Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician

In retrospect, his departure was logical enough. A fractious relationship with certain colleagues, occasional friction with the club authorities and that oft-quoted boredom with Worcester itself all added up to a strong case against Imran’s returning for a seventh season at New Road. The reason his decision came as a shock to so many there was that they saw it in the context of his recent performances for the county. Imran finished the 1976 season with 1,092 runs at an average of 40 and 65 wickets at 23 apiece, earning him the Wetherall Award for English cricket’s best all-rounder. Worcestershire had enjoyed record attendances and reached a cup final at Lord’s. Some of his colleagues could only puzzle at the fact that, as one of them puts it, ‘Imran chose to fix something that wasn’t broken’.

Nonetheless, living abroad turned out to be an only mixed blessing for the ‘fanatically patriotic’ young star. On the positive side, it was liberating for him, as it was for so many other Test colleagues, from Asif to Zaheer, and more personally fulfilling, perhaps, than the likely alternative of a career in the middle reaches of the Pakistani civil service and an arranged marriage. Exposure to English county cricket, for all its flaws, also had the advantage of allowing him to develop as a bowler under the sharp eye of men like the Worcestershire coach Henry Horton and the evergreen D’Oliveira. Imran was doubly fortunate to play so much of his cricket at New Road, not only a picturesque ground in its own right, but in those days also a pitch that more often than not rewarded an attacking bowler like himself. Of his 65 first-class wickets in the 1976 season, 42 came on his home turf. Imran was an immeasurably better all-round cricketer when he left Worcester than when he joined them.

On the debit side, it’s clear that in more than five years there he never really settled in his adopted home. ‘Exile’ may be too strong a word for it, but Imran’s sense of isolation — not only from his English team-mates but from those ‘timid and alienated’ fellow expats — was something he repeatedly spoke of at the time. Instead of ‘fawn[ing] over British institutions’ the way so many displaced Pakistanis of his generation did, he seems to have regarded the host culture, personally gratifying though it was, as all too often wallowing in a mire of frivolity and decadence. Since Imran wasn’t the sort of man to insert metal studs in his face or to stab someone after a bout of drinking, he was clearly always going to be out of step with a significant part of British society as it developed during his time there. Nor was he that impressed with the ‘right-wing Tory regime’ of Edward Heath or the equally feckless Labour government that succeeded it. One or two friends and colleagues in England saw the first stirrings of Imran’s demotic, broadly speaking anti-West politics 20 years before he launched his Tehreek-e-Insaf (‘Movement for Justice’) party.

It’s also easy to believe that Imran was simply homesick in Worcester in a way that he wasn’t in the more collegial atmosphere of Oxford. Although most people in the club went out of their way to make him feel welcome, not every member of the local community was as obliging. These were still early days for the multicultural society, and many Britons avoided the shackles of excessive deference to what became known as political correctness. As it happened, there was one distressingly widespread illustration of the UK’s still somewhat rudimentary concept of race relations as a whole: ‘Paki-bashing’, of which Worcester saw its fair share around pub closing time most Saturday nights. As far as is known, Imran was never directly targeted, but he attracted his quota of muttered asides both on and off the cricket field. For some reason, a disproportionately high number of these seem to have occurred while playing against Yorkshire. There was apparently one occasion when Imran went out to bat on an overcast evening at Leeds, to be greeted by the home team’s bowler ostentatiously peering down the pitch at him and enquiring, ‘Where are you, lad? Give us a clue. I can’t see nowt’ — all ‘standard, knockabout stuff, [but] not appreciated by Khan’, I was told by one of his team-mates, speaking of such antics in general. As we’ve seen, he tended not to fraternise with his own colleagues, though this seems to have been more out of choice than necessity. As Mike Vockins notes, ‘Worcester had a good group of very personable young cricketers around then. I’m confident that there would have been enough sensitivities among them for one or other to have dropped a word if they felt that Imran was unsettled, [and] for it to be noted.’ Seeming to refute the idea that Imran had complained about his life in Worcester virtually on a daily basis, Vockins adds, ‘We were wholly unaware that he disliked living here. I have no recollection of his ever having spoken about it over the course of five years, or having talked about being unhappy to me or any senior officer of the club.’

