Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician

It was the same story against Cambridge in the varsity match. Imran top-scored with 51 in the Oxford first innings (caught off the bowling of Phil Edmonds), but took only a modest three wickets throughout. One or two of his Oxford colleagues wanted him to bowl faster, of which he was fully capable, rather than to concentrate on line and length as Worcestershire always insisted. Both Imran and his new bowling action were still works in progress. Although tall, he wasn’t as well upholstered as he would be when he filled out two or three years later, and the ‘little jump’ was a formidable physical feat that wasn’t yet invariably effective when it came to getting the ball on the wicket. In those days, the former England captain Ted Dexter told me, ‘Imran used to come charging in [and] plant his left foot virtually parallel to the batting crease in the delivery stride. “Sooner or later, that young man will do himself an injury”,’ Dexter thought presciently. Oxford drew their match with Cambridge. A night or two later, Imran walked into the White Horse in Oxford’s Broad Street, where he became one of the first men to successfully order a glass of milk in a British pub. As usual there was a small group of acolytes at his table, including the statutory blonde girlfriend. ‘People were fawning on Imran because he was already a bit of a superstar,’ one of the party recalls. ‘But the English have always been fascinated with swarthy oriental mavericks. Or at least they were in those days. Imran would have turned heads even if he’d never picked up a cricket ball. I have a fond memory of him sitting there with his milk and his blonde, trying desperately to look unimpressed while somebody read out all the glowing references to him — how he was a tiger and a fighter and so on — in the morning press. He loved it. Who wouldn’t have?’ Imran may not have been the finished article, but good judges had begun to take serious note of him.

Fighting was what life was about. That was the reason Imran ‘worked like a cur’, to quote a Keble source, to support himself at Oxford. When he was later to claim that ‘playboys have plenty of time and money — I’ve never had either’, he didn’t exaggerate his case. In the wake of the civil war and the subsequent currency crisis, the Pakistani government had imposed strict exchange controls that made it illegal to send more than the equivalent of £15 out of the country annually, with the prospect of a lengthy gaol term for anyone breaking the law. As a result Imran had no trust fund and an only minimal allowance. To keep himself afloat in the off-season he took a series of menial jobs, including one washing dishes over the Christmas holiday at Littlewoods store in south London. It was no worse than the fate of thousands of other students over the years, but it does refute the idea that he swanned through his time at Oxford like one of the teddybear-carrying toffs in Brideshead Revisited.

Despite his claim to have been neglected by Worcestershire, Imran played for the county in 11 first-class matches in the second half of the 1973 season. The club found him new if rather basic digs in the town’s Bromyard Road, and even went to war with the Test and County Cricket Board to keep him registered with them under the board’s Rule 4, relating to ‘temporary special players’. Imran came into the team in time to play Warwickshire in a fixture starting on 14 July, just three days after appearing for Oxford at Lord’s. The more free-spirited, if not always effective, student approach to the game gave way to the trench warfare of the county championship, conducted behind the sandbag of broad pads — the main idea being for batsmen to obtain a reasonably good average each season at the minimum of risk and physical exertion to themselves. For a cricketer who abhorred the safety-first school epitomised by certain old pros, it was all mildly depressing. Imran took just 31 wickets in the 11 matches (one of them, admittedly, when he bowled Garry Sobers) at some 24 apiece. But even that modest achievement eclipsed his performance with the bat — 15 innings, 228 runs, average 16.28. Being Imran, though, what he lacked in mature ability he fully made up for in self-belief; the fact that he neither scored runs nor took wickets troubled him as little as did most of the criticism he received over the years, and had the same general effect. ‘It taught me never to stop, that when you lose you fight harder the next time.’

Back in Oxford, Karen Wishart sometimes talked to Imran about his future — Imran apparently uncertain, Wishart positive that he would play cricket for only a year or two more and then go back to a steady job in Pakistan. Both the civil service and engineering were mentioned. Wishart often urged Imran to ignore the temptation to become a fully professional sportsman who presumably might just about eke out a living for another ten years or so while his contemporaries got on with their ‘proper’ careers. Down that road, she insisted, there was nothing to gain and everything to lose. Imran frequently said he didn’t much like the idea either.

If Wishart took that for an answer, she knew less than she thought she did about a man who was born to perform.

* (#ulink_6456f3df-ca0c-5074-af52-6169d9addf53) At which point Newsweek’s editor apologised, remarking that his story had been based on an anonymous source who now ‘wasn’t sure whether it was true or not’.

* (#ulink_962c9972-b3ae-59ef-8eae-6027d3e16b51) Opening the bowling with Imran for the school’s First XI was a Kenyan-born 18-year-old named Rabi Mehta, who in the 1980s went on to author several scholarly articles about the aerodynamics of a cricket ball in flight, and thus to ‘explain’ the theory of reverse swing.

THREE The Swinger (#ua4d40457-9028-54b4-a687-233d3633884c)

In 1974 Imran was elected captain of Oxford. It was a somewhat surprising choice, considering his only mixed form with bat and ball, untried diplomatic skills and still limited command of English. According to those with whom he discussed the club’s offer, he hesitated a day or two before agreeing, apparently concerned that ‘the guys’ might not accept him. There was also the question of whether the added responsibility would affect his own game, as has been known with cricket captains. Trying to bat, bowl, lead from the front and learn the language, one friend said bluntly, was at least one job too many.

