Reflecting on Pakistan’s triumph in the following days and weeks, Imran spoke with becoming modesty, frequently making reference to the part played by the Almighty. ‘I was thankful to Allah that I was able to leave cricket with dignity. It is a blessing that has been denied to greater men than myself,’ he observed. Unfortunately, his immediate post-final remarks were considerably less polished. Climbing on to a rostrum and holding aloft the Waterford crystal trophy, a sweating, somewhat manic-sounding Imran seemed to forget himself. For once his oratorical skills failed him. ‘I would just like to say that I want to give my commiserations to the England team. But I want them to know that by winning this World Cup, personally it means that one of my greatest obsessions in life, which is to build a cancer hospital … I’m sure that this event will go a long way towards completion of this obsession … It is my dream … I feel very proud that finally I have managed to succeed …’
It was language that, to many, seemed oddly self-centred and out of place to celebrate what had, after all, been a team win. One journalist would remark that the Pakistan captain ‘sound[ed] as if he had just taken part in a single-wicket competition’. Of equal concern to some in the audience, there seemed to be an implicit threat to dedicate the cup, and the financial rewards accruing, to Imran’s hospital. The ‘great Khan’, it was said, had let both his country and himself down, his choice of words ‘pompous and megalomaniacal’. Imran himself later joined this consensus, admitting that he’d been ‘high on emotion’ when called on to step up to the podium and speak live to some 600 million television viewers around the world.
That was hindsight. At the time, most neutral observers declared themselves unimpressed by Imran’s ‘rant’, which ignored the normal protocol of thanking the event’s organisers, hosts, sponsors and paying customers. ‘I remember thinking his victory harangue was somewhat immoderate and rather more self-absorbed than is usual in team games,’ Ted Dexter allowed. ‘Now I know that [Imran] was just warming up for life as a politician.’
But if non-partisan reaction to Imran’s de facto hospital fundraiser was tepid, the response of some of his Pakistani team-mates bordered on volcanic. Qamar Ahmed remarks that ‘the captain’s whole performance was in poor taste and very naive’, an opinion broadly shared by the winning players. The future national captain Ramiz Raja and Imran’s old friend Salim Malik were among several colleagues reportedly left uneasy by the thought, however misguided, that certain cup-winning bonuses and gifts might be directed to the Shaukat Khanum facility rather than themselves. In Javed Miandad’s opinion, ‘Imran would perhaps have been better off staying quiet that evening. He made a real hash of it.’ In the coming days, Javed added that he and ‘the guys’ would be setting out on a nationwide fundraising tour to capitalise on their success in the World Cup. ‘He made it clear,’ according to one published report, ‘that these appearances have nothing to do with Imran’s ambitions for a cancer hospital — they will be purely for the players’. Even at their moment of supreme national triumph the Pakistanis were now to demonstrate what even General Zia had called their ‘uniquely delicate wiring’, and to exercise self-destructive skills of a high order. When he took over the team 10 years earlier, Imran had shown a steely willingness to carry things through, a resolve that had included the immediate sacking of his cousin and mentor Majid. As noted, he could be equally single-minded when it came to various nonplaying parties. In particular, his relations with the home board had only rarely reached that ideal of ‘mutual tranquillity and common goodwill’ of which the chairman had spoken in 1982. But Imran had been ‘taking it’, to use one of his phrases, too long, and a series of misconceptions that arose out of his victory speech and subsequent events brought an inglorious end to his captaincy.
Normally a day of rest, Friday 27 March, when the news and analysis from Melbourne was first broadcast in full, was a busy day in Pakistan. The press went into overdrive, and there were street carnivals and improvised tickertape parades, though without the players themselves, in Karachi and the other major cities. This was the apogee of the national cricketing revival that, by general consensus, had begun in 1971. Alone of the current squad, Imran had been there at the start. The chain of events that had led to Pakistan winning the World Cup was to a large extent of his making. Recent studies that measure managerial skills seem to be describing Imran when they stress ‘multidimensional thinking’ and such other desirable attributes as ‘getting groups to collaborate well’, ‘using forms of influence to build alliances’ and ‘boxing smart’. It’s true that there had been various local ructions along the way. As the preceding pages have, perhaps, shown, Imran and his near contemporary Javed Miandad hadn’t always been as close as they might have hoped. One particularly well-placed source characterises their relationship as that between ‘two scorpions in a bottle’. But generally public reaction in the wake of the World Cup was everything Imran could have wanted. As well as the donations in cash and kind that came in for his hospital, he was presented with the nation’s most prestigous civil award, the Hilal-i-Imtiaz, or ‘crescent of merit’. (He later returned this in protest when the Pakistan government gave the same award to Richard Boucher, the US Assistant Secretary of State, whom Imran considered a warmonger.) To the British journalist Kate Muir, who travelled with him in 1992, it was as if he was ‘Gazza, the Beatles and President Kennedy rolled into one in a country famished for idols’. Had he chosen to put himself forward then instead of waiting as he did, it’s a fair bet that Imran might have met with electoral success, if not actually been appointed state president for life.