There were, it’s true, certain ongoing administrative difficulties when it came to the matter of Imran’s lodgings. In his 1983 memoirs, written relatively soon after the events in question, he insists that he had arrived in Worcester for the start of the 1976 season, his annus mirabilis, to find that he was effectively homeless. ‘I had to sleep on Glenn Turner’s floor for the first five days, then the county put me up in what I thought was the lousiest hotel I’ve ever seen … After six weeks, I managed to find a flat of my own and then the club made me pay half the hotel bill.’ In time Imran solved the problem of his Worcester accommodation by rarely turning up there. After taking possession of a ‘lively’ second-hand Mazda, he preferred to bomb up and down the A44 to London at every opportunity. There appears to have been a familiar theme to Imran’s restiveness. Speaking of monogamy, the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow would write in his novel Dangling Man, ‘The soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisical women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?’ For Imran, the answer was clearly no. Even when he was seeing one of his ‘special girls’, he made little pretence of fidelity. Imran’s taste in women ignored all considerations of age and appearance, and also spanned the class structure. In the course of the Worcestershire years there was a ‘succession of debs, dolly birds and shopgirls’, I was told by one of his still impressed colleagues. To be fair to Imran, he also showed notable self-restraint, given that he was as often the pursued as he was the pursuer. One of his relatively few male English friends recalled an occasion when they had been sitting together on a ‘perfectly decorous night out’ in a London club, only for ‘a siren’ to walk over, sit down in Imran’s lap and place his hand on her leg. ‘Help yourself, sexy,’ she’d announced, rather unnecessarily. Although Imran declined that particular offer, he can hardly have failed to reflect on the life he left behind in Pakistan, where the authorities had recently re-introduced public flogging for ‘those who drink, gamble or sexually philander’.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Imran had reservations about Worcester, an undeniably lovely town but one which lacked any of the raw energy, vital nightlife and racy promise of neighbouring Birmingham, another of his frequent overnight haunts. His predominant sense of the place would remain its ‘soulless’ amenities, oddly enough with the sole exception of the public library, where he was a regular weekly patron. As well as the matter of his ‘lousy’ hotel and subsequent accommodations, Imran seems to have had two other particular issues with the Worcestershire club. They had waited until 1976 to award him his county cap, at which time his wages had risen from a basic £2,000 to a relatively munificient £2,500, with the prospect of various allowances and bonuses.

‘Provided I make up my mind to return to Worcester next year,’ Imran wrote to Mike Vockins in September 1976, ‘I would like the following terms: a) £4,000 basic salary; b) free accommodation; c) full return airfare.’ In time the club wrote back to offer £3,000. ‘After giving myself two months to make up my mind,’ Imran replied, ‘I have finally decided [not to return]. I have realised that even if you had agreed to everything I had demanded in that note, that still would not compensate me for the dreary existence that Worcester has to offer me … I honestly don’t think I can spend another six months of my life in such a stagnant place.’

This general dissatisfaction was compounded by Imran’s distaste for a specific ordeal he faced at Worcester, where, to a man, from the club chairman down to the lowliest programme vendor they addressed him as ‘Immy’. It was no more than the standard dressing-room lingo, which turned D’Oliveira into ‘Dolly’, Pridgeon into ‘Pridgey’, Inchmore into ‘Inchy’ (though Hemsley remained Hemsley), and so on. Although he never seems to have openly complained about it, Imran ‘absolutely loathed’ the practice, which apparently struck him as patronising. One of his local girlfriends remarked that by the time he left Worcestershire, it had become a ‘fixation’ for him and ‘definitely poisoned the atmosphere [with the club]’. He had pronounced the offending name as if he was ‘smelling a dead fish’. Early in their own relationship, she had noticed that Imran seldom gave up on that sort of grudge. ‘Once he took a dislike to someone or something, you could absolutely never get him back again.’

For their part, some at Worcestershire believed that Imran had effectively used the club as a sort of paid finishing school. According to this theory, he had joined the county as a promising but erratic young seamer and, thanks to men like Henry Horton, left again as a devastatingly hostile ‘quick’ of international class. This was perhaps to downplay the role the bowler himself played in the transformation. In the same vein, certain of the county membership remained stubbornly convinced that they had subsidised Imran’s education at Worcester Royal Grammar School, whereas in fact the fees were paid in full by his father. (The members might have been on firmer ground had they raised the matter of the help given him in areas such as his work permit and TCCB registration.) There were equally persistent and unfounded rumours that he had been poached by another team with the promise of higher wages. As the whole dispute became noticeably more bitter in the autumn of 1976, a senior member of the Worcester committee summoned Imran and put it to him that he was leaving ‘because there aren’t enough girls in this town for you to roger’. This same general thesis was aired in the local press, and was eventually widely reproduced in Pakistan.

The opinions of most Pakistani news organisations are not noted for nuance, so the varying fortunes of their Test side tended to get the most graphic possible treatment. ‘WORLD BEATERS!’ the Karachi Star had insisted following a short, unofficial tour to Sri Lanka in January 1976 in which Imran participated. Taken as a whole, the media believed the appointment of Mushtaq Mohammad as national captain to be a major turning-point in the history of Pakistan cricket. ‘We have seen some heated exchange of words between the Board and several of the players,’ the main Lahore morning paper conceded. ‘But those days are over. We can go to the extent of predicting our men will remain successful, peaceful and united for many decades to come.’

