Imran Khan Read online

  The following list of incidents is by no means exhaustive.

  The second Test, at Lord’s, of the England-Pakistan series of 1974 ended in some disarray when the tourists’ manager Omar Kureishi called a press conference to protest at the inadequate covering of the pitch, which had opened up a conveniently placed crack for the English bowler Derek Underwood to exploit. Kureishi’s opening remark was, ‘Gentlemen, I am not accusing you of cheating but of gross negligence.’ Harsher words followed, in the privacy of the Pakistanis’ hotel, over how such conditions could ever have existed at the ‘so-called headquarters of cricket’. It would be true to say that there was a broad tendency among many of the tourists, Imran included, to interpret such incidents in a racist light.

  Two years later, the touring Pakistani captain Mushtaq Mohammad made much of the ‘absurd’ umpiring that he believed had cost his side the series. This time the venue was the West Indies. Seeming to confirm the Pakistanis’ impression of institutionalised bias against them from whatever quarter, the next major incident, in October 1978, came at Faisalabad. The final day’s play in a generally ill-tempered encounter between Pakistan and India was delayed by 15 minutes to allow the umpire Shakoor Rana to harangue several of the players. This was not to be an entirely isolated incident in Rana’s long career. Nine years later, standing at the same ground, he became embroiled in a discussion about gamesmanship with the England captain Mike Gatting. The language employed throughout the exchange was basic. Six hours of playing time were then lost while Gatting, to his very vocal displeasure, eventually composed a written apology acceptable to Rana. As a result of this and other perceived slights, the Pakistan board initially withheld a substantial slice of the guarantee money owed to their English counterparts. The England authorities replied by awarding £1,000 to each of their players by way of a ‘hardship bonus’, a move that did not visibly improve the host team’s mood at the post-tour press conference.

  In April 1984, the International Cricket Conference (ICC) gave its blessing to a triangular 50-over competition between Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka held in the Asian equivalent of Las Vegas, Sharjah. The venue was the newly opened 24,000-seat United Arab Emirates Association stadium, set in a vast tract of arid wasteland where Bedouin had roamed not long before. Alas, the cricket itself rarely lived up to the surroundings. But the tournament was significant nonetheless, because it was the first ICC-sanctioned series to employ exclusively ‘neutral’ umpires — umpires, that is, born and raised anywhere other than the three competing nations. From then on, this concept of non-aligned officials became something of a fetish for Imran. In October 1986, he persuaded the Pakistan board to appoint neutral umpires for the home series against the West Indies, to the evident satisfaction of both teams. Despite this initiative, the England authorities stubbornly resisted the temptation to assign two independent umpires to each Test for another 16 years. To Imran, for one, the delay was unconscionable, and could have only one explanation. ‘It reeks of colonial arrogance,’ he wrote. In the meantime his entire tenure as Test captain was punctuated by a series of umpiring controversies, often involving home officials such as Rana as well as English ones such as Constant. Highly debatable decisions, incredulous stares, on-field exchanges of pleasantries, calamitous press conferences, and spurious but widespread allegations of gambling, ball tampering and even food poisoning — these were the backdrop to the most successful career in Asian sports history.

  The combustible world of Pakistan cricket was also frequently enlivened by charges of match-fixing, much of it reportedly centred on the ground at Sharjah. The ever voluble Sarfraz Nawaz would be neither the first nor the last player to go public with this particular allegation. But whether Sarfraz’s claim was deliberate or compulsive, there is no doubt the Pakistan team were affected by it. Although Imran himself was above reproach, he was made vividly aware of the rumours on a daily basis, chiefly by a Pakistani press never inclined to ignore or bury a good scandal. In fact some of the most lurid headlines on the subject came not in London but in Lahore and Karachi. It reached the point where in April 1990, at Sharjah, Imran felt compelled to gather his players together in the dressing-room before the start of play in a one-day international and have each of them swear on a copy of the Koran that none of them stood to gain by Pakistan losing.