The offer was nonetheless a heady one for a 21-year-old Pakistani who had a somewhat romantic view of the British university tradition as a whole, based as it was on the exploits of men like Majid’s father Jahangir Khan, who had been up at Cambridge in the 1930s. Accepting it would give him a certain cachet, as well as the chance to bowl himself as he saw fit. After another winter of training and periodic trips to the indoor school at Edgbaston, Imran’s action was now close to the real thing. ‘I also knew I had the temperament for fast bowling,’ he remarks. With five years of first-class cricket and one Test appearance to his credit, ‘I was ready … confident the job would [make] me a better player’ — a judgement that events bore out to a quite astonishing extent.

Imran hit the ground running, taking five for 56 against a Warwickshire side including six current or former England Test players and the West Indies’ Alvin Kallicharran. He then began to do the thing in style. Innings of 117 not out and 106 against a full-strength Nottinghamshire. Another five-wicket haul against Derbyshire. A cameo of 20 (Oxford’s top score) against a Somerset who were giving a second match to a teenager named Botham. Imran seemed to be playing some of the counties by himself, fielding tigerishly to his own bowling and driving batsmen into errors and indecision where previously there had been only confidence. As one of his colleagues told me, ‘You frequently had the feeling that he could have made up a team with just himself, a couple of serviceable all-rounders and maybe a wicketkeeper.’

At the Parks on the bitterly cold morning of 15 May, Imran went out to toss with the captain of Yorkshire, Geoff Boycott. At ten o’clock the entire playing area was covered with a sleet that had frozen in the night, and both the pavilion and the rows of deckchairs rather optimistically displayed in front of it seemed to have been varnished with ice. This gave the two men the opportunity to agree that conditions for early-season English cricket could be a bit on the crisp side. After these pleasantries were concluded, Boycott told Imran (whom he addressed as ‘young man’) that he didn’t much care for the occasion as a whole. ‘It’s not worth getting out of bed for these fucking student games,’ he complained. Someone in the sparse crowd then made an audible and rather racist remark in which he drew comparison between the ethnic make-up of the two teams. You could literally see the steam coming off Imran as he bounded back up the pavilion steps. Anyone at all familiar with him would have known what to expect next. Bowling at maximum revs for the next two hours he took four Yorkshire wickets, including that of Boycott with a late inswinger. A young boy’s perhaps ill-timed request for the Yorkshireman’s autograph a few minutes later was met in the negative. Back in the middle Imran was the most restless captain, pacing around with a frown when not actually bowling, making pantomime signals to his fielders. He took himself off at last after 39 overs, mentally perhaps, if not physically, exhausted.

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There followed a short and unremarkable match with Worcestershire, then the visit of the touring Indians, against whom Imran made 160 and 49. He began his first innings quietly enough, with just a clipping four or two against Madan Lal. But with the arrival of the spinners came one of the most ferocious onslaughts on any type of bowling which can ever have been inflicted at the Parks. The students put on 189 for the third wicket, 120 of them by Imran who, playing on the offside at one end and on the on-side at the other, struck the ball relentlessly to the near boundary, at least once with such force that it rebounded off the heavy roller half-way to the pitch. For good measure, he also took four wickets in the Indians’ first innings. Imran’s century was his highest score to date in first-class cricket. Eight days later, he broke his record with 170 against Northamptonshire. He then proceeded to dispatch the Northants middle order with three wickets in the first innings and four in the second. Imran was still bowling when Oxford won by 97 runs, having given one of the really great all-round performances.

Imran’s well-developed sense of self-respect might go some way to explain why, time and again, he and his bowling seemed to step up a gear when he had something particular to prove. An associated element of revenge — the Pathan principle of badal — was also observable deep in the mix. Most sportsmen, of course, talk about ‘pride’, at least as an abstraction, and virtually no pre-match press conference at any level of the professional soccer world would be complete without repeated references to the concept. But Imran took it to an almost messianic degree, and an ill-advised remark such as Boycott’s was apt to have roughly the same effect as lighting the touch-paper on a particularly spectacular firework. ‘Ten of us were just students together, playing a game,’ one of the Oxford team told me. Imran, by contrast, ‘came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little slight into a life-or-death struggle. I wouldn’t say he always thought everyone was ganging up on him. That sounds a touch paranoid, whereas in my experience he saw things from a very clear cultural-historical perspective. From what I heard and saw of Imran, and charming as he often was, he had a definite thing about certain aspects of the mother country. As far as he was concerned, we were all essentially colonialist swine who had been screwing his people for centuries.’

Such was the general backdrop to Imran’s first match as captain against Cambridge, the university which had seen fit to shun his services two years earlier. It scarcely needs adding that his bowling proved a shade brisk for the opposition. Imran took five for 44 off 20 overs in the Cambridge first innings and five for 69 off 38 overs in the second. As a rule he was very fast, variable both in length and direction, with a preference for the ballooning inswinger, and desperately hard to score from. When he was short and on line a number of the Cambridge batsmen elected to take the ball on the body anywhere between the top of the pads and the general area of the forehead, if more out of necessity than choice. Not that Imran’s robust approach to the game precluded the odd moment of light relief, as when he saw fit to amble in once or twice and lob up a gentle leg break. One Cambridge batsman thought this to have been a prime example of reverse psychology on Imran’s part. ‘It bloody nearly worked, too, because one of our guys promptly lost his head and dollied up a catch, which was dropped.’ This had been ‘poorly received’ by the bowler. Pantomime then stalked proceedings on the third day, when Oxford were chasing 205 to win. They eventually needed just 61 off the last 20 overs, with half their wickets in hand. Imran’s ‘crystal clear’ instruction to go for runs was somehow missed by the Oxford No. 5, Edward Thackeray, who proceded serenely to 42 not out in just over three hours. Towards the end the general noise from the Tavern stand dissolved into an exasperated chant of ‘Wake up, Oxford’ and ‘We want cricket’. The situation was apparently no less trying to Imran, who could be seen pacing restively from side to side on the players’ balcony, occasionally pausing long enough to scowl or shake his fist towards the middle. After what was described as a ‘strained’ tea interval, he had resorted to thumbing through a copy of the laws to see whether Thackeray’s innings could be involuntarily declared closed. It couldn’t, and the match was drawn.