It lasted about nine months. Once back in Pakistan, Imran promptly joined his fellow members of the Test squad in protesting their rates of pay, which currently stood at 1,000 rupees (or £50) a man for each five-day match — substantially better than their 1971 levels, but still leaving them firmly at the foot of international cricket’s financial league table. All hell again broke loose in the press. One imaginative and much-quoted report in Lahore insisted that the dispute was really about the players’ hotel and travel arrangements, and that the entire squad would take strike action were their ‘nine-point list of perks’ not met in full. Had a request for a chauffeur-driven limousine apiece made it a round 10, there could not have been more public outrage. The whole matter came to a head in the middle of the three-Test series against New Zealand in October 1976, when the Pakistan team wrote to the board to confirm that they would down tools unless their grievances were at least taken under consideration. The board responded in kind, with a telegram stating that anyone who didn’t immediately accept the existing terms would be banned from Test cricket for life. Five of the team promptly dropped their demands. The remaining six, including Imran, were in negotiation with the board until 90 minutes before the start of play in the second Test, which Pakistan won by 10 wickets.

Not untypically, there appears to have been some misunderstanding between the two sides about the exact terms of the deal that had been thrashed out to allow the match to go forward. Imran recalls that the board chairman Abdul Kardar had ‘admitted our demands were not that unreasonable’ and ‘agreed to a full dialogue’. A fortnight later, Kardar was quoted in the press calling the players ‘unpatriotic bandits’. The board’s subsequent threat to ban the so-called rebels from the winter tours of Australia and the West Indies made headlines even in England, where a ‘distraught’ Mushtaq Mohammad suggested that he would resign from the captaincy. At that stage the Pakistan head of state, Fazal Chaudhry, intervened. The board’s selection committee (though not Kardar himself) were sacked, eventually to be replaced by a government-appointed sports authority, and the players were each awarded 5,000 rupees (£250) a Test, sufficient to ensure that the winter’s itinerary went ahead as scheduled.

Meanwhile, Pakistan had overrun the New Zealanders, with Imran taking a respectable 14 wickets (including his best Test analysis to date, four for 59, at Hyderabad) over the three matches. It possibly says something for the Pathan revenge ethic that, years later, he was to speak of his particular satisfaction at dismissing Glenn Turner, ‘who had said that I didn’t have it in me to become a fast bowler’. Although onesided, the series wasn’t entirely free of incident. Early in the proceedings, Imran had occasion to speak to the umpire in Urdu to ask him to stand back from the stumps, whereupon the non-striking batsman had requested that he confine himself to English when addressing the match officials. Some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives had followed. In the third Test at Karachi, Imran was prohibited from completing his over against Richard Hadlee and temporarily removed from the bowling attack by another umpire, Shakoor Rana, who felt he had been over-generous in his use of the bouncer.

Six weeks later the Pakistanis arrived in Australia to find that the home press didn’t much fancy their chances there. ‘COBBLERS!’ was the initial assessment of the West Australian, while the Herald Sun restricted itself to the only marginally more charitable ‘PAK IT IN!’ Dennis Lillee took the opportunity of his own newspaper column to remark that, though Pakistan had a few talented batsmen, their bowling attack (with Imran himself dismissed as ‘a trundler’) was rubbish. The first Test at Adelaide seemed to confirm the generally low opinion of the tourists. Australia got the better of a high-scoring draw, even though they lost their nerve when chasing a relatively modest 285 to win on the last day. The Melbourne Test, played over the New Year, followed a broadly similar pattern, at least up to the half-way point. Australia’s Greg Chappell won the toss and batted. A day and a half later he was able to declare on 517 for eight, Imran having been ‘tonked around’, to again quote the Herald Sun, with figures of none for 115 off 22 overs. Pakistan, who had seemed to be cruising at 241 for one, were then dismissed for 333.