There were those who held back from the general effusion. Nawaz Sharif, the one-time first-class cricketer and current prime minister, was not an unmitigated admirer of his nation’s World Cup-winning captain. Five years later, Sharif could still reportedly ‘vividly remember’ the scene when, in his role as Punjab chief minister, he had gone to Lahore airport to welcome back the team after they had beaten India. The future premier had been ‘nearly skittled over’ by the crowds who had stampeded through the official reception committee in their rush to greet Imran and his men. Now Sharif sent orders that the cup-winning players’ return flight should leave late and take the most circuitous route possible, not landing until after dark. The delay made little difference. In the improvised stands the army had erected alongside the Allama Iqbal terminal, a crowd of three to four thousand people broke into cheers and whistling applause as the plane finally came into view. Several dozen others scrambled into the branches of trees for a better look. ‘Nothing compares to the feeling of an entire nation pouring out its love and respect to you,’ Javed notes. Nawaz Sharif himself was not among those present at the airport. The general feeling among the press was that he had no wish to be upstaged a second time.
By then it was nearly a week since Imran had lifted the trophy on that sultry Wednesday night in Melbourne. The next morning, 16 of the 17 Pakistan players had flown on to a state-funded shopping trip in Singapore, while an ‘exhausted’ Imran, still on a course of daily, but diminishing painkillers and steroid shots for his shoulder, stayed behind in Australia. When everyone was reunited the following Monday morning, the air of collective euphoria soon dissolved. ‘We were in the Singapore transit lounge, on the way back to Lahore,’ Imran says. ‘A friend of mine arrived and handed over a cheque for £5,000. It was money raised by the Asian community in the area, and it was clearly and unequivocally meant for the hospital. Unfortunately, two or three of the players were infected by greed, and put it about that all the bonuses and appearance fees raised from then on would go to the cause and not to themselves. It absolutely wasn’t true.’ Within a fortnight of the players’ return to Pakistan, a full-scale slanging match had broken out in the press. Imran continued to insist that the team, or at least some of its prominent members, were labouring under a mass delusion. ‘Where there was a dinner specifically arranged for the guys, of course they were the rightful beneficiaries. It never even occurred to me
to interfere.’ Eventually, there were two parallel laps of honour being undertaken by the Pakistan squad, one a commercial endeavour by the players and the other a charity fundraising tour by their captain. Imran later told Mushtaq Ahmed, ‘I treated you like my son, and what you did was not great. I was hurt.’
Nor was he feeling the love he’d enjoyed when the BCCP had first appointed him. The board and even the government itself were up in arms; according to a well-placed student of Sharif’s premiership, the cabinet’s view was that the spectacle of ‘one group of players apparently engaged in a highly public monetary feud with another’ was not necessarily conducive to ‘Pakistani national dignity’. In time the issue turned into a face-off between those BCCP officials broadly in league with senior members of Sharif’s ruling Muslim League (Nawaz Group) party, at least some of whose instincts were pro-Karachi, and by extension pro-Javed, and the ‘most influential Asian sportsman of all time’. After a period of reflection in the mountains, Imran emerged to announce that he would not be available for Pakistan’s tour of England in the summer of 1992. In explaining his decision, he cited his nagging shoulder injury, proof that he could no longer bounce back as he had in his twenties, as well as the ‘misconceptions of a few senior players and others’ surrounding his fundraising activities. According to one leading British political figure and cricket fan, ‘One had to hark back to Churchill’s exit immediately following the defeat of Nazi Germany for a comparable example of a national hero being so swiftly replaced at his moment of ultimate glory’, although at least in that case there had been a democratic election.