The team party, or post-mortem — there was no formal dinner — that evening was an equally stiff affair. For the most part, Imran (who left early to catch a train to Hove, where he was appearing for Worcestershire against Sussex) engaged only in uncomfortable small talk with his men, and chose not to dwell on the match at any length. Many silences resulted. At one point, apparently in an effort to warm things up, one of the less experienced members of the side reached over to the bar and offered his captain some champagne.

‘Thank you,’ Imran said. ‘I drink milk.’

Since 1971 Pakistan had been gradually returning to cricketing health, if not without the occasional relapse or well-publicised temper tantrum. The national team had a new bowler in Sarfraz Nawaz and a well-remembered one in Mushtaq. Asif and Zaheer were batsmen fit to set before the world. In 1972–73, when Imran was bedding down at Oxford, his countrymen had toured Australia and acquitted themselves rather better, both on and off the field, than the 3–0 result suggests. No side including Saeed Ahmed could be entirely incident-free, even so, and the selectors had been forced to draft in the all-rounder Nasim-ul-Ghani for the Sydney Test after Saeed refused to open the batting against Dennis Lillee. Pakistan had gone on to win and draw series against New Zealand and England respectively. Along the way, Intikhab Alam had been replaced as captain by Imran’s cousin Majid, who was considered an only modest success in the job. After three consecutive draws against England, Majid stood down and Intikhab returned for his third time in charge. ‘[The captaincy] is out of control … it’s a circus,’ the PIA president was heard to complain at a press conference in his office, throwing his pen so hard it bounced off the carpet.

The labyrinthine world of Pakistan politics, meanwhile, continued to be mirrored by that of its cricket administration. Abdul Kardar, the former captain of the national team, now combined his position as chairman of the BCCP with a cabinet office in the Bhutto government. In 1974, Bhutto and Kardar moved the headquarters of Pakistan cricket from Karachi to Lahore. They took the opportunity to rename the Lahore stadium after the self-styled ‘Glorious Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist Peoples Brotherly Libyan Army’ (and supporter of both the eventual South-East Asian nuclear powers, if not their cricket), Muammar al-Gaddafi, along with a gushing tribute from the Pakistani prime minister: ‘Today, to you, we say thank you … thank you, thank you, Glorious Guide.’

For what? some journalists wondered, no doubt in keeping with many residents of Karachi. Most of Bhutto’s government were involved in one way or another in the management of Pakistan cricket, although generally they restricted themselves to various pet schemes, such as their decision to honour the Libyan dictator, rather than the tedious business of day-to-day administration. Before and during Test series, therefore, when the BCCP should have been most active, its new office, a dim, green-carpeted room in the bowels of the Gaddafi stadium, was often utterly deserted — a condition which was only slightly improved even on the rare occasions when Kardar scheduled a meeting of the full ‘committee’, which consisted of a dozen or so Bhutto appointees based in Islamabad; more than once, the only people who bothered to show up were Kardar and a secretary.

It’s not clear to what degree, if any, the BCCP officials balanced their misgivings about Imran’s one Test performance to date with their apparent new-found preference for Lahore over Karachi, a bias which was to be reflected in a number of hotly debated selections over the next decade. Perhaps they simply felt that after three years he was ready to return. In either event Imran joined his colleagues midway through their 1974 tour of England. His first appearance, against Warwickshire, following just four days after the varsity match, came as a rude lesson in the comparative merits of student and representative cricket. Imran went for 126 runs off his 22 overs in the Warwickshire first innings. At one stage the opener John Jameson carted him for 50 in four overs. Rain then spared him any further indignity. The unimpressed tour manager, Omar Kureishi, promptly called the team together and read them the Riot Act, which ‘in no way dented Imran’s high spirits or self-confidence’, according to Kureishi’s then teenaged son Javed, who accompanied the side. ‘I remember him as this supremely cocky, long-haired guy who was tremendous fun to be around. Imran thought nothing of marching up to a senior player and telling him, “Your grip’s all wrong, chum”, or advising everyone on their fitness and diet. I once watched, fascinated, as he dropped two raw eggs into a glass of milk in a London restaurant and drained it off in one gulp. Very specific about things like that, Imran. Always finished his day off with a carrot.’

The tour management took the view that Imran’s jaded performance against Warwickshire must be due to a hectic nightlife, and as a result imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on the entire team. ‘This brought some dirty looks in my direction,’ he recalls.