Under the circumstances, and now faced by a vocally derisive 60,000-strong crowd, certain other bowlers might have quietly given up the fight. But that was rarely to be an option that appealed to Imran. In the next two sessions he took five Australian wickets, including that of Dennis Lillee, whom he clean bowled. According to those who saw it (and Lillee himself, who didn’t) it was very possibly the fastest ball ever sent down at the Melbourne ground. Richie Benaud told me that, on the basis of this performance, which proved to be in a losing cause, ‘I promptly chalked Imran up as extremely interesting.’ In Benaud’s measured technical opinion, ‘he was [quite] determined, and had markedly increased his pace and improved his balance in delivery’. Cricket, of course, is played as much with the brain as it is with the body. Here, too, Imran was quite well fixed. That same week, he had happened to meet his old sparring partner Geoff Boycott, who was spending the winter playing for an Australian club side rather than with England in India and Sri Lanka. Boycott remembers that he took Imran aside and advised him to bowl ‘really quick’, preferably aiming ‘about four inches outside off stump’ in short, controlled bursts to make the most of the conditions. The Pakistan tour management seemed to concur. Seven days after leaving Melbourne, Imran went on to take six for 102 and six for 63 in the course of the third and final Test at Sydney, which the tourists won by eight wickets. It was their first such victory in Australia, and only their fifth anywhere overseas, and a major turning-point both for the team and for the ‘Orient Express’, as the Herald Sun now hurriedly renamed him. Some of the hyperbole might have been a touch overdone, but after this match there was no longer any question that Imran was a fast bowler to be reckoned with. Both the Australian and, more particularly, Pakistani press were highly complimentary. When the reader wasn’t swept along by the lively similes — ‘like a rampant stallion’, ‘like a blistering typhoon’, ‘like a runaway truck’ and so on — there was the statistical evidence to back the imagery up: in just three innings, Imran had taken 17 Australian wickets at slightly over 16 apiece. His departure from the field at Sydney, his shirt sleeve ripped off his arm from all the effort, had brought the house down; as he led his team into the pavilion, spectators of all ages pummelled the railings of the lower terraces, and jaded critics broke into wide grins up in the press box. The next minute saw a steady crescendo in the sort of rowdy whoops and high-pitched acclaim normally associated with a major rock star. Geoff Boycott was in the home dressing-room. ‘Even the Aussie players were standing up applauding,’ he recalls. ‘They thought it was bloody fantastic.’

Imran was 24, and he was famous.

Back in England, Imran’s representatives were engaged in an as yet quiet but ugly spat with the Worcestershire committee, his decision to quit the club seemingly only hardened by his triumphs of the past 12 months. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that there were no obvious personal confrontations before that. But by late 1976 Imran was clearly impatient to move on. In retrospect, Mike Vockins believes that it was ‘inevitable … the real reason for his departure was to be somewhere nearer London, and the party life that went with that’. Seeming to confirm this thesis, Imran’s friend and occasional landlord, the journalist Qamar Ahmed, told me that it wasn’t about ‘cricket as such … he left to have a more exciting life and to enjoy the bright lights’. Worcester must have seemed even more dreary a prospect to Imran after his having tasted international fame, although the same problem never seems to have applied to Basil D’Oliveira, the best-known sportsman in the world for a time in 1968–69 following his controversial omission from an England tour of South Africa on allegedly racial grounds. ‘I love it here,’ D’Oliveira once told me as we enjoyed the hospitality of an after-hours club in central Worcester. ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.’

In his own quiet way, Imran now measured himself against the modern giants: Lloyd, Richards, the Chappell brothers and Lillee. Though he didn’t bluster about ‘climbing in the ring’ with Larwood and Voce in the way Fred Trueman occasionally had, he aspired to belong in their company; as Asif Iqbal recalls, he was ‘always going to do more than the rest of us’. Some of the same self-assurance was evident in Imran’s handling of the protracted judicial wranglings with Worcestershire. By all accounts, the county appears to have initially accepted the inevitable with some good grace. Dropping the club a note on a souvenir postcard while on an overseas tour, Imran wrote, ‘I am sorry to inform you that I really do want to leave … I genuinely feel guilty I’m letting [people] down, but I am afraid I have also to think whether I am happy living in a place I don’t like. Moreover I was treated pretty poorly by the club as regards my accommodation.’ ‘I was distressed to read the contents of your note,’ Mike Vockins wrote back, urging him only to ‘keep an open mind’ and ‘achieve a truly objective decision’. On 1 January 1977, the day he was to tear out the heart of the Australian batting at Melbourne, Imran was formally released from his contract and thus able to negotiate with other counties. He chose Sussex, on account of his friendship with Tony Greig as well as the club’s relative proximity to London. To his evident displeasure, Worcestershire then objected to the move, claiming to have a ‘proprietary interest’, to quote the subsequent legalese, in a player they might reasonably have felt they had discovered in the first place. Their creative solution to ‘Mr Khan’s withdrawal of labour’, as the lawyers put it, was for him to serve a suspension for the entire 1977 season, after which he would be free to play for whomever he chose.

