Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician

The turning-point came when he was rising 13, and had moved into the upper school at Aitchison. As a result, when the new cricket season began in October, Imran found himself for the first time playing on a professionally prepared pitch. He also had access to a coach named Naseer Mohammad, a former club player with decided views about what a proper cricketer in the making should look like. ‘Correct’ was the operative word. Mr Mohammad took one look at Imran’s repertoire of cross-batted slogs and went to work on him in the nets. An Aitchison contemporary and fellow Colt remembers that ‘Naseer’s interest and enthusiasm were just almost contagious … He would practise with you — I remember hours of the forward defensive — literally until you dropped.’ When the afternoon sessions did not go well, the coach often kept his pupil at it into the misty autumn dusk, bringing out an old white cricket ball and turning on the weak pavilion lights. Imran recalls that by the time the new season began in 1966, ‘My attitude to the game had changed: all I wanted to do was play cricket … I decided that I was going to play for Pakistan, and soon.’ By this point Imran was just turning 14. He responded to maternal approval and appreciated applause. He participated enthusiastically in school Under-16 matches, impressing coaches because he took direction willingly and trained harder than anyone else did. And thanks to a sudden pubescent growth spurt, he possessed the classic fast bowler’s physique long before he was a fast bowler. Imran had caught up with his illustrious cousins through hard work, natural talent and an utter unwillingness to fail at anything he put his mind to. The consensus at Aitchison was that he was an orthodox and hard-hitting batsman, as well as a safe pair of hands in the field. No one yet thought of him as a full all-rounder, least of all Imran himself.

The next three years saw the cricketing equivalent of the Great Leap Forward, even if they proved less distinguished academically. Although not studious, Imran was a quick learner and, with his mother’s and older sister’s assistance, proved an at least adequate pupil. The portrait of him that most often emerges from those who knew him at Aitchison is of a teenager who was long on graft and determination and less so on raw intellect. Even some of his later disciples had their doubts about his mental candlepower, although, as at school, no one who knew him ever questioned his perseverance. The curricular emphasis there was on English, maths, geography and history, the last two of which generally took a dim view of India and its territorial claims in Kashmir. Aitchison, originally known as Chiefs’ College, had been founded in 1886, and was modelled strongly on the British public-school tradition. Delivering his inaugural address to the boys, the school’s benefactor Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had remarked that ‘… much, very much, is expected of you. I trust you will use well the opportunities here afforded you both for your education and for the formation of your character … This is an institution from which you will henceforth banish everything in thought and word and act that is mean, dishonourable or impure, and in which you will cultivate everything that is virtuous, true, manly and gentlemanly.’ The school (motto: ‘Perseverance commands success’) was laid out along the lines of a Mogul fort, ambitiously crossed with a traditional English church — there were steeples, cloisters and stained glass windows — and set in a tree-ringed 200-acre estate. (One well-known American travel writer insists that Aitchison could have ‘easily been found in the rolling Sussex countryside, were [it] not for its prominent central minaret’, but this merely displays his ignorance of modern English rural life.) Several graduates I spoke to about the school referred to it as ‘the Eton of Pakistan’. There was a house system, uniforms, an emphasis on organised sport and a daily routine ‘as ritualised as Edwardian English behaviour’. By and large, Imran was in his element.

Both at Aitchison and its next-door neighbour Zaman Park, he was clearly moving in a more exalted world than most Lahorites. The student body included luminaries such as the princes Salahuddin and Falahuddin, the Nawab of Kalabagh’s son and several future or present Pathan chiefs including Imran’s friend Sardar Jaffer Khan Leghari, the strongman of the Leghari tribe. Even in this company Imran was considered quite combative. He seems to have been as adept at mind games as he was at the raw aggression that was such an integral part of his cricket. ‘Imran was a merciless enemy on the sports field’, whose great strength as a batsman ‘was his ability to get his opponent off-balance’, an Aitchison contemporary recalls.

Even then, he was a crafty performer … Imran would deceive the bowler into thinking he was weak against the short ball, for instance. He would hop and jump and generally carry on like a man standing on hot coals. You could see the fielders smiling to themselves … The bowler would charge in and bowl probably the fastest bouncer of his life, and Imran would deposit it about twenty yards behind the tall trees on the square leg boundary.

Another Aitchison friend recalled an altogether gentler Imran away from the cricket field. ‘There was a boy who sometimes begged at the school gates. He was about 16, like us, and he was crippled … One evening he was dragging himself home [and] with his arms already full Imran leant down to speak to him and then picked him up. Off he staggered with the boy and crutches and books and cricket gear up the road and the steep steps to the boy’s house, where he gently set him down again. No one else was around. To me, that was the real Imran as much as the cut-throat sportsman was.’

Imran sometimes used to say that his pleasure in playing cricket every available hour of the day was enhanced by the knowledge that, in at least one sense, it was a complete waste of time. So many hours ticking past, and it not mattering. So many afternoons when other boys were in the library or diligently writing essays or studying their Koran, while Imran, immaculately turned out in whites, practised his forward defensive in the nets or carted the opposing team’s bowlers around the park. It’s worth mentioning again just how fortunate he was in his choice of school. As Haroun Rashid, a year senior to Imran at Aitchison, recalls, ‘The place prided itself on its sports, and certainly in [the 1960s] cricketing abilities were better appreciated by the powers-that-be than academic ones.’ Imran was equally lucky to play on two such exquisite grounds as Aitchison and the Lahore Gymkhana (whose club was captained by another cousin, Javed Zaman) rather than the sparsely grassed mud tracks where most Pakistani cricketers honed their craft. As he was turning 16 Imran had duly become the youngest member of the Aitchison First XI. He modestly confirms, ‘I was by far the best batsman [there]; I saw myself as the next Bradman.’ In the course of a year and a half he had ‘radically changed’ his attitude to the game, if even that phrase conveys a process bordering on reincarnation. Imran now carried his cricket bat with him wherever he went, tucking it under his bed at night. He persuaded the domestic servants to bowl at him for hours on end in the garden at Zaman Park, moving proceedings to the front hall if it rained. When high summer came he stayed home in Lahore rather than join the traditional family holiday in the hills, in order to play for the local Wazir Ali league. This was cricket strictly for hard-core devotees of the game: the Wazir Ali matches were bruising encounters that typically began at 7 a.m. and continued in baking heat right through to sunset or beyond. In time even Mrs Khan, the scion of a fanatically keen cricketing family, was moved to ask Imran’s older sister Robina if he was ‘all right’.