The tour Imran missed was a fractious one, even by modern standards. Once again under Javed’s captaincy, the Pakistanis took the series 2–1. There were frequent innuendoes of underhand practice, with the Sun cordially referring to the visitors as ‘bloody cheats’, among other remarks of an unappreciative nature. In his autobiography, Ian Botham recalls batting in a one-day international at Lord’s when his attention was drawn to the state of the ball. ‘On one side it was so badly chewed up that it looked about 300 overs old. The other side was perfectly normal.’ Botham adds, ‘Over the years I’ve seen Pakistan players fiddle with the ball illegally, and [that summer] they were at it again.’ It should be added that Javed and his bowlers vigorously denied the allegations, insisting that it was all simply a case of legitimately ‘work[ing] on the orb’, to quote the press statement, to induce reverse swing. As one of the team later remarked, ‘When we did it we were called con men. When the English bowlers did it against Australia in 2005, they were called heroes.’
At the end of the series, the BCCP announced that they were awarding their players a hardship bonus to compensate for their ‘outrageous reception’ in England. There was some talk of whether sporting relations between the two nations would survive. Following events from the press box, Imran wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘No official Pakistan team will ever set foot in this country again.’ Although a shade drastic, it expressed a view that many people, both English and Pakistani, held at the time.
Imran may not have had much of a gift for prediction, in common with most of us, but he generally made a good fist of analysing what exactly was going on out on the field. Stylistically, his journalism, for which the Telegraph paid him £1,000 a column, was more in the school of Ian Botham than Neville Cardus. He tended to pick a subject and then bludgeon it with a characteristic mix of persistence, intelligence and unshakeable faith in his own judgement. The paper gave Imran his head, and from the first he exhibited signs of a marked independence. Javed later complained that his predecessor ‘wrote pieces where I thought he was trying to disclose our weaknesses and our strategy … It wasn’t as if he was revealing state secrets to the enemy, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you expected from your immediate past captain.’ Behind the scenes, Imran would in time let the board know that in his view Wasim Akram was the best man to be leading the team. He reports that his advice was ‘not well received’.
Apart from his articles and a coffee-table book on the tribes of Pakistan, Imran was busy organising a series of fundraising galas for his hospital. As a whole these tended to be well-attended, financially robust affairs whose organisation wasn’t always as pronounced as the enthusiasm that went into them. In mid-July, Imran hosted a floodlit pan-Asian cricket match at Crystal Palace. With a summer-festival atmosphere, despite the rain, and the euphoric chanting of the 17,000-strong crowd, the event billed as ‘the greatest party of the year’ initially nearly lived up to its hype. Unfortunately, the game got off to a late start and was bedevilled by a variety of further weather delays and other interruptions. The English seem to have patented the concept of the al fresco evening involving a mass audience and large amounts of drink which then duly goes wrong. The general exuberance of the occasion eventually spilled over into a series of pitch invasions and a running brawl between rival factions of Indian, Pakistani and non-aligned spectators. At one stage Imran himself had to get on the loudspeaker to make a forlorn appeal for calm. Most of the print media (whose own, hastily erected tent collapsed in the mud as the match approached its climax) were negative in their overnight reporting of the event, which nonetheless raised some £75,000 for the Shaukat Khanum centre.
When Imran subsequently came back to London from a fundraising tour of the United States and Saudi Arabia, he threw a party for the Pakistan team. Javed Miandad reports that ‘he invited the entire squad with the exception of three people — Ramiz Raja, Salim Malik and myself’. Casting modesty aside, Javed adds that he was then enjoying a ‘fabulous’ tour of England, and that Imran’s efforts were aimed at ‘try[ing] to create an intrigue against my captaincy’. One of the senior players confirmed to me that there had been a ‘certain affection’ among the side for their departed captain, ‘who only ever criticised you from love’, and even some hope that he might make a comeback. It had happened before. ‘There’s an old proverb that applies very well in the situation we found ourselves in while we were trouncing England in 1992. “When drinking the water, don’t forget those who dug the well.”’ The player listed a number of team-mates who had benefited from Imran’s patronage. ‘We don’t forget our friends.’