(#litres_trial_promo) Later that winter the parties met before the TCCB registration committee at Lord’s, where Worcestershire’s barrister cross-examined Imran over the course of two ‘intense’ sessions about his ‘capricious’ motives for leaving the county. The judicial process as a whole had been ‘almost like [a] criminal trial,’ he later complained. At the end of the hearing, the TCCB formally found Imran’s case ‘not proven’ and agreed to suspend his registration until January 1978. The curt, one-paragraph ruling made reference to ‘the player hav[ing] put forward reasons … deriving solely [from] his own personal enjoyment and social convenience to reside away from Worcestershire’. To the men in the committee room, this was ‘not grounds for his [immediate] registration with Sussex’, nor was it ‘in the best interests of competitive County Cricket as a whole’.

At that stage Imran and Sussex appealed to the 25-man Cricket Council, the sport’s ultimate governing authority in the British Isles, and a body hardly less august than the medieval Star Chamber. In due course there was another all-day hearing at Lord’s before the Council’s independent tribunal, accompanied by an epistolary scrap between the various lawyers over who exactly would pay the estimated £7,000 bill for the two proceedings. The event was umpired by Oliver Popplewell, QC, aged 50, a distinguished Cambridge University and Free Foresters wicketkeeper in his day and more recently Recorder of the Crown Court. Each side arrived for the encounter with a full complement of barristers, solicitors and expert witnesses. Among those appearing for the appelate was the former Sussex and England captain Ted Dexter, who told me:

I didn’t know Imran. But I got a call from Tony Greig seeking my help in securing a ‘free’ transfer to Sussex. Next thing I found myself speaking in a panelled room at Lord’s along these lines: ‘Imran is a very unhappy young man. He has been unable to make friends. His natural habitat is the London area and though he would prefer to move to Middlesex, Sussex is willing to ensure his access to old haunts and a reconnection with old acquaintances, male or female …’ It’s the only time in my life that I have knowingly committed perjury. I still get a cold shiver when I think back to the quizzical looks that came my way that day at Lord’s. Just as well it was not a court of law or I might have spent time inside at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

After only ten minutes’ deliberation, the tribunal found for Imran, whose ‘special registration’ for Sussex would be completed on 30 July 1977. In his ruling Mr Justice Popplewell noted: ‘We are impressed by the argument that Khan’s unhappiness was a genuine one, and that there was no evidence of financial motivation in his movement … The strict application of the requirement of 12 months prior residence [in Sussex] can be mitigated.’

It was not a universally popular decision. On 26 May, Worcestershire formally wrote to the TCCB secretary, Donald Carr (of Idrees Beg fame), to express their ‘very considerable misgivings over the procedural arrangements adopted for the Appeal’. Carr volleyed back on 29 May that the matter was ‘closed’. There was talk of some county pros refusing to play against the ‘disloyal’ Pakistani, who further earned the censure of the Cricketers Association for ‘hasten[ing] the onset of a football-style transfer system’. Reading the correspondence now, one is struck by the quaint sense of outrage at the notion that a professional athlete should feel free to take his services wherever he chose. ‘Cricket and its relationship between authority and players has suffered a grievous blow,’ the Association’s Jack Bannister thundered on 25 May. Bannister subsequently revealed that acting in his professional capacity he had ‘contacted the 17 county sides with the question, “In your dressing-room, is there a totally unanimous view either for or against the decision allowing Imran Khan to play in August?”’ The results showed nine sides ‘totally opposed’ and four sides ‘largely opposed’ to Imran, with only two in favour and one neutral. Curiously enough, according to Bannister ‘No reply [had] yet been received from Sussex, for whom John Spencer says that the players want more time to consider the matter.’

In the end, the boycott never materialised. Bannister and the other parties dropped their protest. Imran was, however, subjected to some choice abuse on his later visits to play Worcestershire. Of this Mike Vockins says, ‘I was so incensed with the crowd on more than one occasion that I felt minded to get on the PA and insist that spectators show the normal sporting courtesies, before swiftly recognising that this would just have goaded further those who behaved in that unacceptable way.’ In time Vockins himself inherited Imran’s locker in the Worcester dressing-room ‘along with some abandoned cricket gear which was in pretty dire straits. “Festering” would just about sum it up. The boys believed that on occasion, rather than getting kit laundered he rang the sponsors for a new lot and threw the old stuff in the locker.’ Despite this rather dubious personal legacy, Vockins, an eminently fair-minded man who went on to take holy orders, has ‘delightful’ memories of Imran, a view broadly shared by the current Worcestershire regime 30 years after the acrimonious events at Lord’s.