The fighting spirit that Imran often credited to his Pathan ancestry wasn’t just confined to cricket. In April 1965, when he was 12, Pakistan and India had gone to war in one of their periodic disputes over Kashmir. The whole family gathered at the Khans’ house in Lahore, only 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the Indian border, and decided to form a home guard to repel a possible parachute landing by the enemy. Imran was vocally eager to go up the line nearer the battle, and had to be restrained from marching off with a knapsack in the general direction of the front. In the end he contented himself with doing sentry duty in Zaman Park with his 18-year-old cousin Majid. A year or so later he was running around the neighbourhood on one of his regular training exercises when a local boy with whom he’d exchanged words rashly shouted out, ‘Look at that ponce!’ Imran reportedly hit the boy so hard that he broke one of his own fingers. He was also known to play competitive soccer and hockey, could swim a length of a pool with seven or eight windmilling strokes, and once went trekking with a party of schoolfriends up into the Northern Areas close to the Chinese border. But when the cricket season began ‘he was a man of such single-minded ambition … with such intensity,’ says Haroun Rashid. ‘In 1968 when we went to Lawrence College in Ghora Gali, our traditional rivals, for our annual sports meet, Imran opened the batting for us and, without losing his wicket, proceeded to decimate the hapless Gallians. It was a slaughter of the innocents … Due to Imran’s sixes about half a dozen balls were lost in the forests surrounding their cricket ground. The match was over in half its allotted time.’

It was the watchword and comfort of the Pakistani Test selectors that their team ‘got through the Sixties unscathed’ as one of them said later. Unscathed, but hardly unbeaten; in the entire decade the Test side managed only two wins, both against New Zealand. The history of Pakistan cricket as a whole in the 1960s is one of corruption, dissent and consistent under-achievement. Hanif Mohammad remained the pioneering figure, but even he eventually outstayed his welcome, apparently wanting to finish his 17-year career with a then impressive-seeming 4,000 Test runs. He fell 85 short, after Abdul Kardar, the chairman of selectors, had remarked tetchily, ‘I can’t give him another five Tests.’ Hanif went out to widespread barracking from crowds who had grown impatient with his kind of dour, bricklaying approach to batting, and after a power struggle with his successor as Test captain, Saeed Ahmed. Saeed was not a success in the job. On hearing the unsentimental announcement of his own replacement by Intikhab Alam, he threatened to punch (and reportedly did ‘jostle’) chairman Kardar, among others. Intikhab’s first series in charge was at home to New Zealand, whose manager remembered his own side as being ‘hopeless’. New Zealand won 1–0, with two Tests drawn. By 1969, around the time Imran was making the step up to first-class cricket, the Pakistan national team was anchored firmly at the bottom of the unofficial league table.

A public- and private-sector consortium had, it’s true, raised funds for an Under-19 side to tour England in 1963, where they performed better against the counties than the senior team had a year earlier. As a result of this initiative, Pakistan went on to organise a number of youth teams to play both domestically and around the world. But set against this modest success, there was acrimony amid the acronyms — by 1966, the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan (BCCP) and the newly restructured Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) began a near-continuous clash, with the PIA chairman accusing the BCCP president of ‘exploiting players’ and being ‘short-sighted’. In time, the major Pakistan banks, the national railway company and various government departments all fielded teams in the domestic first-class cricket tournaments, leading one BCCP administrator to fret that this could be a ‘potential recipe for … disaster [in] providing competitive sport and a sound Test team’. It was. Imran himself was later to observe, ‘Pakistan is the only country in the world where cricket is played between commercial organisations and not between regions, zones, cities or states. The result is abysmal … Most of the matches are meaningless and insignificant.’ Added to the structural deficiencies were some of those unique qualities of Pakistani national life that were to continue to play such a vital part in their sporting fortunes. The 1965 war against India interrupted regularly scheduled Test cricket for two years, and the 1968–69 England tour of Pakistan was eventually abandoned when a crowd of some 4,000 students, unhappy with the current military regime, invaded the pitch at Karachi; the police responded by firing tear gas, most of which blew straight back over their shoulders and through the broken windows of the England dressing-room.

In the same week that the red-eyed MCC tourists caught a hurriedly booked return flight to London, the regional selectors summoned Imran to an Under-19s trial in Lahore. There were 200 other hopefuls present, each of whom batted for five minutes in two adjoining nets. Imran lasted only half as long as that before being given the hook — a rare failure for a self-assured 16-year-old whose school batting average was currently 67.50. ‘As I stood watching the other triallists, reality slowly seeped in,’ he later noted. ‘I was a reject.’

The proceedings weren’t quite over, however. Before he could slink off, Imran was told to go back to the nets and turn his arm over. Doing what any red-blooded teenager would do in the circumstances, he pulled up his collar, West Indies style, loped in and bowled a bouncer. According to the best available evidence, this was ‘fast but somewhat deviant … It nearly hit the man in the next net.’ After his third or fourth ball, the chairman of selectors stopped Imran and announced to the group as a whole that he had ‘the ideal seam bowler’s action’. This was followed by something of a lull, I was told. Certainly Imran himself would remain, at best, ambivalent about his potential new role. By and large, batsmen were idolised in Pakistan, where the seamers typically sent down a desultory few overs before the captain summoned the first of his four or five spin bowlers. Often even this brief delay wasn’t necessary, as there were competitive matches where the spinners opened the attack. To give the ball a good tweak was the instinctive response to the beach-like pitches, with cracks down which Geoff Boycott would remark he could stick not only his house key, but the house as well, that were prevalent at every level of the game in Pakistan. Men like Niaz Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Majid himself, none of whom were exactly brisk, regularly took the new ball for the national Test team of the time. Nor did either the climate or the uniquely atrocious standard of most wickets around Lahore as a whole encourage the average aspiring cricketing prodigy to bowl fast. But there it was. The following week Imran was selected to play for the Lahore Under-19 team against a touring English side. He opened the attack, sending down four fiercely erratic overs in the England first innings, taking three for 7 in the second, and batting No. 10.

It was an only fitfully impressive debut, and Imran recalls that he was ‘treated [with] a certain amount of hostility. My team-mates thought I didn’t deserve a place in the side and was there on the basis of my connections.’ This sense of perceived rejection, and an answering competitiveness on his part, was to be a theme right through his career. A day or so later Wasim Raja, the captain of the Under-19s and a future Test all-rounder, greeted a friend with an account of the wild antics of a ‘posh kid’ on the team named Imran. According to Wasim, Imran wanted to bowl a bouncer with every ball, threw in a generous quota of beamers, and generally sprayed it around in an arc from gully to leg slip. One particular delivery had come close to felling the square leg umpire. ‘He’s the craziest cricketer I’ve ever seen,’ said Wasim.

