Indeed Miandad was left out of the squad, and the players left for Australia without him. But he worked on his game, and the selectors were convinced that he was fit enough to go. In due course they announced him as vice-captain without the knowledge of either Imran or Salim Malik, who thought he was the number two. When Javed was put on the plane to Sydney, Imran did not know about his departure.
Reflecting on this, and the calibre of the Pakistan squad as a whole, one Karachi news organisation was to remark, ‘Imran’s men are the most complete fumblers and blunderers this nation has shipped overseas in a long time.’ But perhaps more representative were the millions of civilian cricket fans who remembered their team’s frustrations and despairing near-misses in four previous tournaments, and who believed that ‘the wheel [would] now finally turn’, to quote the state president. There was a certain burden of popular expectation. The Pakistanis’ campaign would take place over the course of five weeks, and involve up to 10 matches, in an event which for the first time brought together all the trappings of a modern limited-overs cricket competition — coloured clothing, floodlights, white balls, black sightscreens, and a bizarre ‘rain rule’ which famously reduced the semi-final between England and South Africa to a lottery. Imran was later to inform his hosts that their World Cup was the worst organised of the five in which he had played. His own tournament got off to a bad start when he tore his right shoulder in practice and missed Pakistan’s initial qualifying tie against the West Indies at Melbourne. In his absence, Javed led the side in what the AP called the ‘psychologically vital’ first fixture. West Indies won the match by 10 wickets.
A league phase had been introduced to the tournament’s opening rounds to sort the wheat from the chaff, and Pakistan’s early experience down under suggested that the system was working. The side which had swept all before them in Sharjah, winning five international competitions in four seasons, now struggled to dispose even of Zimbabwe. Although restored as captain, Imran neither batted nor bowled in that match. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of mediocre, low-stakes sport in the round-robin stages of the cup as a whole, which nonetheless generated thousands of hours of television and the equivalent in newsprint. As well as reporting on the actual play, media organisations such as the Fairfax Group were letting their women’s page editors loose on the cricket for the first time. Imran looked ‘tip-top … his hair perfect. When I found my voice, I asked him how the heck he stayed so young,’ one wrote. But even then the grilling wasn’t quite over. ‘My admiration and wonder at his laid-back way of looking at things, and his obvious rude health … reached a new high.’
Unknown to his interviewer, Imran was actually spending most of his off-duty hours strapped to a machine which sent electrical currents through his injured shoulder, while simultaneously swallowing painkillers and undergoing a daily course of cortisone injections to the torn cartilage. ‘I knew the agony he was in, but he never showed it,’ his team manager recalled. There appears to have been some question of whether he might even drop out of the team but remain in Australia as a non-playing captain, much as he had eight years earlier. But the reporter was at least right when she remarked on Imran’s essential optimism. The veteran Pakistani commentator Omar Kureishi would recall a ‘dark night in Hobart, when [our] side was in some disarray, and on the verge of being eliminated. With just three weeks to go to the final, the captain was still hurt and there were question marks about several other players’ form and fitness.’ Despite these concerns, Imran still ‘exuded a certain quiet confidence’ as he briefed Kureishi on the team’s prospects. ‘We will bring the trophy home,’ he told him.
Imran’s prediction showed commendable self-assurance given his side’s disastrous start to the campaign. ‘It’s hard now to understand how far down they were,’ Kureishi later observed. Pakistan ‘made just about the worst start of any team in the tournament’s history,’ winning just one of their five opening ties. Rock bottom probably came on 1 March, in a match against England at Adelaide from which Imran either dropped or rested himself. The Pakistanis were skittled out for 74, the lowest total by a Test-playing nation in any of the five World Cups to date. England were cruising at 24 for one in reply when steady rain began to fall and the match was declared void, with one point to each side. Later that night the Pakistan team straggled into their manager’s hotel room for what they assumed would be ‘the mother of all bollockings’, to quote a party who was present. Not for the first time in his captaincy, Imran defied convention. ‘Be as a cornered tiger, come out and fight,’ he announced to the assembled group. It was the same oblique advice he had once given a colleague in the Hove dressing-room. ‘Just bowl flat out; I don’t care about any wides or no balls,’ he added, in reply to a question from Wasim, and that completed the tactical talk. ‘The skipper was unshakeable’; he spoke in his ‘usual determined, skilful and spiritual way’, and ‘convinced almost everyone present in the room they could actually win’, according to the players’ quoted remarks. Imran was also realistic enough to know that the Pakistanis’ fate rested to a large extent on injuries, accident and luck — although since he believed the future of his hospital was also at stake, he may have felt a degree of divine providence was involved. The ‘overriding point’ was to ‘be ready [to] seize the ring’.
