Imran Khan Read online

  Before the tour of England there had been the home series with Sri Lanka in the spring of 1982, when the Pakistan team took the field for the first Test without eight of their senior men, including Imran. The same group had come to share certain private misgivings about Javed Miandad’s leadership of the side, and shortly afterwards they released a public statement to that effect. Imran then unilaterally signalled his intention to return for the second Test, only for the other mutineers to prevent him from doing so. After further protracted negotiations, Pakistan eventually fielded a full-strength team for the third Test at Lahore. Imran took eight for 58 in the Sri Lanka first innings and six for 58 in the second. Pakistan won the match by an innings and 102 runs. Javed then diplomatically announced that he would be ‘unavailable’ to lead his country in England, leaving Imran himself to step in.

  In January 1983 Pakistan played India in the fourth Test at Hyderabad, already 2–0 up in the six-match series. In the Pakistan first innings Javed and Mudassar put on 451 for the third wicket, tying the record for the most lucrative partnership in Test history. Javed finished the second day’s play on 238 not out, 127 short of the then highest ever individual score in Tests, Garry Sobers’s 365 not out for the West Indies against Pakistan in 1958. Javed notes that at that stage, ‘there was no talk of a declaration. Imran never brought it up … I took this to mean that I was actively being given a chance to go for all possible records.’ He wasn’t. Much to Javed’s obvious displeasure, Imran declared midway through the following morning’s session, leaving his predecessor as captain stranded on 280. A mutual colleague, reflecting on the two men’s contrasting cricket philosophies, told me that ‘Javed [was] a feisty little bugger, which I say in all affection. He wanted to score tons of runs, and in doing so he wanted to crush the opposition. It was a case of kill or be killed. By contrast, Imran took the view that you played your hardest, but that at the end of the day you shook your opponent’s hand and went off to dinner. He wasn’t demoralised by defeats. He wasn’t aggrandised by victories.’ Pakistan won that particular Test by an innings and 119 runs, with most of the last day to spare.

  Zaheer Abbas, the bespectacled batting genius of Pakistan cricket, then led the team in Australia in the winter of 1983–84, when Imran suffered a recurrence of a serious shin injury. Zaheer’s first act was to issue a statement saying that it was not the side he would have chosen and complaining that he was only a caretaker, with inadequate resources, which would appear to have been a tactical own goal on his part. Pakistan duly crumpled in the first two Tests. The third was only marginally more competitive, producing a draw. As a result, the home Board of Control in Lahore was toppled by a coup. Zaheer, meanwhile, took the opportunity of a local newspaper column to publicly castigate his predecessor for everything from his influence over team selection to his various alleged tactical foibles. Despite this rather muted welcome, Imran agreed to appear in the fourth Test at Melbourne as a specialist batsman. On a fast pitch against a still fiery Dennis Lillee, he scored 83 in the first innings and an unbeaten 72 in the second. After that tour Imran would be out of Test cricket for nearly two years, during which Javed Miandad and Zaheer assumed what was effectively a co-captaincy of the team. Against all the odds, Imran returned to international cricket in late 1985, promptly taking 17 wickets in three outings against Sri Lanka. In the course of the series, Javed let it be known that he would again be resigning as captain, and Zaheer announced his retirement. Imran himself then threatened not to play for Pakistan ever again following a dispute with the selectors, but returned to lead his country in the 1987 World Cup, where against expectations they managed to lose to Australia in the semi-final at Lahore. Following the match, a mob estimated at 10,000 roamed the streets, looted stores and demanded the wholesale sacking of the team. Imran’s old fast-bowling partner Sarfraz Nawaz metaphorically fanned the flames by insisting that Pakistan had deliberately thrown the match as part of a betting scam. Evidently this was something of a fetish for Sarfraz, because he made the same allegation nine years later, when Pakistan equally unexpectedly lost a World Cup tie to India.