Yet the Lahore selectors soon began to take the kid seriously. In the next two Under-19 games, Imran was to show an at least rudimentary grasp of line and length, taking three for 19 and five for 42 respectively. He wasn’t, perhaps, as inherently gifted as some other up-and-coming bowlers around the world. He lacked the fluid hydraulics of even the teenaged Michael Holding. He wasn’t as squarely built as Ian Botham, or quite as lithely fast as Dennis Lillee or Richard Hadlee. Yet no young cricketer ever brought together such an amalgam of carefully nurtured talents. Imran was relentless in his pursuit of excellence. At least one observer saw him in the light of the 20th century’s approved canon for success, as ‘literally a self-made man’. Wasim Raja would long remember that ‘Imran was invariab[ly] the first on the ground every morning, where he would run circuits of the playing area’ — a novelty in the cricket culture of those days — ‘before repair[ing] to the nets to practise bowling at a single stump for an hour or more before the start of play.’

Fanatically determined as he was, Imran may also have enjoyed a certain degree of old-fashioned patronage in his early career. He made his full first-class debut for Lahore against Sargodha when he was just turning 17. The chairman of the Lahore selectors was Imran’s uncle, and the captain and two of the senior players were his cousins. It was another only sporadically successful start. Bowling a lively mixture of bouncers and prodigously fast outswingers, Imran took two wickets at some 20 runs apiece. That was to be the highlight of his contribution to the match. During a subsequent rain delay, Imran wandered off to his nearby bedroom, fell asleep and returned to the ground to find he’d missed his turn in the batting order. When he did bat he was run out, and Lahore lost the match.

Wasim Raja remarked of Imran’s bowling technique at the time that, while generally effective, ‘it wasn’t pretty … He more or less just ran in and hurled it.’ Other accounts of the young Imran recall that he had a slinging action much like that of the Australian Jeff Thomson. All parties agree that, in Wasim’s words, ‘It was awkward and unorthodox … You wouldn’t find it in the MCC manual.’ Perhaps as a result Imran tore a back muscle in his next match and missed nearly a season’s competitive cricket. He didn’t waste the time, however. He was the ‘most hard-working, the most focused student of cricket ever,’ a man closely familiar with the game in Lahore told me. ‘Everybody else would be gone at the close of play, and he would still be there. At that age, most of the kids in the team wanted to have fun. He wanted to be … Imran Khan.’ As soon as he was physically able to do so, he resumed his lengthy workouts, spending afternoons in the nets and evenings in indoor ‘skull sessions’ with men like Javed Burki and Majid, discussing the finer points of the game. In time he made a gradual comeback through the ranks of Lahore juniors and Lahore B, often coming on first change, before returning to the senior team. Wasim Raja saw an immediate difference in Imran’s action. ‘He was bowling chest-on, which looked even more awful. He’d also grown another inch and put on some muscle, and the whole effect [was] highly intimidating from the batsman’s point of view.’ Another Lahore colleague recalls Imran carefully smoothing down his hair on his brisk trot back to his mark, and his subsequent snorting approach to the bowling crease, ‘like that of a well-groomed bull’. His repertoire now included a ‘devastatingly fast’ inswinger as well as his stock bouncer, which ‘on average, he employed three times an over’.

Imran had, meanwhile, left Aitchison College, whose vaunted enthusiasm for sports seems not to have extended to sharing one of their own with a professional cricket team. He spent his sixth-form year at the nearby Cathedral School. Although founded and run by a Christian mission, and thus somewhat at odds with both Niazi and Burki family tradition, the school ‘more or less indulged [Imran]’, as one of the staff remembers. ‘He was a special case, [someone] who just seemed to be in a hurry to get to somewhere else. He was always driving and pushing, even as a teenager.’

Besides cricket, that drive and push found expression in longdistance running, javelin- and discus-throwing, and various other demonstrations of adolescent physical prowess. Imran was a full-time member of the Lahore team in the 1970–71 season, where he was lucky enough to have his cousin Javed Burki as captain. Javed cannily used the 18-year-old tear away in short bursts. In the BCCP Trophy against Rawalpindi Blues (surely a song title) Imran took two for 26 and one for 10, followed by the more impressive first innings figures of 18–3–54–6 against Pakistan Railways. In the cup semi-final against Karachi he scored 17 and 60 batting at No. 3, but was said to have served up a ‘dog’s dinner’ with the new ball. Moving across to the three-day Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, Imran recorded figures of five for 75 off 16 overs against Rawalpindi, missed the grudge match against the government’s Public Works Department, but returned to play in the losing semi-final against Punjab University, where he took two for 96 in the first innings and one for 10 in the second, while scoring 36 and 68 in the middle order. At the end of the season Imran had a first-class batting average of 31.69 and a bowling average of 21.60. His first full year in domestic cricket was also to be his last, because he was rarely seen again in Pakistan after that except at representative level.

As Imran played cricket, the situation in the country as a whole was ‘desperate’, he later recalled. The first ever fully democratic national elections were due to have been held on 5 October 1970, his 18th birthday, but had to be postponed by two months because of the cataclysmic damage caused by floods in East Pakistan, where 200,000 people died and some 12 million lost their homes. It was generally agreed the relief operations were not well handled by the government. The result of the election gave the Bengali militant Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib) and his Awami League an absolute majority in the National Assembly and all but two of the 162 seats allotted to East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a champion of Islamic socialism, a strong army and ‘a 1,000-year war with India’, emerged as the leader in the West. The irreconcilable differences of the two men’s programmes and the growing threat of secession by the Bengalis set in train the breakdown first of parliamentary government and eventually of all domestic law and order. President Yahya Khan, the hard-drinking, straight-talking former army chief, first refused to honour the election results and then sent 40,000 troops to arrest Mujib and suppress the rioting that erupted in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. Unrelieved suffering from the cyclone, coupled with brutal suppression by Yahya’s army, may have killed as many as 500,000 more men, women and children over the next month. The confrontation eventually led to the events that brought about Pakistan’s dismemberment in December 1971. Even before that, Imran had seen ‘AIR-RAID SHELTER’ and ‘CARELESS CHAT COSTS LIVES’ notices being tacked up on public buildings, just as he had in 1965. More and more recruits signed up for Yahya’s, or Bhutto’s, army; I was told that the Khan family had been ‘rightly alarmed’ they would be evicted from Zaman Park, either by invading Bengalis or the Indians, if not by government fiat, and forcibly resettled, much as had happened following Partition in 1947. In the end they kept their home, although in the most harrowing circumstances. India again went to war with Pakistan in 1971 just as the latter finally tore itself apart. In the ensuing 13-day bloodbath, some 300,000 Pakistani civilians died and the country’s armed forces were crippled for a generation. As the author Tariq Ali says, in less than a fortnight the nation ‘lost half [its] navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army’. India and its Soviet ally jointly declared the outcome of the war, and the emergence of Bangladesh from the ruins of East Pakistan, to be a triumph for socialist and democratic principles.

Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Imran proved to be an aggressively patriotic sportsman, not least when it eventually came to playing against India. Already, by 1971, he’s remembered as a ‘fine adornment of Pakistani manhood’, who was widely known for his ‘impassioned if selective’ monologues on his country’s history. Physically, too, he was quite imposing, having coaxed his hair into a Beatle moptop and developed a particularly intense, piercing stare — ‘that don’t-fuck-with-me squint of his’, as one ex-girlfriend characterises it. He spoke in an almost sepulchral tone, with the occasional incongruous ‘Strewth!’ or ‘Gorblimey!’ coming to intrude on his otherwise exemplary English. Even his dress code was distinctive, eventually flaunting a conflict of styles dominated on the one hand by traditional Pakistani garb, and on the other by a collection of hip-hugging velvet flares, garishly loud shirts splayed open to the chest and chunky jewellery such as might have been favoured by Gary Glitter in his ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ era.

This was the self-admittedly ‘bumptious’ individual who, on 4 March 1971, strode out into the Lahore Stadium to play for the BCCP side against a touring International XI, marking his first representative appearance for his country. The short goodwill visit by the Internationals had not been entirely free of incident up until then. In fact, the team’s previous match at Dhaka had come to an abrupt end shortly after England’s John Murray, who was batting at the time, ‘happened to notice the Pakistani who had been fielding at long leg edging up to the slips and furtively muttering to them, “There will be trouble” about a split second before someone set the main stand on fire. The next thing I knew we were in the middle of an army escort screaming down a dark road towards the airport, where we caught the last plane out to Lahore.’ Conditions there were ‘marginally more tranquil’, Murray says. Imran eventually took three wickets in the match and, coming in at No. 9, hit 51 not out after his team had collapsed to 80 for seven. The Internationals’ Australian bowler Neil Hawke, the man who saw most of the batsman, recalled his ‘not being aware [he] was in the presence of an obvious genius’. Another player I spoke to couldn’t even remember that Imran had taken part in the match. But it was apparently enough of an all-round performance to impress the then 77-year-old Wing Commander William (or ‘Harold’) Shakespeare, the chairman of Worcestershire, and his outgoing county secretary Joe Lister, both of whom were accompanying the tour. According to the written minutes, they particularly admired the 18-year-old’s ‘attitude’ and ‘obvious passion’ for the game. As a result, Worcestershire offered Imran a one-year contract, with an option to renew, at a basic salary of £35 a week along with a somewhat vague promise to secure his ‘special registration’ as the county’s primary overseas player. The momentous deal was consummated with a simple handshake in the pavilion. Imran’s parents initially withheld permission, but were eventually won over by the argument that he could finish his education at Oxford or Cambridge, as several Khans had before him.

Later in the spring Imran received a letter from the Pakistan national selectors, offering him a place in the party to tour England that summer. He was more than five months shy of his 19th birthday, and was still notionally studying for his A levels at Cathedral School. The country was just then embarking on the process of ripping itself apart. Displaying some of the same self-destructive qualities, the Test team had acquired the name of ‘Panikstan’ for its consistent ability to lose from a winning position. Impatient with the practice, the home crowds had increasingly taken to verbally or physically abusing their cricketers. After one Test at the National Stadium in Karachi, the Pakistanis’ team bus had been set on fire. Even so, in a nation still struggling for its identity, playing representative sports remained the peak of most young male Pakistanis’ ambitions. ‘A cricketer then could be like a rock star today,’ said Wasim Raja. The ‘distinct [and] high honour’ of the occasion was reflected in the board’s printed invitation received by Imran, which one family member who saw it remembers as a ‘really elaborate affair’ bearing the signature of a ‘government dignitary or minister’, which may have helped soften Ikramullah Khan’s disappointment that his only son had apparently shunned a technical career and instead taken up with so ‘boring’ a sport. It’s possible that, like many fathers of his generation, he took a restrained approach to showing his emotions. I was told that Mr Khan had later been in a crowded shop in central Lahore when a radio news report announced that the Pakistan team had won a match in England. Everyone in the place had ‘gone wild [and] started cheering’. He did not tell them that the young fast bowler who had helped bring about the victory was his son. When Mr Khan later told the story in private to a colleague at Republic Engineering, he was ‘as proud as if Imran had been elected prime minister of Pakistan’.

No major team travelled overseas with less expectation than the Pakistanis did in late April 1971. Led by Intikhab Alam, who had finished on the winning side only once in his 26 Tests, the squad boasted the stylish but frail middle-order batting of Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal and an as yet only locally famous 23-year-old named Zaheer Abbas. The bowling resources, as Majid recalled, were ‘thin, not to say gaunt’ and focused on the young Lahore seamer Asif Masood, the man whose crouching approach to the wicket reminded John Arlott of ‘Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress’. In the event Masood took nine wickets in his first Test against England, only to suffer a dramatic decline in form from then on, leading to his premature retirement from all cricket in 1976. The tour itself took place against the backdrop of the Pakistani civil war, which both split the party along ethnic lines and provoked mass demonstrations against its supposed regional bias even before the players left their home soil. Earlier in the spring, the national Under-25 side’s visit to England had had to be cancelled when Bangladeshi separatists threatened to firebomb the team’s hotel. Right up to the last moment, there was a lively debate about the propriety of 16 cricketers ‘fly[ing] off to sun themselves in England’, as one report put it, at that particular point in their nation’s history. Hence, perhaps, the BCCP president’s masterly understatement at the pre-tour press conference, when he admitted that his team was in ‘a little bit of turmoil’.

For all that, Imran records that he was ‘brimming with excitement’ at the prospect not only of his first cricketing tour but of his first time out of Pakistan. Although not exactly a household name, he was beginning to acquire some of the trappings of being a local celebrity, a status he enjoyed. The Lahore newspaper ran a long if factually flawed profile of the schoolboy ‘heavy hitter’ who was sure to ‘knock the spots [off] the English attack’. Family friends converged on Zaman Park with pre-tour congratulations and advice. Imran’s father is said to have taken special pleasure in seeing his son kitted out for the first time in his navy blue Pakistan blazer. Shaukat Khan was ‘beside herself’ with maternal pride, I was told, although anxious that Imran should not return from his travels with an English wife; it was a ‘long tradition of the Jullandari Pathans’ — words Imran heard often as a boy — to marry inside the fold. The many cricketing Khan relatives can be presumed to have heartily joined in the celebrations. On the eve of the team’s departure to London Imran came out on to the street in front of his family home and signed autographs for a small but vocal crowd who had gathered there, while some of the adolescent girls among them shouted endearments and threw rose petals at his feet.