In between dressing up in a dark suit and tie to go into the witness box, Imran had continued his scintillating run of form on Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies. The first Test at Bridgetown featured some notably robust bowling from the home team’s Roberts, Garner and Croft. But even they appeared sluggish in comparison with the ‘Orient Express’, who announced himself with three consecutive bouncers to the opener Gordon Greenidge. The former England wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans told me that he had watched this blitz while standing immediately in front of the pavilion with a ‘strangely silent’ Sir Garry Sobers. While Godders himself had characteristically cheered and whistled in appreciation, his illustrious companion had merely followed proceedings with narrowed eyes. When the third ball in rapid succession ‘nearly decapitated’ the batsman, Sobers finally spoke: ‘Bit brisk, this chap.’ The words were uttered with a thin smile and seemed to Evans to be a sort of ‘royal warrant’ coming from the man who was arguably cricket’s greatest ever all-rounder. That Test was drawn, and the West Indies won the second, at Trinidad, by six wickets. Imran reports that he had lost his temper and ‘bowled appallingly’ after being attacked (something of a role reversal) by Greenidge and Roy Fredericks in the latter match. There was then another draw at Georgetown.

Following this, Imran’s tour, hitherto only intermittently dazzling, took much the same upward trajectory as it had at a comparable stage in Australia. Reviewing his performance in the series as a whole, one Jamaican paper wrote, in an only slight case of overstatement, that ‘his fame soared like a rocket and hung high over Caribbean skies for weeks’. In more prosaic terms, in the fourth Test at Trinidad Imran took four for 64 off 21 of the most hostile overs imaginable in the West Indies’ first innings. There was a moment in mid-afternoon when, with the ball flying round the batsmen’s heads and some in the crowd calling their disapproval, the atmosphere threatened to grow ‘iffy’, to again quote Evans. But Imran and Pakistan had stuck to it, eventually winning by 266 runs. The West Indies then generally did Pakistan for pace at Kingston, to take the series 2–1. Imran took six for 90 in the first innings and two for 78 in the second, as well as contributing much-needed runs in the lower middle order. Short of staying behind to sweep up the pavilion, it was hard to see what more he could have done. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s specialist batsmen failed to similarly rise to the occasion. Set 442 to win, they were soon 51 for four. At that stage, in a show of less than total confidence in the outcome, the tour management saw fit to change the date of the team’s return flight to Pakistan from Wednesday, the last scheduled day of play, to Tuesday; an admission of ‘a general lack of resolve’, Imran notes ruefully.

In the five Tests Imran took 25 wickets at 31.60 apiece. He’d clearly taken his time to find his form early in the tour, as great players frequently do in unfamiliar conditions; only mediocrity being always at its best. Generally speaking, the series confirmed that Pakistan for all their occasional frailties deserved their place at cricket’s top table. It also did no harm at all to Imran’s reputation. ‘I want to be known as a good bowler … My ambition is to dominate … What I’m always after is penetration,’ he’d once remarked. Within a few short months his textbook technique, iron will and unshakable self-confidence had convinced even the most sceptical that his targets were well within his scope.

His fame was already secure in Pakistan, where satellite technology had allowed huge numbers to watch their team’s two winter tours. As a result, cricket soon reached the plateau occupied only by soccer or rock music in Britain. This was the era in which the journalist Fareshteh Aslam refers to Imran as a combined Superman and Spiderman, ‘this exotic-looking guy doing battle on our behalf’. Mobs now followed him about, and Imran, who a year earlier had been known to stop and chat with fans at his local Lahore milk bar, learnt to hurry out of the players’ entrances of cricket grounds around the world and make his way to safety through side streets and roped-off alleyways.

As it happened, there was something of a precedent for this level of intense adulation of a Pakistani cricketer. A hard-hitting batsman named ‘Merry Max’ Maqsood had played for his country 16 times in the 1950s, while enjoying a particularly active social life. Equally famous for his strokeplay on and off the cricket field, he had soon acquired a substantial cult following. At the end of the 1954 tour of England, Merry Max had stayed behind to take a local bride. Since he was allegedly already married the news initially caused something of a splash in Pakistan, though even the Star eventually held this to be a ‘largely private matter’ between him and the lawful Mrs Maqsood. No such restraint greeted the news of Imran’s various affairs 30 years later, for which the press deployed their full, 24-point size headlines. He was the first tabloid superstar of Asian sport.