  It would be a stretch, therefore, to claim that Imran’s leadership was universally popular, or that he was always an easy man to get to know. ‘He was constantly reinventing himself … Had an inner wariness … There was a kind of barrier between him and the rest of us, a film you couldn’t get through … Fanatically private’ — phrases like these come up time and again in research. One colleague from his county cricket days in England told me that in his considered opinion there had been five or six Imrans, ‘a veritable layer cake of contradictions’. There was Khan the Vengeful Warrior, Khan the Great Unifier, Khan the All-Knowing, Khan the Mild-Mannered, Khan the Dedicated Professional and Khan the Shagger. But whatever the various sides to the man, more or less everyone agrees that he was an outstandingly resilient Pakistan supremo, an office that traditionally enjoys the same degree of job security associated with that of the Italian government. Furthermore, Imran led from the front: five of his six Test centuries and 15 of his 18 Test half-centuries came when he was in office, and his bowling average improved from 25.53 to 20.26 over the same period. These were figures certain other all-rounders thrust into Test match captaincy could only dream of.

  From Pakistan’s arrival on the international cricket scene in 1952, the key piece of dressing-room wisdom handed down from player to player was ‘Keep in with the board’ — that remote and forbidding body of extravagantly mustachioed army officers which typically served at the pleasure of the head of state. It was good advice. Even at the best of times the board presided over a bewildering succession of abrupt resignations, embittered retirements and ill-advised comebacks, the direct result of their own long established habit of capriciously reversing themselves on most key decisions. Nowhere was this extreme administrative flexibility more keenly felt than in the Test captaincy. In a period of just 12 years, the national side was led by Saeed Ahmed, Intikhab Alam, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Intikhab again, Mushtaq Mohammad, Wasim Bari, Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbas and Imran. The bloody and sustained in-fighting would make even the shambolic England feud of early 2009 look like a trivial misunderstanding. There were certain Tests when up to half the Pakistan XI consisted of ex-captains. Imran’s record, then, may not be unblemished, but merely to have survived for 48 matches in charge was itself a feat. To have done so while making it clear to the board that it was he, not they, who both chose the team in the first place and then ran it on the field of play makes it even more impressive. ‘I came to admire his [Imran’s] tactics and his principles … how an organisation works and how you get things done,’ General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the former army chief of staff and state president, later said.

  At the risk of hyperbole, or of sounding like an apologist, it could be said that there was no such thing as a dull Imran Khan performance in the dozen or so years that he was at his peak: weaker ones, certainly, county matches in front of a couple of hundred spectators where he failed to fire on all cylinders, or Tests where either the wicket or the umpires clearly favoured the opposition batsman (who could still expect a few irritated bouncers for his pains) — but never a truly boring spectacle, a match that was begging to be walked out on. At least part of the overall appeal was distinctly physical. Imran in his prime was a famously fine specimen of a man, with a gym-honed body, a leonine mane of shaggy dark hair and what was authoritatively described to me as a ‘knee-trembler’ of a voice. Men wanted to be like him and women wanted to go to bed with him, which a fair number of them duly did. Part was also technical, in that Imran was not only an accomplished bowler but a visually thrilling one. From a slow, crouching start he accelerated with a sprinter’s poise and balance in his approach to the wicket, which culminated in a last-second propulsive leap and a virile, full-stretch whip of the body. The sheer energy of his bowling style was such that, even from the boundary, Ken Barrington ‘fully expect[ed] to see dust and newspapers flying around in the air when he followed t
hrough, much like what happens when the Brighton Belle thunders past’. As a batsman, Imran was known as an improviser who liked to smash it around on occasion, but with an essentially sound, orthodox technique that included a full range of ground strokes. Along with the runs and the wickets he also provided a firm hand on the tiller and in general put the steel into his team. Imran himself modestly felt he did ‘as well as [he] could’ as a captain, given the available assets. Under him, Pakistan enjoyed 10 years of nearly unbroken success, all the more striking a record when measured against their ramshackle showings in the 1960s and early 1970s.