Now all that remained was the tour, which did not go well.

Given the nature of Pakistani cricket, it’s somehow inevitable that there would be various factors behind the scenes that contributed to a generally lacklustre performance on the field of play. The country’s arrival on the Test-playing circuit in the 1950s and their periodic successes against all five of their international opponents had been one of the early bonds of nationhood. Less than 20 years later, that initial wave of optimism had given way to what Imran calls an ‘inferiority complex … The English team was thought to be invincible [and] I was told it would be impossible for me to take any wickets there.’ An air of mild apology, or deference, seemed to attach to the blazered figure of Masud Salahuddin, the 56-year-old Pakistan manager (and another of Imran’s cousins), whose self-professed lifelong ambition was to win honorary membership of the MCC. Early in the tour, Mr Salahuddin formally thanked his side’s hosts by remarking in a speech that ‘England [had] taught us Pakistanis much-needed discipline through the game of cricket’, including the protocol of how to eat with a knife and fork. Imran reports that he had been too embarrassed to listen to the rest. To be fair, the manager was not conspicuously well served by his home board, whose most senior positions were now a sinecure of the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). Whatever their skills in managing a public utilities company, the WAPDA officials were not, for the most part, ideally suited to the job of supervising a national sports tour taking place thousands of miles away, whose day-to-day running at least one senior player thought ‘a joke, even by our standards’. While in England Imran would receive just 150 rupees, or roughly £7.50, for every five-day Test he played. The fee for a three-day match against one of the counties was some 80–100 rupees, depending on attendances, and even this pittance was often slow in coming. The players’ weekly stipend was an equally modest £3–7 each, based on seniority, not exactly a fortune even in the Britain of 1971. At the end of the 11½-week tour, Imran was awarded a bonus of £2. No wonder that Zaheer Abbas reports that ‘one of the first English words I learnt when I switched from Urdu was “peanuts”. Everyone in the Pakistan team told me it summed up our wages.’ In another of those administrative lapses that characterised the tour, Imran was frequently called on to share a room with Saeed Ahmed, the deposed captain who had a ‘persecution complex’, Wasim Raja believed. Following his sacking, Saeed had developed an ‘embittered disposition’, I was told, and it was ‘damn hard to be his friend’. According to the testimony of Wasim and others, he was not the ideal man to have as a mentor on your first overseas tour.

For all that, however, the real reason that Imran initially failed in England was simply that his ample self-confidence wasn’t yet matched by his abilities. His team-mate Asif Iqbal told me that ‘he had bags of determination, but only a fair amount of natural talent and, back then, hadn’t learnt many of the tricks of the trade he acquired later’. Set against this measured description is the account of the former England captain who recalls that ‘Imran bowled a lot of balls on his first tour: take that any way you want’. Another senior Pakistan player thought the 18-year-old to be at a ‘critical point in his life … I told him that he should strive to get some qualifications, in order [to] have something to fall back on if the cricket failed. Otherwise he stood a good chance to end up a mere ditch-digger in Pakistan.’ Even if Imran made it, his colleague added, he should know that ‘professional sport was filled with reprobates who gambled and drank and ran after lewd women’. The teenager couldn’t argue, and merely kept saying, ‘I know, I know …’

Imran made his first appearance of the tour on a frosty early May morning, bulked up in three sweaters to play for the Pakistanis against Northamptonshire. Before that he’d restricted himself to bowling in the nets at Lord’s, which proved to be an only partly successful introduction to English conditions. For one thing, he still had no formal run-up. He just tore in off anything up to 10 or 12 scything paces and let fly. Imran’s first delivery in England duly reared up and spat past his colleague Aftab Gul’s nose. This would have been promising, but for the fact that Gul was batting in the next-door net at the time. Imran’s second ball ricocheted off the head of a spectator. His third was reported as being a vicious beamer that struck the iron cross-bar over the net and shot perpendicularly up into the air. ‘I was bothered by the difference between the hard grounds of Pakistan and the soft, damp, English turf [and] couldn’t get a foothold,’ Imran later explained.

At Northampton he took just two wickets in the match, but partially redeemed himself by clouting 28 and 33 not out in a low-scoring game after coming in at No. 10. ‘In the power and cleanness of his hitting, Khan gave as much pleasure as anyone,’ opined that doyen of cricket correspondents, E.W. Swanton. Imran took three for 58 in his next outing, against Hampshire, failed dismally against Nottinghamshire and wasn’t selected for the tourists’ showpiece match against MCC at Lord’s. In all, he was to have a distinctly mixed first impression of what soon became his adopted home. Some of the sledging in those pre-PC times tended to be blunter than today, and there was often a muttered ‘Paki’ or ‘Curry breath’ to be heard from the fielders as Imran came out to bat. The insults seem to have had the singular motivational effect of making him work even harder at his game. As Javed Miandad recalls, ‘On [that] tour, Imran developed a strict routine of physical training that he adhered to without fail throughout his playing days … Every day, he would bowl six to eight overs without fail. He wouldn’t be bowling to any batsman, but would just be on his own, bowling at a single stump … There was a popping crease, and 22 yards away there would be the solitary stump. It was just Imran and the craft of bowling, with the rest of the world completely blocked out.’

When the tour ended and Imran joined Worcestershire, he continued to practise in an indoor school with the county coach and former slow left-armer Henry Horton. The coach thought ‘the lad bowl[ed] like a catapault’, but recognised that there was talent there to be tapped.

One of Imran’s Pakistan colleagues told me that, such were his shortcomings in England, there had even been talk of sending him home early ‘to hone his skills with Lahore’ — a fate not much better, for an ambitious young professional, than being sent down the salt mines. He probably survived as much by luck as by any sudden improvement in technique. Two of Pakistan’s faster bowlers, Sarfraz Nawaz and Salim Altaf, were ruled out by injuries, so Imran found himself called up for the first Test against England at Edgbaston. For the record, he was 18 years and 240 days old on his debut: impressive, but almost a case of late development compared to other Pakistan internationals such as Mushtaq Mohammad, who had supposedly been just over 15 when he first played for his country. Imran would remember the pre-Test dinner as being a less than inspirational affair. Several of the senior players took the opportunity to remark that the England batsmen and bowlers were the best in the world; and as for their slip fielding, if you nicked the ball, there was no point in even looking round, as the catch would already have been taken. (They were obviously still unfamiliar with Keith Fletcher.) There were raucous celebrations when the news of Imran’s selection reached Zaman Park, where Mrs Khan distributed a large tray of the enticingly-named barfi, a fudge-like confection traditionally reserved for holidays. As we’ve seen, Imran’s father’s response was generally more restrained. One English-based family friend told me that Mr Khan ‘took great pride that Imran represented his country. He never missed his press cuttings and appearances on T V. But he followed them as though Imran had a permanent starring role in a school play. I don’t think he ever fully grasped the size of the stage his son played on.’

