Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
the neighbourhood on one of his regular training exercises when a local boy with whom he’d exchanged words rashly shouted out, ‘Look at that ponce!’ Imran reportedly hit the boy so hard that he broke one of his own fingers. He was also known to play competitive soccer and hockey, could swim a length of a pool with seven or eight windmilling strokes, and once went trekking with a party of schoolfriends up into the Northern Areas close to the Chinese border. But when the cricket season began ‘he was a man of such single-minded ambition … with such intensity,’ says Haroun Rashid. ‘In 1968 when we went to Lawrence College in Ghora Gali, our traditional rivals, for our annual sports meet, Imran opened the batting for us and, without losing his wicket, proceeded to decimate the hapless Gallians. It was a slaughter of the innocents … Due to Imran’s sixes about half a dozen balls were lost in the forests surrounding their cricket ground. The match was over in half its allotted time.’
It was the watchword and comfort of the Pakistani Test selectors that their team ‘got through the Sixties unscathed’ as one of them said later. Unscathed, but hardly unbeaten; in the entire decade the Test side managed only two wins, both against New Zealand. The history of Pakistan cricket as a whole in the 1960s is one of corruption, dissent and consistent under-achievement. Hanif Mohammad remained the pioneering figure, but even he eventually outstayed his welcome, apparently wanting to finish his 17-year career with a then impressive-seeming 4,000 Test runs. He fell 85 short, after Abdul Kardar, the chairman of selectors, had remarked tetchily, ‘I can’t give him another five Tests.’ Hanif went out to widespread barracking from crowds who had grown impatient with his kind of dour, bricklaying approach to batting, and after a power struggle with his successor as Test captain, Saeed Ahmed. Saeed was not a success in the job. On hearing the unsentimental announcement of his own replacement by Intikhab Alam, he threatened to punch (and reportedly did ‘jostle’) chairman Kardar, among others. Intikhab’s first series in charge was at home to New Zealand, whose manager remembered his own side as being ‘hopeless’. New Zealand won 1–0, with two Tests drawn. By 1969, around the time Imran was making the step up to first-class cricket, the Pakistan national team was anchored firmly at the bottom of the unofficial league table.
A public- and private-sector consortium had, it’s true, raised funds for an Under-19 side to tour England in 1963, where they performed better against the counties than the senior team had a year earlier. As a result of this initiative, Pakistan went on to organise a number of youth teams to play both domestically and around the world. But set against this modest success, there was acrimony amid the acronyms — by 1966, the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan (BCCP) and the newly restructured Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) began a near-continuous clash, with the PIA chairman accusing the BCCP president of ‘exploiting players’ and being ‘short-sighted’. In time, the major Pakistan banks, the national railway company and various government departments all fielded teams in the domestic first-class cricket tournaments, leading one BCCP administrator to fret that this could be a ‘potential recipe for … disaster [in] providing competitive sport and a sound Test team’. It was. Imran himself was later to observe, ‘Pakistan is the only country in the world where cricket is played between commercial organisations and not between regions, zones, cities or states. The result is abysmal … Most of the matches are meaningless and insignificant.’ Added to the structural deficiencies were some of those unique qualities of Pakistani national life that were to continue to play such a vital part in their sporting fortunes. The 1965 war against India interrupted regularly scheduled Test cricket for two years, and the 1968–69 England tour of Pakistan was eventually abandoned when a crowd of some 4,000 students, unhappy with the current military regime, invaded the pitch at Karachi; the police responded by firing tear gas, most of which blew straight back over their shoulders and through the broken windows of the England dressing-room.
In the same week that the red-eyed MCC tourists caught a hurriedly booked return flight to London, the regional selectors summoned Imran to an Under-19s trial in Lahore. There were 200 other hopefuls present, each of whom batted for five minutes in two adjoining nets. Imran lasted only half as long as that before being given the hook — a rare failure for a self-assured 16-year-old whose school batting average was currently 67.50. ‘As I stood watching the other triallists, reality slowly seeped in,’ he later noted. ‘I was a reject.’