Duly rested, Pakistan turned in a bravura performance against Nottinghamshire, whom they dismissed for 51 in their first innings. Sarfraz moved the ball about ‘like a boomerang’ in Derek Randall’s phrase (the pitch having been ‘a bog’, he added), and finished with eight for 27. Imran took a single wicket. The following week he managed a modest one for 56 and two for 65 against the Minor Counties, and was sufficiently worried about his finances to write a ‘Dear Mike’ letter to the Worcestershire secretary, telling him that he had been ‘made to understand by the other professionals in the touring team that their clubs keep on paying their basic wages throughout the duration of the tour. I wonder if that applies to me as well … I hope it does’ — all part of a ‘miserable’ first month back in Pakistani colours. (Javed Kureishi, even so, remembers accompanying Imran to the cinema around that same time, where the 21-year-old ‘laughed like hell’ throughout a Snow White cartoon. ‘There really was a core enthusiasm and innocence to the guy.’) As slumps go, this wasn’t quite on the scale of, say, Denis Compton’s famous bad patch of 1946, but it contained some pretty spectacular flops which inevitably caught the critics’ attention. ‘The student looked out of his depth at this level,’ was the Daily Mail’s scathing assesment. Imran was distinctly lucky to play in the first Test, at Headingley, and even then he operated as a third seamer after Sarfraz and Asif Masood had taken the new ball. If anything, he shone more with the bat: appearing at No. 8, he lashed 23 and 31 in a low-scoring match which petered out in a draw. These weren’t tail-end runs, either; Imran hit Old high and handsomely for a first-bounce four into the crowd in front of the press box, and when Arnold tried him likewise with a bouncer he found himself flat-batted down to the West Stand bookstall with, in one account, a stroke ‘like a tracer bullet’.

Imran went back to the nets and worked on his action, sending down the daily equivalent of 10 overs to a batsman and another half-dozen with just himself and a stump. Another game he evolved was to bounce a cricket ball off the side of a bat, and then try to retrieve it again with either hand as it shot off at odd angles. Wasim Raja once watched Imran spend 20 or 30 minutes by himself throwing a ball against a small upended trampoline; he would then catch the rebound and, in the same action, try to return the ball to hit the target, and again field the rebound. The performance was ‘all very impressive, because the [other] players just focused on their batting or bowling, while Imran also wanted to improve as an athlete.’

It worked, not right away in every case, but eventually in a series of improved bowling performances on the tour. The second Test, another draw, was notable chiefly for the incessant rain and the Pakistanis’ subsequent complaint about the state of the Lord’s pitch.

(#litres_trial_promo) Little did they or the spectators know that this was to be a feast of entertainment compared with what followed. The third and final Test at The Oval — drawn again — ‘tapered off into the type of meaningless sport which only cricket can produce’, to quote the journalist Omar Noman. Imran then bowled a tidy 10 overs for 36 in his first ever one-day international, which Pakistan won, and took two for 16 in his second, with the same result. He ended with an ‘immaculate exhibition’ (Wisden) of fast bowling in the admittedly more relaxed atmosphere of a 50-over thrash against a Yorkshire League XI at Harrogate. Imran’s figures for the tour — 249 runs at an average of 31.12, and 15 wickets at 41.66 — perhaps failed to do justice to what one critic described as an ‘efficient but rather lugubrious’ young all-rounder. Wisden was kinder: ‘He should be a powerful figure in Pakistan cricket for years to come.’

That ‘efficient but lugubrious’ might have given pause to anyone who knew Imran only as the priapic Oxford smoothie who charmed his way into a succession of beds. (‘About thirty’ over the three years, I was told — an impeccably moderate figure for the mid-1970s, although another well-placed source thought it had been more like one a week.) But spending any extended amount of time in close quarters with the Pakistan cricket team and its management would have tried the most equable of personalities. As Imran himself recalls, ‘My overall performance on the tour had been adequate, yet snide remarks were still being made about my connections, and statements to the effect that better men had been left behind.’ By all accounts there were one or two unflattering references behind his back to what one famous contemporary later dubbed his ‘Olympic ego’. (When you talk to people who knew the young Imran professionally, the word ‘humility’ comes up a lot. They say he was extremely sparing with it.) The 21-year-old’s self-confident manner occasionally chafed the other players, but in 1974 he encountered little overt hostility except from Asif Masood, who apparently disliked him almost on sight. Intikhab was fairly friendly, and Majid remained a firm ally. Mostly, though, Imran’s colleagues just ignored him, which was the usual practice with the younger players. None of them seems to have known or cared much about his life in England. ‘Imran was thought to have a superior attitude,’ Wasim Raja recalled. ‘People backed away and left him in his own castle.’

The demands of university and Test cricket, as well as of the Oxford examiners, left little time for Worcestershire, and as a result Imran made only a handful of one-day appearances for his county over the summer. He used most of the brief gap between the varsity game and the Pakistani tour to bowl in a Gillette Cup tie against Sussex that ran long, thanks to rain. That would have made his schedule over the course of one six-day period: Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, captaining Oxford at Lord’s; Wednesday and Thursday, playing the knockout game at Hove; early Friday, reporting for international duty with Pakistan at Birmingham. On most of those days, Imran also had to give interviews, attend functions and generally roam around the country by British Rail. It was a full workload, even by his standards. The people who knew him best also knew how utterly unsparing of himself he was apt to be — how ‘he gave 200 per cent, whatever the competition’, as Wasim Raja put it. ‘No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew Imran would work harder than anyone else.’ But even they didn’t know how hard he would work.