At Edgbaston Pakistan won the toss, batted and were still there two days later. It was the Test in which Zaheer Abbas scored 274, Asif Iqbal 104 not out and Mushtaq 100, and England followed on for the first time against Pakistan. Imran’s inaugural over in Test cricket was one he never forgot. It was bowled to Colin Cowdrey, who was then winning his 109th cap. Cowdrey failed to land a bat on the first four balls, if only because they were so wide. At the end of five overs Imran’s analysis was none for 19. The figures would have been worse had the England batsmen not been content to stand back and watch the ball pass harmlessly by in the direction of long leg. In one account, the Pakistani wicket-keeper Wasim Bari was obliged to ‘fling [him]self around like Gordon Banks’. At the end of Imran’s spell his captain took him aside and gently explained that an inswinger should ideally pitch outside the off stump, not outside leg. England managed to hold out for a draw thanks to rain and an unbeaten century by Luckhurst. The former Australian captain Richie Benaud was commentating on the match and rather generously remarks that ‘No one paid a great deal of attention to the tourists’ young all-rounder. He was just one of 11 players.’ Imran himself reports that as a result of the Test ‘the reputation of our side rose, while mine sank without trace … Dreadful … I considered giv[ing] up serious cricket.’ Clearly, a star wasn’t born.

The rest of the tour can perhaps be quickly recalled. Imran was back to his old routine against Yorkshire at Bradford, using the scattergun approach to try to dismiss batsmen, if mostly favouring the leg side. He was dropped for the second and third Tests, which Pakistan drew and lost respectively. It rained almost constantly. At the end of June the tourists took the bus up to Selkirk to play Scotland, where Imran recalls that two of his colleagues ‘sat talking about me, fully aware that I could hear them. They made no attempt to hide their scorn. Their verdict was that I would be lucky to get into the Second XI of an English club side, let alone a county team.’ Imran adds that he was immediately fired up to prove his critics wrong, although with initially disappointing results: wicketless in both Scottish innings, he managed knocks of 14 and 0 with the bat. His primary challenge remained landing the ball on the cut part of the pitch. Against Surrey, Imran took off his sweater to start bowling and the umpire good-naturedly called down the wicket to the batsman, ‘Right arm over, anywhere.’ Everyone duly fell about laughing, including, to his credit, Imran. Or perhaps he had merely been gritting his teeth. In the 11 matches he played on the tour he took a total of 12 wickets at an average of 43.91 each.

Things didn’t go that well off the field, either. Imran was fined £2, equivalent to his entire tour bonus, when he left the Pakistan hotel one night after stuffing a pillow down his bed, Great Escape-style, to make for the nearest disco. Another evening he enjoyed the heady atmosphere of the Top Rank, Swansea, only to find that his room-mate Saeed Ahmed had reported him for breaking the team curfew: fined £1.50. A day or two later a catch went down off Saeed’s bowling, causing him to break into tears and Imran in turn to burst out laughing, resulting in another visit to the manager’s office. One wet afternoon in the Pakistan dressing-room, Sadiq Mohammad, at 26 one of the senior members of the team, asked Imran to get him a cup of tea, whereupon Imran told him to do it himself. It was a characteristic response by a man whose hallmark was the untugged forelock. Sadiq had ‘gone berserk,’ I was told. ‘He shouted at Imran, prodding his fingers towards his face, and said, “I’ll finish you now!” and “You’ll pay!”’ Imran had calmly looked the older player in the eye and said, ‘I’m not your servant.’

Even at this early stage, Imran attracted an entourage of flattering male followers who proved no threat to his ego and who acted as loyal buffers between him and the outside world. Or at least that was their role in later years, when a key duty was to restrain the more persistent of Imran’s female admirers. The 1971 entourage was only the first in a series of royal courts, often made up of junior colleagues. Players like Talat Ali and Azmat Rana, neither of whom appeared in a Test on the tour, were typically part of the group. A then 20-year-old legal secretary named Judy Flanders well remembers Imran’s activities at a popular lar Manchester nightspot: ‘He sat around, smouldered, muttered a bit to his mates, didn’t dance, drank only milk, and rested his hand affectionately on my thigh.’

There was something of a heroes’ welcome waiting for the Pakistanis when they flew home in the middle of July. Losing an overseas series to England 1–0 was considered a rare achievement, given both the negative pre-tour publicity and the team’s generally dismal track record over the past decade. The relative success on the field in turn fed into a renewed public enthusiasm for the national game. With hindsight, the centre of gravity of international cricket was already shifting towards South Asia, where most of the potential spectators, much of the wristy talent and a fair amount of the available gambling money all were. Imran himself was not on hand to hear the cheers and wolf-whistles of the crowd at Karachi airport. Later that week he treated himself to a final evening’s entertainment at the Mecca dance-hall in London’s Leicester Square, then caught the early train to Worcester, his principal English home for the next five years.

Had Imran gone back to Lahore and taken up engineering, as his father still periodically urged him to, he’d be remembered today as a talented underachiever. As it was, the odds were that he would go on to play perhaps one or two obscure seasons of county cricket. Then a professional career in Pakistan, possibly involving the civil service, along with an arranged marriage, and the occasional weekend appearance for the Gymkhana or a similar club; retirement; death; appreciative but not long obituaries, followed by a footnote recalling him as a ‘one Test wonder’ in the cricket reference books — that would have been it. The reason Imran succeeded where other, more naturally gifted, players failed was that he put his first year in England to such good effect, emerging from it fitter and faster than ever. More determined, too. Reflecting on Imran’s self-belief, Wasim Raja (no martyr to false modesty himself) admiringly recalled that, as a 19-year-old, he had had ‘a healthy ego [along] with the single-minded focus of a speeding bullet’.

Even so, it was a struggle. Imran would have been less than human if he hadn’t taken time to adapt to single life in an English provincial town just as early autumn approached. Worcestershire initially accommodated their overseas signing in a rather spartan room in the market square’s Star Hotel. Local folklore has it that, while staying at the Star, Imran put his mattress on the floor each night, and each morning the chambermaid, ignorant of the oriental custom, returned the mattress to the bed. He was not selected for the county side in the remaining part of the season, but played seven matches for the Second XI, and less formally in the Under-25 groups and assorted knock-ups. Once again these gave scant evidence of any latent genius, although the newcomer ‘absorbed’ everything, I was told, and was a ‘quick study’. Imran was once seen to take a thick coaching book with him back to his digs. He had apparently combed through it overnight and mentally photographed what he needed, because the next morning ‘he could quote the book’s exact captions [and] whole chunks of the actual text,’ an impressed colleague recalled.