  Imran, in short, changed the way Pakistan cricket was perceived around the world. The perennial cabaret turn of the international circuit was transformed into the hyper-aggressive fighting unit who lifted the World Cup. He was the figurehead of a sporting renaissance which had direct and dramatic results on national self-confidence. He personally turned in the performances with bat and ball that made most of this possible. And he did it while facing a continuing series of internecine feuds and self-inflicted crises which the Pakistan game unerringly managed to produce even amidst all the progress.

  In fact, there’s a theory, no doubt highly debatable and based on selective evidence, that Imran is one of only two professional athletes of the post-war era to have transcended his sport to the point of being a universal — or at least continental — icon, someone whom tens of millions of ordinary citizens instantly recognise. (The other one is Muhammad Ali.) Certainly his dazzling social life and long list of public causes were at least as well known as his bowling average. As more than one critic has remarked, Imran turned into a shout a voice that had hitherto hardly been heard, ‘that [of] the developing world as a whole clamouring for respect’. No less an authority than Richard Nixon, a shrewd judge of geopolitics, whatever one makes of his own contribution to them (and, it emerged, something of a closet cricket fan), told me in 1992 that, in this sense, ‘Khan [was] really on a par with a head of state’. Imran knew that, for many impoverished people, cricket was never a game. To millions, it was an escape from drab reality, while for the ruling elite it was a propaganda tool no less important than, say, Bollywood or the possession of nuclear weapons. Imran himself became the most potent visual symbol not just of Pakistan, but of an entire subcontinent coming to assert its identity in the aftermath of independence and partition, a role he played with characteristic, if not messianic self-belief. What’s more, his appeal was always rather more earthy than that enjoyed by a Mahatma Gandhi. Imran’s friend Naeem-ul-Haque told me of an occasion in the early 1980s when the two of them had been walking through Harrods department store in London and a young woman, seeing Imran, ‘lost first her decorum and then her consciousness. She literally collapsed at his feet.’

  Why did he do it? In his mid-forties, Imran abandoned the comfortable career of the recently retired sports superstar. Tempting as it is to see his decision to enter the unforgiving world of Pakistani politics as a clean break from his past, I think the precise opposite is the case. If anything, it was a straightforward, logical progression. After nearly three decades in Pakistani public life, he’d acclimatised to the country’s peculiar political culture and was uniquely qualified to decry the practice of politics even as he prepared to embark on a political path. President Pervez Musharraf may well have been ‘the most corrupt [and] vile … the worst’ petty dictator of Imran’s acquaintance, but many of the cricket authorities with whom he came into contact every day of his playing career would have made a strong bid for second place. A few of the Pakistan board’s internal memos and various other ‘Eyes only’ documents from the early 1980s have survived. They still exercise a morbid fascination. Taken as a whole, their bloated and sadly unwarranted complacency, and at times breathtaking disdain for their own team make the England authorities of the day seem like paragons of competence. At least one of the senior administrators concerned was to be ignominiously removed from office, an experience that did no discernible damage to his considerable self-esteem. Writing in his autobiography, Imran was to note, ‘Too much is at the whim of powerful individuals. Nepotism and favouritism are rampant … If only those at the top would sanction a radical shake-up of our system, [Pakistan] as a whole would benefit. Unfortunately, their reaction to constructive criticism has never been all that impressive.’ He was speaking of the national cricket selectors, but it would be just as insightful and relevant an overview of his political career 25 years later.

  The institutional turbulence of Pakistani public life, then, if anything merely perpetuated the hostile working environment of Imran’s playing days. This extended right through his career, and managed to blight even some of his greatest triumphs. Fresh from winning the World Cup in March 1992, several of the Pakistan players expressed dissatisfaction with their captain (who top-scored in the final itself), or more specifically with his reported suggestion that certain funds go to his hospital rather than to themselves. The Board of Control conspicuously failed to back Imran, with the result that he declined to tour England that summer, signalling the end of his 21-year Test career. Any cricket team can have a falling-out when things are going badly. It takes self-destructive skills of a high order to do so when that team have just become world champions. Four years later, the cup final was staged in Lahore and, perhaps predictably, ended in organisational chaos. The prize-giving ceremony turned into a shoving match between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who watched the melee with a frozen smile, and was eventually brought under control by police in full SWAT gear, against a backdrop of exploding smoke bombs and the widespread kindling of bonfires in the stands. This was not quite the ‘simple, dignified [and] appropriate piece of ceremonial’ the home board had promised in its pre-tournament literature.