On a bitingly cold morning in late May 1977, a shaggy-haired, tanned young man wearing a silk shirt splayed open to display a gold medallion walked through the gate of the municipal cricket ground on Pavilion Lane in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His arrival was noted by a solitary reporter, who saw the man nod to one or two friends, then sit down in one of a sea of empty seats, essentially unrecognised by those few duffle-coated spectators in attendance. The reporter was intrigued to learn the man’s identity. It was an ‘almost comically mild-mannered’ Imran, already one of the world’s most famous sportsmen, who would spend the early part of the season playing a variety of modest Yorkshire league and club matches while waiting to qualify for Sussex. He seems to have enjoyed the substantially less formal atmosphere of rural northern grounds and all the familiar icons associated with the lower reaches of English cricket: deckchairs, long grass, tiny plastic cups of volcanic tea and a sparse but surprisingly loyal fan base. Imran took the opportunity to put in place some final refinements to his bowling action, running in closer to the stumps and occasionally going round the wicket in order to stand up straighter at the moment of delivery. By the end of his first season in Sussex, he reports, he felt ‘more confident of putting the ball where I wanted it’.

That year Imran saw rather more of London than had been the case before, often staying at the Shepherd’s Bush flat of the journalist Qamar Ahmed. Also there while passing through town was another young rising Pakistani star, Javed Miandad, a ‘feisty little bugger’ of a cricketer, to quote one good friend. Javed, too, was beginning a four-year playing association with Sussex. According to Qamar Ahmed, ‘Imran was shy and not an extrovert, and remained so even after becoming an overnight star in that Sydney Test. He stayed with me off and on whenever he visited London. He was a lot younger person than me, basically quiet, and never any bother.’ Ahmed insists that Imran’s good nature extended toward his fellow house guest. ‘Javed was also very young, and competitive, when he joined Sussex. But he and Imran never spoke against each other. Even on tour overseas they were quite good mates and Imran would listen to him agreeably — in some ways Javed possessed a sharper brain cricketwise.’ For all that, the relationship would face a number of well-publicised snags in the years ahead. Imran would later be one of 10 players to issue a statement deploring Javed’s leadership of the Test side, and subsequently to refuse to play under him. Although the crisis was defused and they were to remain international colleagues for another decade, Imran appears to have harboured certain long-term reservations about the younger man’s character. ‘Javed’s man management was poor [and] he lacked the strength of will to drag the team along under his wing,’ he notes. I was told that Imran gave particularly short shrift to Javed’s ‘highly vocal’ complaints following the declaration that had left the batsman stranded on 280 in that 1983 Hyderabad Test against India. Coming across the 25-year-old Javed later that night in the Pakistan hotel, Imran reportedly remarked (in Urdu), ‘This is a team game, son. I don’t believe in playing for personal records.’

Wasim Raja considered Imran ‘deeply sensuous’ and ‘somewhat cavalier’ as a cricketer, whereas ‘there wasn’t much sensuousness’ about the practical-minded Javed. ‘In most cases, [Miandad] would have one eye on the scoreboard, while Imran didn’t give a damn about averages — nor was he ever frightened to lose, if it came to that.’ Imran was interior, self-referring; Javed was more up front and superficial, concerned with material rewards and acclaim. Another well-placed source told me that where Javed was ‘obvious’, meticulous and ambitious, Imran was laid back, affable and self-contained. ‘You could buy most of what Javed had, if not his talent. You couldn’t buy what Imran had. He had something that’s inside.’ The result, as Wasim Raja observed, was ‘much detachment, some respect and a little distrust’, all part of an occasionally dysfunctional but long-running working relationship that was to be the making of modern Pakistani cricket.

In his memoirs, Javed recalls a somewhat curious incident when he had acted as a peacekeeper between Imran and their mutual landlord Qamar Ahmed. Evidently miffed at something the journalist had written, Imran let loose one night with a whole series of complaints, including the observation that the Shepherd’s Bush flat was ‘a pigsty’. At that Ahmed rose to his and his home’s defence. ‘All of a sudden,’ Javed writes, ‘the two men were screaming four-letter words at each other and Qamar was sticking out his chest urging Imran to take a swing. I stepped in and put an end to it.’ If so, the scene would seem to reveal hitherto under-reported diplomatic skills on the part of Javed. (Wasim Raja, when I once ran the story past him, glowered in a pained way and eventually said, ‘Bit of a turnaround, isn’t it?’)

When Imran began to play for Sussex, the club found him a small ground-floor flat next to the gates of the county ground in Hove. As a result he could commute to work in a minute or two, while London was only an hour away by train. Imran initially spent much of his free time with Javed, but soon reactivated his old social life. By early in his second season at Hove, he had ‘plugged himself in like an “Open” sign’, to quote one of his county colleagues. Accounts of Imran’s dating habits differ. According to his amused team-mate, ‘Immy was on the pull in London or Brighton on average four or five nights a week.’ He was allegedly vain of his appearance. The team-mate remembers Imran standing in front of the mirror grooming himself, smoothing down his thick hair, ‘adjusting the chain round his neck so it hung just so’, then happily padding off with his ‘feline lope’. According to others, Imran was actually ‘quite relaxed’ or ‘passive’ with the opposite sex, and more inclined to the role of the hunted than the hunter. The Sussex and England bowler Tony Pigott told me he had once been in a nightclub in Brighton with Imran and the county’s South African star Garth le Roux. ‘It was a mirrorball and Bee Gees sort of place; that whole thing … After a bit Le Roux and I chugged back from the dance-floor to the table where Imran was sitting alone with his glass of milk. “Come on and meet some girls,” Garth said, only to hear Imran’s superb reply, “No, thanks. If they want to meet me, they can bloody well come over here”.’