Back in Oxford, Imran made a friend out of a fellow third-year student on his Politics and Economics course. Now a 55-year-old television pundit and author of various self-help books, he had heard that the ‘famous Khan’ could be a bit standoffish. He adds that when he met Imran for the first time he’d been expecting someone ‘as warm as a December night on an ice floe’, but in the event ‘he turned out to be almost absurdly polite, in that rather courtly way some Asians have. Between the accent and the blazer, he was almost like a Terry-Thomas stereotype. Better-looking, though.’ After banking his admittedly meagre appearance money from Pakistan and Worcestershire, Imran was able to rent a small flat close to Oxford town centre. There were framed hunting prints on the wall, a wolfskin rug and reportedly rather more in the way of furniture than the average student digs of the era. On several mornings in the autumn of 1974, a plump young woman with the word ‘IMRAN’ daubed on her forehead kept up a forlorn vigil outside the main gate at Keble (where, these days, her quarry rarely appeared), displaying a ‘Fatal Attraction’ form of obsession, erotomania, of which Imran would come to see more over the next 20 years. The trappings of fame were starting to come fast.

The future Somerset and England bowler Vic Marks went up to Oxford in that same term. Thirty-five years on, he remains one of the game’s more astute critics. I asked him if at that stage in his university career Imran had ever appeared the least bit shy around his English teammates. ‘No,’ Marks replied. ‘More aloof.’ He added that Imran had been ‘hard on those he didn’t know and didn’t rate, declining to bowl them or encourage them … He knew he was better than the rest, [but] if he rated you he would try to help and advise.’ Still, at least one other colleague in the Oxford side remained bemused by Imran’s insecurity. ‘The guy generally had bags of self-confidence, sure, but oddly enough not when it came to his bowling. I thought he was a natural. Thousands of fans thought he was a natural. Just about every batsman he ever played against thought he was a natural. Imran remained unconvinced.’

Perhaps Imran’s qualms had something to do with the distinctly mixed signals he was still getting from his two principal teams. At Worcester, he notes, ‘I [was] bullied into bowling medium pace line-and-length stuff which didn’t suit my temperament.’ The key message from Pakistan was very different. Imran was astonished and overjoyed when Intikhab had thrown him the ball early on in the Test series with England and told him to do what came naturally — but, whatever happened, ‘Make them jump around.’ (He did.) Indeed, Imran occasionally seemed to be in two minds about his bowling even when he was his own captain. He rarely appeared for Oxford in the 1975 season, thanks to a commendable and possibly justified concern about passing his finals. In one of the games he did play prior to the varsity match, against Derbyshire at Burton-on-Trent, Imran surprised both the Derby batsmen and his own team by persisting in his attempts to bowl a leg break, an effect that was uneasily like that of a champion shot-putter who’d strayed inadvertently on to a badminton court. It was a curious strategic decision, or so the Oxford men thought. As it turned out, it was a repeat experiment and nothing more. After Imran’s leg spin had gone for eight in two balls he turned around, muttered something to the non-striking batsman, and measured out his full international run. A few overs later, he had taken three of the first four Derbyshire wickets to fall.

If his cricket career was somewhat erratic in the summer of 1975, his love life was a constant. Imran generally brought a ‘special’ girl with him to his matches, or even to watch him practise in the Parks nets. One female undergraduate recalls having feigned an interest in the game, ‘which I actually thought coma-inducing’, just to be near him. Imran made it immediately clear to his companion that he was a man of no small ambition, displaying ‘brass’ which impressed her. She wasn’t the only college girl who noticed the emerging star; a 21-year-old fellow politics student named Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the former Pakistan president and serving prime minister, was ‘much taken’ by Imran’s obvious talent. The elegantly shod Bhutto did not go unnoticed herself. Then in her second year of residence at Lady Margaret Hall, she was intensely outspoken both about Pakistan’s place in the world and the role of women in society. Several of Bhutto’s already quite vocal critics pointed to her Dior wardrobe and liberated lifestyle as a political symbol of conspicuous consumption, or worse, on her part. A mutual acquaintance who falls into this category told me that Bhutto had been ‘visibly impressed’ by, or ‘infatuated’ with, Imran, and that she may have been among the first to dub him affectionately the ‘Lion of Lahore’. In any event it seems fairly clear that, for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of ‘giggling’ and ‘blushing’ whenever they appeared together in public. It also seems fair to say that their relationship was ‘sexual’ in the sense that it could only have existed between a man and a woman. The reason some allowed themselves to suppose it went further was because, to quote one Oxford friend, ‘Imran slept with everyone’ — a gross calumny, but one takes the point — rather than because of any hard evidence of an affair. On balance, I rather doubt that Pakistan’s future prime minister and future cricket captain were ever anything more than good friends, and only for a term or two at that. Even in the morally libertine days of the mid-1970s, Imran’s Oxford love life soon attained legendary status. It was the beginning of a personal myth of sexuality that led some to credit him with literally scores of spurious ‘conquests’ in addition to the real, still quite impressive, total.

Cricket’s first ever World Cup, staged in England, and in which Pakistan started among the favourites, probably wasn’t the best of times for Imran to be concentrating on his finals. Although not originally selected, he was called up to play for his country in their opening fixture against Australia at Headingley, on 7 June. In Imran’s account, he sat the first two of his five exams on the 6th, a Friday, took the evening train to Leeds and arrived at his team’s hotel at four o’clock the following morning, the day of the match.