  The gladiatorial atmosphere in which Pakistan typically played their cricket also, perhaps not surprisingly, contained an element of crowd participation. In December 1980, Pakistan hosted a Test against the West Indies at Multan; Imran took five for 62 in the visitors’ first innings. Late in the match the West Indies bowler Sylvester Clarke, apparently aggrieved at being struck by an orange peel while fielding on the third man boundary, retaliated by throwing a brick into the crowd. It was an incalculably cretinous thing to do, but, even so, the response was somehow peculiarly Pakistani. A press photographer’s close-up of a victim of Clarke’s assault bleeding from a head wound was blown up and became a popular poster in bus and train stations throughout the country. Some time later, disgruntled students invaded the pitch in the course of a one-day match between Pakistan and India at Karachi. Imran, who was bowling at the time, calmly assessed the situation, removed a stump, waved it under the nose of the lead demonstrator and reportedly offered to impale him with it. After that there was a loss of interest on the student’s part in prolonging his stay on the field. Sometimes the source of the trouble was even closer to hand; at Perth, in November 1981, Javed Miandad became probably the first player to threaten to brain another one during a Test, after Dennis Lillee had kicked him. Lillee later admitted to having also given Javed some ‘verbal’, but insisted the Pakistani batsman had ‘overreacted’; a not unheard-of development.

  For Imran Khan, the perennially embattled cricket superstar, a career in politics must have seemed almost tranquil by comparison. It’s rare for a player not only to operate at that level, in what he once called the ‘toxic’ atmosphere of Pakistan sport, but also to have graced the game in its every format around the world, chiefly in England. Although Imran took some time to find his feet in his adopted home, several good judges were left in no doubt, even then, that his arrival on the scene marked that of a major new talent. In July 1975, a 19-year-old Cambridge freshman named Alastair Hignell walked out to bat in the university match against Oxford at Lord’s. Hignell had been away on an England rugby tour of Australia until the eve of the game, and ‘therefore had no idea what to expect from the bowler ominously pawing at the ground before starting his run-up somewhere in the mid distance. Sure enough, it was a terrifying barrage … At one point, I took the wrong option and ducked into a bouncer which hit the fleshy part of my ear and ricocheted past the wicketkeeper in the direction of the pavilion. I was hoping for a single to fine leg to get off strike, so set off immediately. As it happened, the ball hit the boundary wall before the fielder could intercept it, but for some reason the umpire, John Langridge, didn’t bother tapping his leg for leg byes and instead signalled four runs … As I was trotting by I pointed out that the ball hadn’t hit my bat, but had bounced off my ear which by now was red, swollen and throbbing painfully. “Listen, sonny,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, as Imran again limbered up in the distance. “You’re not going to be here long, anyway. You might as well take all the runs you can get.”’

  * For the statistically minded, 83.3 per cent of the Tests Pakistan played under Imran’s captaincy thus ended in a win or a draw; Mike Brearley, widely regarded as the Freud of modern Test captains, scored 89.5 per cent, while for Imran’s contemporary Ian Botham the figure falls to 66.6 per cent.

  * Reflecting on the incident, the veteran journalist Antao Hassan told me that ‘It was really a question of what’s now called ageism’; Saeed was already 31 when he was dropped — ‘virtually senile’ in a national cricket culture that puts an extreme premium on youth.

  * David Constant declined to comment on his feelings, if any, about Imran when I contacted him in 2008. However
, Constant’s sometime colleague Dickie Bird was happy to oblige. He told me that in his experience Imran had ‘play[ed] within the spirit and the law’ of the game, and that he had ‘never had a problem with him’.