  Imran’s first year in charge of Pakistan had revealed him as a tough, decisive, sometimes impulsive captain, not immune to occasional erratic streaks yet fortified by common sense. His third Test in office, against England at Headingley, saw what Imran calls some ‘truly bizarre’ decisions by the English umpires, notably one that arguably cost Pakistan both the match and series. This was David Constant’s keenly debated lbw against the Pakistan batsman Sikander Bakht, a verdict which put those with long memories in mind of the Idrees Beg fiasco at Peshawar 26 years earlier. Of course, mistakes happen. But Imran was so stung by the incident that when Pakistan returned to England in 1987 he formally asked that Constant be appointed for only one Test, if even that, of the five-match series. At the time, Constant, still only 44, was widely regarded, at least by his employers, as being at the top of his game. The Test and County Cricket Board declined Imran’s request and then leaked details of it to the press, resulting in ever more colourful variants of Today’s ‘WHINGEING PAKIS’ headline at intervals throughout the tour. (Imran and his board were to prove similarly unresponsive to England’s concerns about the appointment of certain Pakistani umpires to officiate in the return series six months later.) By the time of the third one-day international, before the Tests had even begun, the tabloids were accusing Imran’s team of out-and-out cheating — not a charge any fair-minded man of some integrity, let alone one descended from a long line of Pathan warriors, was apt to ignore. And he didn’t. The repeated allegation was a blow Imran felt personally, if only because of its implied slur on his family honour — ‘The carping never let up. It got to me,’ he told a close English friend. Still, if the general intention of the headlines had been to undermine Pakistan’s or more specifically Imran’s confidence, they seem to have backfired spectacularly. If anything, they galvanised him. The tourists duly won their first ever rubber in England. Their captain, with 21 wickets, was the player of the series. As a rule, Imran wasn’t a belligerent man, but his back went up when he was attacked or put on the defensive. From then on things were never quite the same between the English cricket authorities and the world’s foremost all-rounder.*

  Since the generally tempestuous atmosphere in which Imran ope
rated for so long is such a significant part of the story, it’s perhaps worth dwelling on this relationship just a moment longer. The folk memory of Pakistan’s England tour of 1987 has it that the visitors were ‘serial cheats’, ‘con artists’ who had ‘perfected the art of intimidation’ by histrionic appealing, frequently accompanied by the fielders ‘racing maniacally at the umpires [while their] English opponents could only watch in disbelief … Imran’s men were the most undisciplined team yet seen on these shores.’ This account perhaps requires correction. It’s true a certain petulance occasionally crept into the proceedings, and more than once Imran’s direct intervention was required to prevent what threatened to become a full-scale evacuation of toys from the visitors’ crib. But some background context might be in order. In trying to assess the barely concealed mutual hostility between the Pakistan team and most non-partisan observers, we have to acknowledge that both sides in the debate had ‘form’. That the Pakistanis could be a touch excitable was no newsflash. But the roots of their particular problem with specifically English officialdom were almost certainly deeper and more intricate than the Sun or Mirror let on, and included a whole gamut of neuroses, ranging from rank paranoia to what psychologists call a ‘morbid utterance of repressed infantilism’ — or resentment — towards the former mother country. It’s admittedly unlikely that many of the Pakistani bowlers decided to appeal quite as often as they did because of some sense of post-colonial, psychic frustration on their parts. But it would be fair to say that there was a mutual edge to the proceedings. Imran later reportedly remarked that the ‘utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign’ unleashed by his exposure of incompetent authority figures had been one of the hallmarks of his career.