(#litres_trial_promo) Australia won by 73 runs, the Pakistanis, like so many others, having been done for pace by Lillee and Thomson. After an epic road-rail return journey some friends finally dropped Imran off in the centre of Oxford where, after going down with flu, he sat his final three papers just as his teammates were losing to the West Indies by one wicket, with two balls to spare, at Edgbaston. That concluded the Pakistanis’ World Cup. Under the circumstances, Imran did well to get a 2.1 for Politics, if only a Third in Economics. ‘I could have exceeded that,’ he remarks. Two days later he was back playing for his country in a meaningless victory over Sri Lanka. The West Indies went on to win the cup. In stark contrast to the protracted seven-week ordeal of the 2007 tournament, the entire competition was completed in 14 days, Pakistan’s campaign in just seven. Majid Khan, again back in charge of the team following an injury to Asif, had won himself a considerable reputation as a specialist in English conditions, as well as being something of a thinker. His own run-a-ball innings of 65 against Australia was a classic of its kind. But Majid’s tenure proved an only limited success, in part because up to half his men would be bickering with the other half at any given time. And even his fondest admirers have never maintained that he was a particularly charismatic or inspiring leader. Pakistan, then, returned home in June 1975 in some disarray. The board sacked Majid, and replaced him with Mushtaq.

Imran left Oxford with a flourish, driving up in his new World Cup blazer, accompanied by his latest blonde, to play in his third varsity match at Lord’s. Several other admirers, both male and female, were seen to be waiting at the gate for a glimpse of their idol, at least one of them sporting a T-shirt customised with slogans indicating how positively she would react to any romantic overtures he might care to make to her. Inasmuch as most of the other students just walked into the ground unnoticed, it was an impressive entrance. The match itself was another draw, but a rather more distinguished one than its two predecessors. The chief honours went to Peter Roebuck and Alastair Hignell, who respectively hit 158 and 60 for Cambridge. Those items apart, Imran’s bowling had all the virtues of a cool, calculated, well-executed assault. As Hignell says, it was a ‘physically terrifying’ and ‘sickening’ barrage; no small accolade from a man who had just come through several bruising encounters with the Australian rugby team.

Imran was to have a modestly successful fifth season at Worcestershire, finishing with 46 first-class wickets at 26, almost exactly the same figures as those for his up-and-coming rival Ian Botham. Still, it was an ‘only fair’ existence. A salary of £ 1,500, paid in six instalments of £250, with a munificent £10 for each county championship win, allowed for little lavish indulgence. But over and above the financial rewards, or lack of them, it had become clear even to Worcestershire that Imran had certain deep-seated misgivings about county cricket as a whole. ‘The English professional just isn’t hungry enough for success. There’s too much cricket … the players get stale,’ he wrote of his experiences some years later. Apart from the ‘essential tedium’ of a system in which too many buckled when they should, perhaps, have swashed, Imran had a more specific objection to his working environment. As he says, ‘I simply found it boring in Worcester’, where he had moved out of the Star Hotel first into digs and then into an ‘unsalubrious’ short-term flat above a fish-and-chip shop in the town centre.

Almost from the first, Imran had vocal reservations about his English club, where he had initially played a series of ‘grim’ and ‘dead-end’ Second XI matches before being ‘bullied’ into bowling ‘military medium’ for the seniors, allegedly at a reduced salary than the one ‘Harold’ Shakespeare (who died in 1976) had promised him in the pavilion at Lahore. As we’ve seen, the eventual terms were on the slim side: as well as his basic salary, the club undertook to ‘… arrange accommodation for away games on a bed-and-breakfast, early-morning tea and one newspaper basis … A meal allowance of £1 will be paid for an evening meal when away from home and for Sunday lunches when away from home’, before adding the rather bleak assurance that ‘a sum equivalent to the Second Class Rail Fare from Worcester to the venue of [an] away match will be paid to all players participating in the match’. Imran, though one of the least materially minded of professional sportsmen, was moved to send a two-page handwritten letter to Tony Greig, the captain of Sussex, in September 1975. ‘Dear Tony, I wondered if you and [your] committee would consider the possibility of taking me on staff next year?’ he enquired, citing ‘the availability of overseas registration and the young age group of the team’ as reasons for his interest. Four days later, Greig wrote back in more measured terms: ‘In reply to your correspondence of 12 September 1975 I would suggest that you telephone our Secretary as soon as your position becomes clear. You will appreciate the implications of any approach prior to your official release from Worcester … Yours sincerely, A.W. Greig, Captain of Sussex.’

I asked Mike Vockins, the long-serving Worcestershire secretary, about all this. Among other things, Vockins mentioned that he and his committee had fought a hitherto unreported running battle with the Test and County Cricket Board to retain Imran’s services. There were various sub-plots involved, but the basic problem concerned the TCCB’s rule, already the source of a skirmish with the club in 1973, restricting each affiliate side to a maximum of two overseas players. As Worcestershire already had New Zealand’s Glenn Turner and the West Indian bowler Vanburn Holder on their books, the club had mobilised on their somewhat unappreciative young all-rounder’s behalf.

‘At the end of Imran Khan’s time at Oxford, the TCCB decided, to my surprise, that his qualification for us lapsed,’ Vockins recalls. As far as the board were concerned, Imran had effectively become a Pakistani again after graduating. ‘It seemed totally illogical, and was also at odds with what both the club and more to the point Imran himself wanted. Not only did we appeal, but we were determined that we should present our case as well as we could and duly retained John Field-Evans QC, later to be a High Court judge, to fight our corner. It was quite an anxious time. I didn’t want Imran to be unduly worried, and so sought to give him confidence that the appeal would be successful and otherwise didn’t involve him directly.’ Another source then on the Worcestershire committee told me that it had cost ‘a lot of money, certainly in the several hundreds of pounds’ to appeal against the TCCB’s ruling, and that ‘that should answer any questions about whether or not we were fully committed to Mr Khan and his welfare’. (Even so, there remained Imran’s core point that ‘all my Oxford friends had moved to London, and I was stuck in Worcester … I was bored to tears there,’ he told me.) After several ‘trying’ months the club had prevailed and ‘both we and the player in question were happy to continue our association together’. Imran omits the episode of the TCCB registration from both his autobiographies, but it does seem to refute the idea that he’d been utterly miserable at Worcestershire from the start, or that the club had ever been less than wholehearted about keeping him on their books.