Imran’s fighting spirit also surfaced rather more literally with regard to Qamar Ahmed, the London-based journalist in whose flat he had been a frequent guest some 15 years earlier. ‘We were boarding the plane in Adelaide after Pakistan were saved by the bell against England,’ Ahmed recalls. ‘A certain Indian journalist had told Imran that I was talking rubbish about him in the press box. It absolutely wasn’t true. But obviously it left an impression. On the flight Imran wouldn’t talk to me, and when I asked why he became rude. Things deteriorated from there … We nearly came to punching each other [until] Miandad intervened and got hold of Imran and some Pakistan journalists dragged me to my seat. We didn’t talk to each other after that for another 10 years.’
Imran returned to the team for their matches against India and South Africa, both of which they lost. By now the home media was close to unanimous in writing the side off. ‘THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD’ was the headline in, curiously, both the Lahore and Karachi main morning press on 9 March, the day after the defeat by South Africa. Events, even Omar Kureishi believed, were ‘chipping away at Imran’s sanguine belief that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance’. Ladbrokes now offered Pakistan at 40–1 to take the cup. Still, not even the most gnarled journalist was making any firm predictions in what The Times called the ‘most open global competition of all’. England had the batting talent to win, if not quite the gumption or the hunger; having followed their one-day form of late, one somehow couldn’t see their campaign ending with a tumult of national merrymaking in Trafalgar Square. The holders and early favourites Australia found that for once they didn’t enjoy the playing resources to match their ample self-belief. The West Indies had omitted Richards and Greenidge from their squad, and spent most of the qualifying rounds coming to terms with the fact. Half-way through the tournament, the experts thought the most likely outcome was an India-New Zealand final, although South Africa, back in international competition after some 20 years’ isolation, remained the ‘sentimental favourites’.
The convoluted process by which Pakistan eventually beat the odds included three wins inside seven days against Australia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand. Then, in order for them to make the semi-finals, the results of two other matches in which they weren’t participating would also have to go their way. Improbably, both did. In their last qualifying match, England managed to lose to Zimbabwe, who were coming off a trot of 18 successive one-day international defeats. Graham Gooch’s side were bowled out for 125, with a Harare chicken farmer named Eddo Brandes taking four for 21. In an almost equally unlikely result, Australia rallied to beat the West Indies in a day-night fixture at Melbourne. When all the figures were totted up,
Pakistan, to general surprise, were found to have qualified for a semi-final tie against New Zealand. Everything had fallen in place to allow a side which had been widely thought down and out to advance to the knockout phase. ‘It was enough to make us feel we were being specially guided toward a great destiny,’ Javed remarks.
As noted, Imran was not at his personal best, having bowled just 44 medium-pace overs for six wickets in the contest to date. His shoulder had only partly responded to treatment, and he remained on a heavy regimen of cortisone shots which apparently also affected his batting, where he currently had an average of 16. There appears to have again been some debate within the Pakistan camp as to whether that was sufficient representation of his role as the ‘world’s greatest all-rounder’. In his 2003 memoir Cutting Edge, Javed writes, ‘As the World Cup was coming to an end, our team had become sharply divided off the field, Imran versus the rest.’ Some four years after his book’s publication, Javed went on to recall that the cup had nearly slipped through Pakistan’s fingers just prior to the semi-final because of a players’ revolt against their ‘domineering’ captain. ‘The mutiny took place before that [New Zealand] match. But to me the country was more important and I convinced the players to carry on,’ Javed adds. The opener Ramiz Raja later termed this account of events ‘absolute tripe’. He told the India Telegraph, ‘Actually, Miandad is perfectly qualified to talk about revolts. He saw three against him, the first when he was captain and twice when he was Pakistan coach.’