  TWO

  Of Hospitality and Revenge

  ‘Once, when I was 13,’ Imran recalls, ‘I was stopped by the police while I was driving my father’s motor car. Of course, I didn’t have a licence. So I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I bribed the policeman. He took the money and I drove away again scot-free. But later that day the chauffeur, who’d been sitting next to me in the car, reported the incident to my mother. She was livid.’ According to at least one reliable account of the ensuing five minutes of ‘peak-volume drama’ this was, if anything, to underestimate Mrs Khan’s reaction. She ‘literally turned purple’. Those who witnessed (or even heard of) the fury of this normally serene, well-bred lady would long marvel at the scene, speaking of it like old salts recalling a historic hurricane. The gist of her remarks was that by resorting to bribery Imran had brought a terrible shame both on himself and his family. No punishment was too severe for this uniquely heinous offence. Had she had anything to do with it, he would have been sent to gaol. Imran’s spluttering attempt at a defence, in which he protested that other boys of his age had done the same thing — or would have done so, given the chance — was cut short by his mother’s abrupt verdict on the matter. ‘You’re not other boys,’ she reminded him, decisively. ‘You are a Pathan.’

  The story illuminates Imran’s childhood, and perhaps his later life, on a number of levels. There’s the fact that his family even owned a car (which one party insists was ‘a sort of limousine — perhaps even a Mercedes’) in the first place, at a time when most Pakistanis travelled exclusively by the country’s notoriously congested train or bus network, if not on foot. At Partition in 1947 the entire Pakistan road system covered just 17,500 kilometres (10,900 miles), of which asphalt roads made up less than 20 per cent; as late as 1967, a couple of years after the bribery incident, the number of privately owned vehicles was estimated at only 240,000, more than half of which were motorcycles, out of a population of some 62 million. Then there’s the matter of the chauffeur, one of four servants employed in the Khans’ home in the exclusive Zaman Park suburb of Lahore, and the significant detail that the 13-year-old Imran had the sort of resources about him with which to bribe the policeman in the first place, let alone the chutzpah to pull it off. The hardship and rawness of the country as a whole, the family’s striving to ‘compete and contribute … [their] utter disdain of sitting around by the pool’, or of aristocratic languor of any sort, were real enough. But the five well-dressed Khan children, the car and the driver, the domestic help, the generous pocket money — all belied the later, well-publicised images of poverty certain Western political commentators would call on to promote Imran as a ‘man of the people’.

  Clearly the key message, though, lay in his mother’s terse summation, ‘You are a Pathan.’ To her, as he later wrote, ‘that was synonomous with pride and honesty’. Central to the tribal identity of the Pathans (or ‘Pakhtuns’) is strict adherence to the male-centred code of conduct, the pakhtunwali. Foremost in this is the notion of honour, or nang, followed in turn by the principle of revenge, or badal. It would be fair to say that the two concepts are closely linked, as the pakhtunwali makes clear that offences to one’s honour must be avenged, or else there is no honour. Although minor problems may be settled by negotiation, murder demands blood revenge, and until recent times women caught in illicit sexual liaisons ran the risk of being severely beaten or killed by a male relative, part of a punishment ritual reserved for crimes of an ‘immoral’ nature known as karo-kari. Vendettas and feuds are also an endemic feature of Pathan social relations, and often handed down through the generations. There are said to be ongoing disputes today over land or women whose origins lie in the Middle Ages. On a more congenial note, the tribal code also stresses the importance of melmastia, or hospitality, and a complex etiquette surrounds the protection and entertainment of one’s guests. A Pathan is required to give refuge to anyone, even one’s enemy, for as long as that person chooses to remain under his roof. To fail to do so is a gross dereliction of nang. Although Imran was to adapt successfully to most aspects of the host culture while living in England, and certainly its more relaxed approach to karo-kari, the Pathan code as a whole remained integral both to the competitive cricketer and the man. His father Ikramullah Khan’s tribe, the Niazis, could trace their ancestry back to 12th-century India, and were still waging a guerrilla war against the Mogul empire when the latter transferred authority to the British crown 700 years later. His mother Shaukat’s, the Burkis, were a Turko-Afghan nomadic clan with a long commercial and military tradition, who turned to the Muslim faith; as Imran recalls, she was the devout one of the Khan family. Following Partition, a number of the Burkis migrated to Lahore, where they produced a remarkable sporting dynasty: no fewer than eight of Imran’s maternal cousins went on to play first-class cricket, two of whom, besides himself, captained Pakistan. As a rule, the Khans were intensely loyal, if not fanatically so, to their adopted country. They invariably spoke Urdu, not English, and were openly contemptuous of the kala sahibs (‘black masters’), the members of the Pakistani professional classes who shamelessly aped the mannerisms of the departed British. Taken as a whole, both the Niazis and the Burkis were formidable examples of the Pathan tribal ethic, whom training and instinct had taught to be tough, capable and self-sufficient even as they assimilated into modern urban life. The children of such people aren’t apt to be weaklings.