The proceedings weren’t quite over, however. Before he could slink off, Imran was told to go back to the nets and turn his arm over. Doing what any red-blooded teenager would do in the circumstances, he pulled up his collar, West Indies style, loped in and bowled a bouncer. According to the best available evidence, this was ‘fast but somewhat deviant … It nearly hit the man in the next net.’ After his third or fourth ball, the chairman of selectors stopped Imran and announced to the group as a whole that he had ‘the ideal seam bowler’s action’. This was followed by something of a lull, I was told. Certainly Imran himself would remain, at best, ambivalent about his potential new role. By and large, batsmen were idolised in Pakistan, where the seamers typically sent down a desultory few overs before the captain summoned the first of his four or five spin bowlers. Often even this brief delay wasn’t necessary, as there were competitive matches where the spinners opened the attack. To give the ball a good tweak was the instinctive response to the beach-like pitches, with cracks down which Geoff Boycott would remark he could stick not only his house key, but the house as well, that were prevalent at every level of the game in Pakistan. Men like Niaz Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Majid himself, none of whom were exactly brisk, regularly took the new ball for the national Test team of the time. Nor did either the climate or the uniquely atrocious standard of most wickets around Lahore as a whole encourage the average aspiring cricketing prodigy to bowl fast. But there it was. The following week Imran was selected to play for the Lahore Under-19 team against a touring English side. He opened the attack, sending down four fiercely erratic overs in the England first innings, taking three for 7 in the second, and batting No. 10.
It was an only fitfully impressive debut, and Imran recalls that he was ‘treated [with] a certain amount of hostility. My team-mates thought I didn’t deserve a place in the side and was there on the basis of my connections.’ This sense of perceived rejection, and an answering competitiveness on his part, was to be a theme right through his career. A day or so later Wasim Raja, the captain of the Under-19s and a future Test all-rounder, greeted a friend with an account of the wild antics of a ‘posh kid’ on the team named Imran. According to Wasim, Imran wanted to bowl a bouncer with every ball, threw in a generous quota of beamers, and generally sprayed it around in an arc from gully to leg slip. One particular delivery had come close to felling the square leg umpire. ‘He’s the craziest cricketer I’ve ever seen,’ said Wasim.
Yet the Lahore selectors soon began to take the kid seriously. In the next two Under-19 games, Imran was to show an at least rudimentary grasp of line and length, taking three for 19 and five for 42 respectively. He wasn’t, perhaps, as inherently gifted as some other up-and-coming bowlers around the world. He lacked the fluid hydraulics of even the teenaged Michael Holding. He wasn’t as squarely built as Ian Botham, or quite as lithely fast as Dennis Lillee or Richard Hadlee. Yet no young cricketer ever brought together such an amalgam of carefully nurtured talents. Imran was relentless in his pursuit of excellence. At least one observer saw him in the light of the 20th century’s approved canon for success, as ‘literally a self-made man’. Wasim Raja would long remember that ‘Imran was invariab[ly] the first on the ground every morning, where he would run circuits of the playing area’ — a novelty in the cricket culture of those days — ‘before repair[ing] to the nets to practise bowling at a single stump for an hour or more before the start of play.’
Fanatically determined as he was, Imran may also have enjoyed a certain degree of old-fashioned patronage in his early career. He made his full first-class debut for Lahore against Sargodha when he was just turning 17. The chairman of the Lahore selectors was Imran’s uncle, and the captain and two of the senior players were his cousins. It was another only sporadically successful start. Bowling a lively mixture of bouncers and prodigously fast outswingers, Imran took two wickets at some 20 runs apiece. That was to be the highlight of his contribution to the match. During a subsequent rain delay, Imran wandered off to his nearby bedroom, fell asleep and returned to the ground to find he’d missed his turn in the batting order. When he did bat he was run out, and Lahore lost the match.
Wasim