Imran gave a stirring, nothing-to-lose speech before the semi-final against New Zealand at Auckland, but then rather spoilt the effect by an indifferent bowling performance of none for 59 off 10 overs. The New Zealanders’ score of 262 was punctuated by a technically sound, if somewhat languid innings of 91 from their captain Martin Crowe. The 35,000 home spectators gave Crowe a rapturous standing ovation on his dismissal, and received a sheepish wave of the bat in acknowledgement. With 15 overs to go, the Pakistan reply stood at 140 for four, by which time the crowd were so confident of victory that they were chanting ‘Easy, easy’ as Inzamam-ul-Haq took guard. When Inzamam departed again, having clouted 60 in 45 minutes, the target had been reduced to 36 from five overs. Javed and Moin Khan duly finished the job. Pakistan won by four wickets, with six balls to spare. As Vic Marks recalled in the Cricketer, ‘As the final shot reached the boundary, the jubilant Pakistan team rushed on to the field and submerged the batsmen. Among them was the usually subdued Imran [who] was beaming like a Cheshire cat rather than a Pathan tiger.’ In the second semi-final, England defeated South Africa after the tournament’s rain regulations had made a farce of the run chase.
The build-up to the Melbourne final was, much like the match itself, a clash of styles: the efficient but dour automatons versus the mercurial, potentially implosive flair players. England spent much of the 48 hours before the game diligently bending, stretching, pumping iron and jogging around the outfield of their training park. Perhaps not coincidentally, they reached their climactic fixture carrying seven injured players. Imran, by contrast, restricted his team to one collective net session and a series of individual briefings that appear to have been as much about personal motivation as they were about tactics. ‘We discussed Graeme Hick,’ Mushtaq Ahmed told the journalist Lawrence Booth. ‘He was the in-form batsman. Imran said to me in the meeting, “Mushy, if Hick comes to the crease, you make sure you bowl to him.” I said, “Hang on, the guy who has been the cleanest hitter of the ball — and he can hit a long way — and I’m bowling to him!” But the way Imran said it, I could see the passion in his eyes. He was telling me I was the guy who’s responsible to get him out. That makes my imagination go.’ It was the sort of counter-intuitive input that one tends not to hear in the average English dressing-room.
When the day came, of impressive humidity, 87,182 spectators were jammed into the Melbourne arena, which resounded to the klaxon, whistle and bugle of fanatical Pakistan support. If anyone in Australia was magnanimously hoping for the Poms to win, they were keeping it to themselves. According to Ian Botham, ‘It was not good-humoured banter [but] barely disguised hate. The English fans in the stadium suffered some terrible abuse. I should think that about 80,000 of the crowd were chanting for Pakistan.’ To at least some of those in attendance, the cup final was symbolically over before it had started. With roughly some 12 playable hours of daylight remaining, the two captains appeared for the toss: Gooch amiably lumbering up, sporting a droopy moustache and a slight but perceptible pot belly, Imran wearing a tight-fitting, ribbed T-shirt emblazoned with a tiger. One England player watching from the balcony told me that it had looked to him like a case of an ‘Edwardian music-hall performer shar[ing] a stage with a guy from Aerosmith’, and it had ‘not been a promising start, from a purely body language point of view’.