  He was born Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi on 5 October 1952, not, as recorded in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and elsewhere, on 25 November. It was both traditional and somehow appropriate that there would be an ‘administrative foul-up’, Imran recalled, when he came to obtain his first passport, resulting in an official filling in the wrong date. Fitting, too, that he would be called Imran (which means ‘construction’, or ‘prosperity’), and be known by his monosyllabic paternal surname, with its tersely assertive ring. In Pathan culture, each tribe has a ‘khan’, meaning ‘lion’ or ‘chief’, at its head. The word is thought to come from the Turkish khaqan, which has the specific connotation of being a conquering warlord. Since Imran himself has dabbled in astrology and isn’t above consulting a clairvoyant before making a major decision, it might be added that he’s a Libra, and thus said to be freedom-loving, refined, idealistic, sincere, broad-minded, truth-seeking, expansive, flirtatious and virile, among several other virtues. Being both precocious and male (one sister preceded him, and three followed), he seems to have been doted on as a small boy. Without wishing to descend too far into the abyss of psychiatry, biographers always seem to recall Sigmund Freud’s line on these occasions: the dictum that ‘a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror’ was undoubtedly true here. The young Imran was also something of a loner, by all accounts. At family gatherings his mother and others would sometimes notice him ‘drift[ing] apart from the crowd’ of relatives. Aged only three or four, a cousin told me, ‘he would always be off stargazing by himself’.

  Imran’s birth preceded that of Pakistan’s international cricket by just 11 days. The national team played its first ever Test, against India at Delhi, in October 1952. The Indians won by an innings. Pakistan had also just embarked on its long and continuing history of political turmoil. The founding father and Quaid-e-Azam (‘great leader’) of the modern state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had died in 1948, some 13 months after independence. His hand-picked successor, Liaquat Ali Khan, was fatally shot by a Pathan fanatic at a public rally in Municipal Park, Rawalpindi, in October 1951. (The former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated just outside the same park 56 years later; the first medical worker on the scene was the son of the doctor who had tried to save Liaquat’s life.) Elsewhere, it was the era of the Korean War, H-bomb tests
and Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe. In London the talk was of the perennial balance of payments crisis, as well as more pressing issues such as an electrical workers’ strike, pickets and power cuts. Agatha Christie’s stage adaptation of her radio play The Mousetrap made its West End debut in the week Imran was born half a world away.

  Imran later told an English friend that he hadn’t had a particularly happy, or unhappy, childhood. Instead he described it as secure and serious. One assumes he meant secure in the family sense, because he was born into a world of violent change. The state of Pakistan was just five years older than he was, brought into being after the end of British rule, when two new countries were created to form predominantly Muslim West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with Hindu-majority India wedged in between. Even at the time, many observers had feared that the amputation of the subcontinent along religious lines would result in wholesale administrative chaos. It did. What ensued was some way short of a textbook example of smooth decolonisation. An estimated 700–800,000 people died in the riots that followed Partition, which also created some 14 million long-term refugees. It would be fair to say that, to many Indians, the very creation of Pakistan was seen as a violation of India’s geographical, cultural and religious boundaries. The two nations would enjoy an at best strained relationship, not least in the disputed sub-Himalayan outpost of Kashmir, and pursued differing alliances around the world. While India looked to the Soviet Union as a strategic ally, the Pakistanis sought support from the Americans by portraying themselves as tough anti-Communists with a British-trained military, based only a cannon’s shot away from the southern Russian border. In October 1952, President Truman spoke to a joint session of Congress of ‘halt[ing] Red expansion by helping develop the resources of the third world’, which he proposed to do by committing an initial $210 million-worth of military hardware and training, a somehow familiar-sounding gesture today.