‘You might as well have been negotiating with a cyclone,’ one of the now retired board members recalls. In a break from the precedent set by other captains, Imran was ‘prodigiously intelligent, opinionated and determined. He once announced that he would argue the merits of a particular player all day if necessary to ensure his selection, and proceeded to do so.’ The official, who was himself ‘not punctual’, he cheerfully admits, also notes of Imran, ‘The calls on his time were always quite obvious, and we were never sure if we would speak uninterrupted. When he excused himself for just a minute, he would sometimes be back half an hour or an hour later.’ The other board members could each tell their own stories of Imran’s exceptional diligence, the long hours he kept and the fact that he took the job ‘very, very seriously. He spent virtually every waking moment working at being captain, and wouldn’t settle for anything less than the team he wanted.’
Having sat out the Australian series, Imran now consented to lead Pakistan on their tour of New Zealand. This was conspicuously hard luck on Javed, who, whatever else one thinks of him, never gave less than his all to his country. It’s not clear to what extent Imran based his decision on popular demands for his return, or whether he simply relished the challenge. On balance, the latter seems more in character. Imran hadn’t played Test cricket against his fellow all-rounder Richard Hadlee since early 1979, when he, Imran, clearly hadn’t been firing on all cylinders. So there was a point to prove, which was probably motivation enough. From the start of his career, even when playing for county seconds or Under-19 sides, Imran had made a habit of doing it his way, against the wishes and even the orders of those above him, while displaying an equally healthy competitive streak when it came to the official opposition. The twin goals were independence and superiority, at whatever level he was operating. By now his life priorities may have changed, but his need to dominate was as strong as ever. In January 1989, a young Pakistani team-mate ventured, in a rare moment of conversational reflection as they were walking out to the Auckland nets together, to say to Imran, ‘Skipper, this will probably make you smile, but I have a curious feeling that you are heading for a very great triumph here.’ Imran simply gazed off into the distance and replied in a deadpan voice: ‘Yes, I do, too.’
On taking over from Javed, Imran had had a number of spirited sessions with the Pakistani national selectors. His confidence in his own judgement of his subordinates seems to have grown along with his disillusion with and contempt for the compromise option. Imran now took up the cause of a 16-year-old Lahore-based seam bowler named Aaqib Javed. Unsurprisingly, the BCCP mandarins had never heard of Aaqib, whose few first-class appearances to date had brought him six wickets at some 40 runs apiece. Despite these modest credentials, Imran insisted that the lad be included in the squad for the triangular Benson and Hedges ‘world cup’ in Australia, where the hosts disposed of Pakistan in the early stages. Aaqib took 10 wickets in the series, which was three more than Imran hims
elf. The young seamer then went on the tour of New Zealand, and would eventually play 22 Tests and 163 one-day internationals in the course of the next 10 years. On his retirement, Aaqib would say of Imran, ‘Once he was convinced about something, he would never retreat. Never.’
In a subsequent meeting, Imran further insisted on picking Shoaib Mohammad, the Karachi opener whose selection he’d vocally objected to five years earlier. Shoaib’s return was not met with great enthusiasm on the part of the selection panel. There was a brief but vigorous debate, which Imran reportedly brought to an end by announcing, ‘If he doesn’t go on the tour, nor do I.’ A witness to the scene remarks, perhaps superfluously, that Pakistan’s captain was ‘not a man to trifle with’. Shoaib duly went to New Zealand and responded with a batting average of 137.50.
In brief, the first Test at Dunedin was abandoned owing to a lake having formed on the outfield, and the second and third Tests were drawn. Wisden, departing from its proprietary brand of critical sangfroid, would deplore the ‘filthy language’ employed during the series. ‘It seemed that the tourists, sensitive to the claims that umpiring in Pakistan was questionable, set out to show that New Zealand umpires were also incompetent. That was the word used by the captain, Imran Khan.’ Other than that, the brief and ill-tempered rubber was notable only for a few individual knocks. Javed hit a nine-hour 271 at Auckland, again falling short of Sobers’s record. Imran became the third player after Botham and Kapil Dev to score 3,000 runs and take 300 wickets. In the two completed Tests his batting average was 140 and his bowling average was 28; Hadlee’s figures were 27 and 34 respectively.
Not, then, a glisteningly brilliant series. The personal coups no doubt gave Imran some pleasure and served to reassure him that he was still up to the job, but it’s very likely that nothing at this time brought him greater satisfaction than the news that the government of Punjab was to donate 8 hectares (20 acres) of wasteland on the southwestern outskirts of Lahore on which to build his cancer hospital.
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