On 9 August, Imran arrived at the unprepossesing County Ground, Derby, with his usual baggage: style. Clad in tailored whites and a Pakistan touring cap, a polka-dot handkerchief sticking out of a pocket, he treated the sparse Tuesday morning crowd to 110 of the best runs possible, out of a grand total of 222. Regrettably, this early-career promise wasn’t to be entirely fulfilled. By the beginning of September, the Worcestershire Second XI had lost four of their last five games and were drifting near the bottom of the 14-team league. The county still seem to have thought of Imran, to the extent that they did so at all, as a middle-order belter who could bowl a bit. It wasn’t an entirely illogical preconception, since they had engaged him in the first place after watching him hit the International XI’s Neil Hawke around the park at Lahore. Although not exceptionally wristy, Imran had developed a series of taut, slightly robotic arm shots which could give the ball an almighty thump. Even so, one or two good judges including Henry Horton appeared to think he had the makings of an all-rounder, a natural replacement for the seemingly ageless but actually 40-year-old Basil D’Oliveira. Though not perhaps the most accurate, Imran’s bowling was pretty spectacular by county, let alone Second XI or Club and Ground standards. He knew it. Beset though he often was at Worcester by nagging doubts about his overall prospects, his claims for himself weren’t small — and weren’t on the whole misguided.

On 1 September, Imran was selected to play for Worcestershire in a three-day match against the touring Indians. It seems somehow fitting that his opponents for his debut should be his nation’s mortal enemies. Imran drew some attention to himself before play started by appearing in the net swinging three bats at once, a practice favoured by professional baseball players to make the bat they hit with feel lighter. To his bemused team-mates, though, it’s possible it merely looked eccentric. He wasn’t to follow up this preliminary flourish when in the middle, scoring 0 and 15 and failing to take a wicket. At least one of the Indian team thought him ‘a hype’.

Imran hadn’t forgotten his promise to his parents to finish his education in England, and shortly after the India game he entered Worcester Royal Grammar school as a boarder, with a view to taking A levels and going on to university. His ten months there don’t appear to have been happy ones. Apart from the institutional food and the cold, he was miserably homesick, his one friend in England being his cousin Majid, who was far away at Cambridge. At half-term and on other holidays, Imran stayed behind and moved into an attic room in his headmaster’s house. One retired staff member described him to me, perhaps not surprisingly, as ‘a bit of a loner’. The English boarding school system was not then troubled, as it was later, by counsellors. Had it been, Imran would no doubt have been thought worthy of concern. In the event, he seems to have been somewhat of an object of satire to the other boys, to whom he had, in any case, little to talk about, preoccupied as they were with glam rock and soccer. Even so, the familiar determination and ambition were to the fore. Despite a still imperfect grasp of English, Imran passed Economics and Geography with an A and a C grade respectively. He completed the two-year course in the equivalent of just over two terms, or nine months.

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One winter Saturday afternoon Imran and Majid visited Mike Selvey, the future Surrey, Middlesex and England bowler (and Guardian cricket correspondent), at his flat in Cambridge. Selvey thought the nearly invisible teenager swathed in a heavy overcoat and a variety of scarves to be ‘very quiet and shy. [Although] Imran said very little, years later he told me how much he appreciated it. I always got on well with him and called him Fred, as in Karno.’

It seems most people who met Imran during his first year or so in England had the same general impression Selvey did. Away from the cricket field, he was basically ‘shy’ and ‘rather mousey — a bit of a mumbler,’ two grammar school contemporaries recalled. Older and more sophisticated people reacted similarly, finding Imran a very different proposition from the later celebrity. ‘He didn’t treat himself like a statue of himself,’ Basil D’Oliveira said after meeting him in 1971.

He seems to have been commendably focused on his studies at Worcester Grammar (whose fees of about £200 a term were paid not by the club, as popularly rumoured, but by Imran’s father). In the light of his future reputation as a sort of flannelled Austin Powers figure, it’s worth quoting one final schoolfriend, now a lecturer in psychology, who saw him as a socially naive young man. ‘He kept to himself, and didn’t show any interest in girls or sex that I was aware of.’ Sometime towards the end of the year, Imran apparently did write a well-received short story or essay, which he circulated to some of the senior boys, about a man who walks around London soliciting beautiful women. ‘He certainly didn’t do any fieldwork on it,’ his friend insists. Imran also spent hours retooling his bowling action both in the school gym and in the indoor net at Edgbaston which Worcestershire then shared. Although Henry Horton worked doggedly to convert the ‘catapault’ bowler into the well-oiled machine of later legend, it was John Parker, the young New Zealand batsman also in his first year at Worcester, who looked at Imran one day and casually suggested he ‘take a little jump’ before delivering the ball. The idea was both to gain extra momentum and to get more side-on to the batsman, who, as an added bonus, would then have to deal with ‘this crazy, vaulting Pakistani bowling at you at 90 miles an hour’, as one distinguished former England opener puts it. The improvisations in Imran’s bowling technique continued over the years. He could, and did, vary his run-up, steam in wide of the crease, move it both ways, or neither, and was apt to follow up a slower ball with a screaming bouncer that left batsmen wringing hands or standing transfixed. But what really set him apart was that ‘little jump’. It was at once superbly efficient and shamelessly flamboyant, and as such could be readily appreciated by players and spectators alike. At Edgbaston in 1982 Imran took seven for 52 in the English first innings, and was paid the compliment of the home crowd applauding their own team’s discomfiture as they savoured a bowling routine that was part athletics, part ballet and part tribal wardance. ‘It was,’ said the England captain, ‘a privilege to be there.’

In July 1972 Imran won a place at Keble College, Oxford, after being brusquely rejected by Cambridge. Before going up he played some schools and Warwick Pool cricket, making use of his new action; although the exact number is hard to establish, I was told he had taken ‘a minimum of 25 wickets’ in the course of four single-innings matches. (He also played once for Worcestershire Seconds against Glamorgan, with the more modest if economical figures of none for 16 off eight.) In his autobiography, Imran notes a shade tartly, ‘When I reported to the county in 1972 I found a few things entirely different from the terms we had agreed. For a start, my wages had been reduced’ — supposedly from £35 to £25 a week — ‘and secondly, John Parker was to be specially registered ahead of me.’ Imran’s account doesn’t entirely square with that of the incoming county secretary, Mike Vockins, who, while not a party to the original deal struck in the pavilion at Lahore, had ‘all the bumph’ at his disposal. ‘There would have been only limited opportunities to play [Imran] in that 1972 season, although under the rules he would have automatically become eligible and registered once he went up to Oxford. I can’t recall any occasion during my 30 years as Secretary when any players’ wages were reduced,’ says Vockins.