Imran went back to Pakistan that autumn, for only his second visit home in four-and-a-half years. He marked the occasion by making a few low-key appearances in the BCCP Patron’s Trophy on behalf of Dawood Industries, a ‘manure and insurance combine’ based in Karachi, as it intriguingly described itself. The same tournament hosted sides from the federal Water and Power Development Agency and a heavily fancied Income Tax (Collections) Department. In the second half of the season Imran represented Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in the Quaid-e-Azam Cup. He took six for 68 and five for 79 against Punjab, gave a bravura all-round performance in the tie against National Bank by taking three for 53 and six for 48 as well as scoring a second-innings century, and followed up with another six-wicket haul against Sind. Imran finished his short involvement in the domestic season with 446 runs at a touch under 30, and 52 wickets at 19 apiece. PIA paid him the equivalent of some £75 a month for his services. Back in Worcester, Mike Vockins was sitting down to write to Imran: ‘The committee has agreed that your basic salary for 1976 should be £2,000, on top of which you will receive appearance money, win money and team prize monies in the normal way … We shall also contribute £100 towards your air fare back to this country.’ On 19 November Imran wrote back to thank Vockins for his offer. The financial terms were ‘very satisfactory’, although he evidently still had doubts about the quality and cost of his local digs, for which ‘last summer I had to pay about £9.50 a week until John Inchmore moved in with me’. Imran’s eventual contract for 1976 bears the handwritten codicil: ‘I would like it to be noted that my accommodation should be subsidised if the rent is too high.’

Imran’s devotion to the grail of constant self-improvement was again kindled during his winter in Pakistan. When not playing competitively in the domestic competitions he found time to practise at the Lahore Gymkhana, next to his family home in Zaman Park. Imran had greatly disappointed the citizens of that cricket-mad enclave by not showing up during any of his Oxford vacations over the previous three years. Now crowds of them came to the Gymkhana to watch him work out (he had a young net bowler throw bouncers at him from 15 yards to improve his hook shot) and mill around the pavilion door for autographs. ‘Every young boy in Lahore wanted to shake Imran’s hand,’ one friend recalls, ‘and many of their elder sisters also worshipped him in their own way.’

Relatively few who have grown up in Lahore, as Imran did, have willingly returned for any extended time after tasting the seductions of the West. (It would be fair to say, too, that a stint in the likes of Birmingham or Dallas has, conversely, led some to appreciate Pakistani life all the more.) And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the 23-year-old native son who spent the winter of 1976 there was ‘virtually unrecognisable’ from the 18-year-old tyro who had flown off with the Pakistani team in 1971. Imran’s boyhood companion Yusuf Salahudin told me that his friend had led a ‘somewhat cloistered life’ growing up in Zaman Park, ‘surrounded by his extended family almost as if it was a colony’. When Salahudin met Imran again after some five years’ absence, ‘I thought he was more obviously mature and outgoing … A man of the world … There was a certain familiar confidence there, but also a new sense of calm. As you grow older, you begin to realise more and more what works for you and what doesn’t, and I think he’d settled into himself in his twenties more than as a fanatically ambitious teenager.’ But for all his cosmopolitanism, Imran clearly remained a Pakistani to his core. ‘London’s most famous socialite’, as Today called him in 1986, wasn’t born in England and apparently preferred not to live there either, once his playing days were over, even if it meant being separated from his two young sons. Years later Imran was to refer to the ‘sad spectacle’ of ‘timid and alienated Pakistanis losing their identity [in] Britain’, a fate he conspicuously avoided.

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There’s nothing quite like the gathering of players, officials and press on the first day of training before the beginning of a new English cricket season. The start-of-term atmosphere, with its ambient smell of embrocation and linseed oil, is often enlivened by tropical rain or even snow falling on the newly cut playing area. They still talk about having to swim for the pavilion in Worcester. By contrast, the spring and summer of 1976 were the hottest for 30 years, with outfields that were baked to a shade of burnt yellow and white. On the grass banks in front of the stands during Test matches, bare chests and floppy hats were in order. This was the series in which the England captain Tony Greig ill-advisedly spoke of making the West Indies ‘grovel’, only for the tourists to take the rubber 3–0, the beginning of some 15 years’ domination of world cricket. Back at Worcester, Imran seems to have rapidly appraised the situation and concluded that these were conditions ideally suited to out-and-out fast bowling. The pitches were rock hard, and with the hook shot now in his repertoire he was able to bowl bouncers with the confidence that he could handle any return bombardment that happened to come his way. About the only cloud on the horizon was again the knotty and apparently insoluble matter of Imran’s accommodation. There’s a note in his file suggesting that Worcestershire had ‘made arrangement for [Khan] to meet a local Estate Agent’, but that even this had not fully resolved the long-running problem. ‘On two occasions the player failed to take advantage of that arrangement,’ the note concludes.