Pakistan batted first, and were in some bother at 24 for two. Imran had promoted himself up the order and had made just nine from 16 overs when he skied the ball to midwicket, where Gooch dropped it. It set the tone for the match. In the World Cup semi-final at Lahore five years earlier, Imran and Javed had rebuilt the Pakistan innings with 112 in 26 overs, only to lose to Australia. Something of the same patient bricklaying approach went on here, though to better effect. Imran restricted himself to a series of broad-bat defensive lunges and occasional trotted singles. Under the tournament rules, a new ball was in use at each end. As a result ‘we had to keep playing ourselves in,’ Imran told me, ‘not to mention being conscious that we had a young and inexperienced team whom we needed to protect’. About half-way through the innings, he ended the period of anonymous accumulation with one of those surges of acceleration beloved of Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear. Imran seemed to signal his intention when, in the 28th over, he calmly lifted Richard Illingworth for six. Another straight biff and two pounded fours followed in short order. The two old lags, with exactly 200 Tests and half-a-dozen leadership rows between them, were to smash and grab 76 runs in the next nine overs. In all their third-wicket partnership was worth 139, with Imran going on to a 110-ball 72. Inzamam and Wasim then ran riot, enabling Pakistan to reach 249 — not an impossible target, but apparently enough for a tired England team who would have to bat under lights. ‘The mood in the dressing-room was a bit subdued,’ Derek Pringle told me. ‘We felt we’d had them on toast at one stage and then let them escape.’
Sure enough, England made a nightmare start, losing Botham for a duck in the third over. The outgoing batsman’s mood was not improved by one of the Pakistan fielders, Aamir Sohail, enquiring, ‘Why don’t you send out your mother-in-law now? She couldn’t do any worse.’ Stewart, having exchanged some similarly pungent words with his opponents, soon followed him to the pavilion. Meanwhile, Imran pulled the strings as tautly as usual, not least when making his bowling changes. With his score on 17, Hick played round a Mushtaq googly and was plumb lbw, the vocally pleased Mushy having won that particular duel on his captain’s behalf. Imran then summoned another protégé, Wasim Akram, for a second spell. At 141 for five, Chris Lewis, the latest England player on whom the ‘next Botham’ mantle had thudded, came to the crease, showing immediate signs of pugnaciousness by playing extravagant air-shots on his way out. He lasted one ball. Botham would call Lewis’s dismissal by Wasim ‘one of the most extraordinary deliveries I have ever seen. It started wide of off stump, suddenly swung in like a banana and smashed into the timbers.’ Hardly had the crowd savoured the moment, stretched and resettled than Aaqib had beaten Fairbrother, and it was effectively all over.
The last rites were at least studded with a few flailed cameo performances. England’s procession of all-rounders finally gave the Union Jack-waving contingent something to cheer, with Reeve and Pringle to the fore. DeFreitas thrashed around gamely, though defiance at that juncture had a slightly forlorn ring to it. Wasim bowled magnificently throughout to finish with three for 49. But for sheer sentimentality, nothing would perhaps rival the moment when Imran came back to take the final wicket with what
proved to be his last ball in competitive cricket. No working scriptwriter would dare contrive such a climax. It was 25 March 1992. Pakistan won by 22 runs. There were four balls left for play.
‘I recall most of the England team feeling a gross sense of injustice at the result,’ says Derek Pringle. Pakistan had certainly taken their time to come to the boil in the tournament, and were supremely lucky to have been saved by the rain at Adelaide. But midway through the competition they had discovered a defiant streak of self-belief, as well as a resilient team spirit that contrasted with the in-fighting, bickering and bureaucratic officiousness of previous campaigns. It’s hard to believe that this was entirely unrelated to Imran’s motivational pep talks, or an even more august source, as some thought. A number of the players would later attribute their success in the final to Inshallah, which roughly translates as the hand of God. Whether or not divine intervention played a role, Pakistan were clearly the better team on the day. Both their batsmen and bowlers displayed a patience and versatility beyond that of their highly touted opponents. Imran’s own innings certainly wasn’t the only reason for yet another crushing England demise. But as captains’ knocks go it was one of the best of modern times, a measure of his determination to overcome a problem and of his cricketing intelligence. Richie Benaud, who knows something about man management, recalled that Imran had not only batted with real nous, but ‘led his team with skill, courage and common sense’. Of course, things might have been different had the Pakistan captain been out for 9 instead of 72. Gooch’s dropping of his opposite number somehow summed up a generally lacklustre England team performance which, one fancies, rather remains the default position 17 years later.
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