Early the following January, Javed led Pakistan to victory on a short tour of New Zealand. When the team returned home the captain was invited to a meeting with the board, who informed him that he was being replaced by Wasim. Javed was caustic throughout the interview. He reputedly belittled Imran, recounting his various alleged screw-ups. ‘Today you have destroyed Pakistan cricket,’ he advised the assembled bureaucrats. Nonetheless, Javed agreed to tour the West Indies that spring under Wasim’s captaincy. The series got off to a poor start from the Pakistani point of view when both the new captain and his deputy, Waqar Younis, found themselves in gaol on a variety of drugs charges, which were subsequently dropped. The West Indies won the series 2–0, the beginning of a decade-long slump by Pakistan.
Javed notionally retired not long afterwards, having played 124 Tests and enjoyed every success, bar unmitigated popularity, the game has to offer. He wrote a well-received if somewhat self-serving memoir in 2003. By then the Pakistanis had just played the West Indies again, and beaten them comprehensively. It seemed to some that the ‘bad old days’ were behind them; only Javed wouldn’t let them go. Among other things, he claimed that the players had nicknamed Imran ‘Meter’, implying ‘a little money counter that was always ticking’, at the time of the 1992 World Cup. A cynical observer might conclude that Javed, a fine bat and a fanatically ambitious sportsman, had been driven almost to madness by his resentment of having had to act as a recurrent stand-in for his more famous contemporary over the years. Both men could at least agree about the various perfidies and idiocies of their home board. In March 2001, Javed stepped aside for the second time as Pakistan’s team coach. He blamed the ‘cadre of senior players’, the media who had ‘managed to somehow make me directly responsible if the team performed poorly’, and the bureaucrats wh
o had ‘also fallen in with this mind-set’.
Imran formally announced his retirement in September 1992, just before his 40th birthday, which the world celebrated 51 days late. His career had often heard the distant drums before, notably in 1983–84, but this time around there would be no miraculous return. In his 88 Tests he took 362 wickets at an average of 22.81, scored 3,807 runs at 37.69, and held on to 28 catches. For many years, Gubby Allen, the MCC’s éminence grise and one-time national chairman of selectors, used to say that the ‘proper and consistent’ way of assessing an England Test cricketer was by his record against Australia. Perhaps it still is. Starting in October 1978, when they resumed play after a break of 18 years and two wars, the same could be said of the Pakistanis with regard to India. Here Imran’s record is even more striking. In 23 Tests against his country’s South Asian rivals he took 94 wickets, including six innings in which he took five wickets or more, and scored 1,091 runs at an average of 51.95. What the figures don’t show is the extent to which Pakistan’s all-important sense of national pride and regional machismo came to be linked to Imran’s captaincy. During his tenure, the team never lost a Test to India.
For almost a decade after his international debut, most people underestimated Imran, and it was only in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when Pakistan started beating the likes of England, that they came to recognise his virtues. It had taken that long for a cosmopolitan, bookish temperament and a lifelong commitment to the key Pathan code of self-assertion and revenge to be seen as traits of some importance to his nation’s sporting fortunes. It would be fair to say that, over and above these qualities, Imran sometimes seemed to suffer from an advanced case of noblesse oblige. It’s also true that he was something of a slow starter, and that his batting, at least, actively improved towards the end of his career. But for the stress fracture and one or two other, self-inflicted absences from the national team, he would have been a member of the 4,000 run and 400 wicket club chartered by Kapil Dev, who played 43 more Tests. And he did all this while leading a fairly full life off the field. Imran undertook a schedule that roughly tripled that of an Intikhab or Mushtaq, moving guests in and out of his hotel room with dispatch, signing autographs in shifts, meeting the press, posing outside nightclubs for photographers, making excursions to Beverly Hills, delivering speeches on healthcare and the plight of impoverished children, and flying on average 80,000 miles a year. And it was hard to ignore the playing style, which involved an essentially sound batting technique and a bowling action so upwardly propulsive it deserved its own runway. Although a recognisably ‘modern’ performer with his teased hair and medallion, Imran also appealed across the ages. Len Hutton, Richie Benaud and Godfrey Evans are only three of the immediate post-war greats to list him in their all-time World XI. Imran was a ‘classical cricketer who’d listened to Sergeant Pepper’, Evans once told me.
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