Imran announced his intention right from the start, when the county hosted Warwickshire at the end of April. This was one of those matches that begin in a downpour and end in a heatwave. After a briefly delayed start, Worcestershire scored 322. The visitors, for whom Amiss made 167, were able to see off the somewhat benign Worcester new-ball attack of Inchmore and Pridgeon without undue difficulty. There was an opening stand of 146. Imran then appeared and proceeded to bowl a selection of inswingers and bouncers at speeds of around 90 miles an hour, hurling the ball down like a live coal. Wickets fell. At the other end, Paul Pridgeon continued to plug away on a line and length for most of the second afternoon session. After just a few overs of this contrasting attack, the senior Warwickshire batsman had called a midwicket conference with the junior one. ‘I’ve assessed the situation, son,’ he announced solemnly, ‘and if you take the Pakistani, I can look after Pridgey.’ A minute or two later, the junior batsman took the opportunity of the tea interval to slip off to hospital for a precautionary X-ray to his skull after Imran had dropped in another short one. (This was to be the last full English season before the introduction of helmets.) The Warwickshire bowlers, led by England’s Bob Willis and David Brown, duly returned the favour on the third day, by which time the wicket appeared ‘like concrete’, with the addition of ‘several deep cracks, off which the ball shot like a skipping rock’, to quote the local paper. Coming in at No. 4, Imran scored 143 at slightly less than a run a minute.

Even in the John Player (or ‘Sunday’) League, Imran evidently decided that this was to be his year. He turned in some impressively consistent figures: three for 23 off his allotted eight overs against Glamorgan; another three for 23 against Yorkshire; three for 34 against Gloucestershire; three for 39 against Middlesex; and so on. If the match warranted, he generally added a brisk 30 or 40 runs with the bat. The message seemed to be that he would take an average of three wickets in each one-day outing, and bowl that much faster than anyone else. It was the same story in the Benson and Hedges trophy, where Worcestershire went all the way to the final against Kent, which they lost. If Imran’s bowling was often, as one observer put it, ‘fast to the point of dementia’, it was also successful more times than not. He left everyone stunned in a Gillette Cup tie against Gloucestershire at Bristol when he began to bounce his friend Mike Procter, who was then widely regarded as not the best man to provoke. Sure enough, Procter retaliated when it was his turn to bowl. After a couple of hooked fours, Imran appeared to have won this particular duel, only for him to fall to the more innocuous seam of Tony Brown.

Imran’s combative temperament helped make him the supreme bowler he now became. ‘I’ve always hated taking a beating lying down — something essential to a medium-pacer,’ he says. ‘Sometimes [I] just saw blood in front of my eyes … It was during those moments that an increase of adrenalin would add an extra yard or two to my pace.’ People who played against him at the time generally agree that he was a difficult, extraordinarily driven opponent. Several of them described him as having been ‘intense’ or even ‘manic’ when he came ‘hurtling in’, his ‘fiery brown eyes’ with an ‘electric glaze’. With his fist clenched and his knees pumping up and down ‘he seem[ed] like a loose power line crackling around, and just as dangerous’. One Worcestershire colleague thought Imran’s intensity on the field ‘took a lot out of him as far as being a human being was concerned. You don’t turn that kind of competitive drive on and off. He was always away by himself somewhere, and we didn’t see him socially.’ Mike Vockins, a professional acquaintance for six years, ‘never got that close’ to Imran, and remembers that he would ‘disappear pretty frequently to London or Birmingham, presumably to visit Pakistani friends or family.’ You hear a lot about this sense of him having been a man apart from the rest of the team. Imran had a ‘persecution complex’, one former colleague believes. ‘One thing most cricketers have is a sense of humour — you need it — but he pretty well totally lacked the ability to laugh at himself.’ Set against this is the testimony of a well-known former Test player and academic, who remarked that Imran was ‘warmly accessible to all sorts of people on the periphery of the action like autograph collectors and dressing-room attendants and programme sellers, and a complete mystery to his team-mates. Without stretching it too far, you could see some of the elements of the classic cowboy type there in the way he did the business and then just silently walked off into the sunset. I always thought there was a touch of Clint Eastwood to the guy.’

So it seems fair to say that Imran wasn’t regarded as the life and soul of the party among his English county team-mates. But even those who had doubts about him as a person admired the often thrilling and always robust quality of his all-round cricket as seen in 1976. It remained a moot point whether Imran would ever thaw out as a human being, but clearly he’d already made the leap from journeyman county professional to world-class entertainer.

In the three-day match against Somerset in early June, Imran scored a full-bodied 54 in the first innings and 81 in the second. There was a raw fury to some of his strokes that made his partner D’Oliveira’s seem merely polite by comparison. Imran added an equally lusty 57 against Kent — and the pattern was set. He then beat Lancashire virtually single-handed, with bowling figures of seven for 53 and six for 46, as well as an unbeaten 111 in Worcestershire’s only innings. Another century followed against Leicestershire. And another against a Northants attack led by Sarfraz. Fast bowlers didn’t generally hope for glamorous figures against the Surrey of the mid-1970s, whose top order typically read: Edrich, Butcher, Howarth, Younis, Roope, Test players all. Imran took five for 80 against them. There were wickets or runs, and frequently both, right up to the game against Gloucestershire in the second week of September. Imran managed a single victim (ironically, his Test colleague Sadiq), having for once — exhausted, perhaps — forsaken pace for control. The local paper speaks of his ‘almost robot accuracy’ in the Gloucester first innings. Little did the reporter or anyone else know it at the time, but Imran had played his last match for Worcestershire.