On 9 May 1977, just as Imran was settling in to life in the Yorkshire leagues, the news broke that Kerry Packer and his Australian television network had signed some two dozen of the world’s top players to appear in an exhibition round under the name of World Series Cricket. It would be hard to exaggerate the ensuing shock in certain quarters. Among several perceived villains of the piece, the press heaped special scorn on the Sussex and England captain Tony Greig, who had acted as Packer’s recruiting agent. Greig appears to have convinced most of the players involved that a compromise would be swiftly reached whereby they would still be available for Test cricket. Imran was one of 14 non-Australians initially contracted to represent a WSC World XI in Packer’s circus, as much of the cricket establishment and media came to know it. There would be particular repercussions for Pakistan, which lost five leading players, including their captain Mushtaq, to the enterprise. For his services, Imran was paid Aus $25,000, or roughly the equivalent of £10,500, for some ten weeks’ cricket. At the time he was making a hard-earned £250 per Test, £3,000 a season for Sussex and a further £70–80 a month from PIA on the rare occasions he played in Pakistan — a total income of around £4,600 from all sources.

Although Abdul Kardar had eventually resigned as chairman of the Pakistan board after the feud about match fees, his successor Mohammad Hussain took a similarly hard line when confronted with the latest demonstration of player power. The dispute that broke out in May 1977 soon threatened to make that earlier row look like a ‘little local difficulty’ by comparison. In short order, Hussain announced that the five Pakistanis who had signed for Packer would be ‘ostracised’ from Test cricket, adding that they were ‘unpatriotic … mercenaries [of] the worst stripe’. The board went on to assure the Pakistani public that there were ‘ample quality reserves’ available to cover for the defectors — a self-confidence not entirely borne out by events, in particular the 1978 Pakistan tour of England, which was a rout.

At 9.30 in the morning of 30 July 1977, Donald Carr of the TCCB sent a telex to the secretary of Sussex confirming that ‘Imran Khan, the subject of our recent discussions’ was now free to play for the county. Two hours later, the subject in question was in action in a championship match against Gloucestershire at the College Ground in Cheltenham. He took two for 52 in the first Gloucester innings and one for 15 in the second; a respectable if not electrifying debut. Opponents, press and public were soon struck by the raw pace of the now visibly stronger, broad-chested bowler — he again took the opportunity to pepper Mike Procter with bouncers — but also by his versatility. His elegance, power and stamina (he could, and often did bowl unchanged all morning) were noted. Nevertheless, some reservations were expressed. Imran was lucky, it was agreed, to play much of his English cricket on the seamer’s paradise at Hove. Would the ‘languid-looking playboy’, as The Times called him, ‘succeed on slower wickets [or] when a really top-class batsman — Barry Richards, for example — [got] after him?’ One expert who didn’t hedge his bets was Geoff Boycott, who told me that ‘Sussex was the making of Imran. He’d had the talent but now he also had the brain and the spirit. A great competitor. Like me, he’s a dragon in Chinese astrology.’

In the event, Imran, or ‘Immy’ as, much to his distaste, he continued to be almost universally known, mocked the doubters. He took four for 66 and hit a rapid 59 (a third of his side’s total) against Glamorgan at Eastbourne. There were a further seven wickets in the win over Yorkshire at Hove, and commendably thrifty figures of 16–5–26–0 against a run-chasing Nottingham side, including Clive Rice, at Trent Bridge. Imran’s batting and bowling averages were good enough, but they failed to tell the full story: the way his best attacking shots appeared to be both fast yet totally unhurried, for instance, or how, in that curious way it has when struck by a great timer, the ball always seemed to gather pace on its way to the rope. And until statistics can indicate such factors as pride and the love of a fight they won’t adequately convey the mettle of such bowling performances as the one Imran gave in the county match against Hampshire at Hove. As mentioned, the Hove wicket often inclined to extravagant morning life, but it takes more than a helpful pitch to account for first-innings figures of five for 51 against arguably the county championship’s strongest batting line-up. Among Imran’s victims: Barry Richards.