Even at that stage, Imran seems to have had distinctly mixed views about the appeal of playing county cricket seven days a week. As he quickly recognised, the sheer repetitiveness of it, often cited as a weakness, can be a marked asset from the player’s point of view; if you make a mistake, you get a chance to atone for it on an almost daily basis for five months. Set against that was the irksome routine of humping one’s kit up and down the British motorway system, and lodging in a series of guest-houses or hotels with little pretension to luxury. The wages were unspectacular — £800 to £1,200 per annum was typical for an uncapped player. For reasons of both background and temperament, Imran never fully integrated into the general banter of the county dressing-room or indeed of the pub. He never drank alcohol, a major handicap in almost every aspect of life as a professional sportsman in the Britain of the early 1970s. ‘We didn’t know quite what to make of him,’ one Worcestershire colleague recalls. ‘He certainly wasn’t one of the boys in the sense of going out on the pull, though I gather he did pretty well in that area by himself.’ Basil D’Oliveira, the South African-born player then in his tenth year with Worcestershire, told me, ‘I’m not surprised if there were misunderstandings, seeing most English county cricketers knew as much about Pakistan as they did about the dark side of the moon.’ Imran came to think that the ‘old pros’ on the county circuit were hopelessly negative in their approach to the game, and ‘slightly racist’ to boot. D’Oliveira confirmed that he had once heard an opposition bowler greet the new recruit ‘with a whole string of ethnic stereotypes, in which the word “chutney” somehow stood out’, and that ‘Immy’s response was to hit the second or third ball he faced from the guy out of the park.’ D’Oliveira added that it ‘wasn’t that unusual a scene’.

Imran eked out the balance of a forgettable season for Worcestershire Seconds, distinguishing himself only with a four-wicket haul against Leicestershire and their perhaps less than stellar middle order of Schepens, Stringer, Wenban and Stubbs. While on the road he roomed alone, generally ate alone, and found ways to kill time alone before and after games. In another departure from standard practice Imran spent long hours wandering through museums and art galleries, browsing in public libraries and visiting the historic sights in various provincial towns. He seems not to have bonded with any of his team-mates, or to have gone out of his way to make friends. Writing of his time at Worcestershire as a whole, Imran was to note, ‘I just didn’t enjoy myself … Either the players were married and had their own lives, or they were unmarried and spent their evenings in pubs. Being a teetotaller, I was lonely and bored.’ About the best that could be said of the experience was that it allowed him to play cricket at a marginally more competitive level than would have been the case in Pakistan, whose domestic contests between various state agencies, transportation conglomerates and banks proved of only limited appeal to players and spectators alike.

The crash course in culture served Imran well at Oxford, where he initially read Geography before switching to Politics and Economics. On the whole it seems to have been a more congenial atmosphere than that of the county Second XI circuit. One of his contemporaries told me that, at 20, Imran had been ‘a bit green’ and had stayed the course academically only through his own freelance efforts and the good grace of Paul Hayes, the senior tutor at Keble, who had evidently taken a shine to him. Imran had been ‘socially agile’, however — ‘If it was female and had a pulse, he pursued it.’ After a year living in college he moved out to a series of digs, getting around town on an ancient Bantam motorbike. It’s remembered that he liked to ride this at top speed, often preferring a zigzag pattern to a straight line, and even in winter carried his cricket bat slung over the back wheel. One Saturday night Imran rasped up on the bike to a party in Oxford’s Summertown area, accompanied by a ‘ravishing looking’ girlfriend. A certain amount of drinking and substance abuse had gone on among his fellow guests, I was told. Perhaps as a result, later in the evening a fresh-faced chemistry student reeled up to Imran and said, ‘I’m Cassius Clay and I’m going to knock the shit out of you.’ Imran, who was somewhat taller than his antagonist, put his hand on the man’s right shoulder and held him patiently at arm’s length while ‘the little guy punched the air in between them’.

Imran was particularly fortunate to play his cricket at the Parks, a handsome, tree-lined ground that was only a short walk from Keble. In the summer term his practice was to go directly from his early morning tutorial to the playing field, returning home again for a late dinner. An Oxford team-mate named Simon Porter remembers him as ‘more inherently gifted, obviously, [but] also more driven’ than his colleagues. ‘Imran spent hours trundling away in the nets, essentially in an effort to perfect his inswinger. He always wanted to know if you could “read” him, which I, for one, couldn’t — and I had the bruises all over my leg to prove it.’ It wasn’t unknown for Imran to attract a ‘small harem’ of supporters to the ground for even the most insignificant fixture. Another colleague remembers that, on losing his wicket in one inter-college game, Imran ‘strode straight through the front door of the pavilion, grabbed a bag, and strode straight out the back one, where a blonde in a sports car was waiting for him. He jumped in, and that was the last we saw of him for two days.’ A subsequent Oxford girlfriend, another blonde now called Karen Wishart (not her name at the time), thought Imran a ‘physically beautiful’ man whose charm was nonetheless limited in its scope. One evening the two of them went off together to ‘a little flat above a fruit and veg shop’ in the Oxford suburbs. Looking back on the episode years later, Wishart was left to conclude that Imran was a ‘music and roses at night, pat on the bum in the morning’ type. It would be only fair to add that another woman found him an ‘attentive, funny and charming’ partner, who nonetheless struck her as the kind who would ‘hug you politely and then just stroll away once you broke up’. The words proved prophetic.

One of Imran’s earliest appearances for Oxford was against Worcestershire, where he clearly had something to prove. Over the years, some of these county versus university encounters could be the ultimate in boredom, and many of the old pros saw them as little more than an agreeable way to improve their averages. That wasn’t to be the case here, at least in Oxford’s second innings. A powerful Worcester attack of Holder, Pridgeon, D’Oliveira and Gifford appeared to be sending down half-volleys and long hops all afternoon. It wasn’t so, but Imran’s polished innings of 54 more than had the measure of the professionals’ line-up. He followed it by scoring 47 and 51 against Sussex, a match I illicitly cycled over from my nearby boarding school to watch. Nothing seemed to better crystallise events than the straight six with which Imran greeted Sussex’s highly regarded off-spinner Johnny Barclay; 2–0–4–2–6 followed, all in the direction of the River Cherwell. After the over, Barclay took his sweater and came back to field at third man, still muttering to himself. Something similar happened a fortnight later against Gloucestershire. Imran scored 59 out of 106 in the Oxford second innings, peppering the old wooden scorebox-cum-groundsman’s hut with sixes. Others landed in the copse of trees behind square leg. Generally speaking Imran did rather less with the ball, but was still in a class of his own compared with his fellow undergraduates, a tall poppy among shrinking violets.