Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
young Imran recall that he had a slinging action much like that of the Australian Jeff Thomson. All parties agree that, in Wasim’s words, ‘It was awkward and unorthodox … You wouldn’t find it in the MCC manual.’ Perhaps as a result Imran tore a back muscle in his next match and missed nearly a season’s competitive cricket. He didn’t waste the time, however. He was the ‘most hard-working, the most focused student of cricket ever,’ a man closely familiar with the game in Lahore told me. ‘Everybody else would be gone at the close of play, and he would still be there. At that age, most of the kids in the team wanted to have fun. He wanted to be … Imran Khan.’ As soon as he was physically able to do so, he resumed his lengthy workouts, spending afternoons in the nets and evenings in indoor ‘skull sessions’ with men like Javed Burki and Majid, discussing the finer points of the game. In time he made a gradual comeback through the ranks of Lahore juniors and Lahore B, often coming on first change, before returning to the senior team. Wasim Raja saw an immediate difference in Imran’s action. ‘He was bowling chest-on, which looked even more awful. He’d also grown another inch and put on some muscle, and the whole effect [was] highly intimidating from the batsman’s point of view.’ Another Lahore colleague recalls Imran carefully smoothing down his hair on his brisk trot back to his mark, and his subsequent snorting approach to the bowling crease, ‘like that of a well-groomed bull’. His repertoire now included a ‘devastatingly fast’ inswinger as well as his stock bouncer, which ‘on average, he employed three times an over’.
Imran had, meanwhile, left Aitchison College, whose vaunted enthusiasm for sports seems not to have extended to sharing one of their own with a professional cricket team. He spent his sixth-form year at the nearby Cathedral School. Although founded and run by a Christian mission, and thus somewhat at odds with both Niazi and Burki family tradition, the school ‘more or less indulged [Imran]’, as one of the staff remembers. ‘He was a special case, [someone] who just seemed to be in a hurry to get to somewhere else. He was always driving and pushing, even as a teenager.’
Besides cricket, that drive and push found expression in longdistance running, javelin- and discus-throwing, and various other demonstrations of adolescent physical prowess. Imran was a full-time member of the Lahore team in the 1970–71 season, where he was lucky enough to have his cousin Javed Burki as captain. Javed cannily used the 18-year-old tear away in short bursts. In the BCCP Trophy against Rawalpindi Blues (surely a song title) Imran took two for 26 and one for 10, followed by the more impressive first innings figures of 18–3–54–6 against Pakistan Railways. In the cup semi-final against Karachi he scored 17 and 60 batting at No. 3, but was said to have served up a ‘dog’s dinner’ with the new ball. Moving across to the three-day Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, Imran recorded figures of five for 75 off 16 overs against Rawalpindi, missed the grudge match against the government’s Public Works Department, but returned to play in the losing semi-final against Punjab University, where he took two for 96 in the first innings and one for 10 in the second, while scoring 36 and 68 in the middle order. At the end of the season Imran had a first-class batting average of 31.69 and a bowling average of 21.60. His first full year in domestic cricket was also to be his last, because he was rarely seen again in Pakistan after that except at representative level.
As Imran played cricket, the situation in the country as a whole was ‘desperate’, he later recalled. The first ever fully democratic national elections were due to have been held on 5 October 1970, his 18th birthday, but had to be postponed by two months because of the cataclysmic damage caused by floods in East Pakistan, where 200,000 people died and some 12 million lost their homes. It was generally agreed the relief operations were not well handled by the government. The result of the election gave the Bengali militant Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib) and his Awami League an absolute majority in the National Assembly and all but two of the 162 seats allotted to East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a champion of Islamic socialism, a strong army and ‘a 1,000-year war with India’, emerged as the leader in the West. The irreconcilable differences of the two men’s programmes and the growing threat of secession by the Bengalis set in train the breakdown first of parliamentary government and eventually of all domestic law and order. President Yahya Khan, the hard-drinking, straight-talking former army chief, first refused to honour the election results and then sent 40,000 troops to arrest Mujib and suppress the rioting that erupted in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. Unrelieved suffering from the cyclone, coupled with brutal suppression by Yahya’s army, may have killed as many as 500,000 more men, women and children over the next month. The confrontation eventually led to the events that brought about Pakistan’s dismemberment in December 1971. Even before that, Imran had seen ‘AIR-RAID SHELTER’ and ‘CARELESS CHAT COSTS LIVES’ notices being tacked up on public buildings, just as he had in 1965. More and more recruits signed up for Yahya’s, or Bhutto’s, army; I was told that the Khan family had been ‘rightly alarmed’ they would be evicted from Zaman Park, either by invading Bengalis or the Indians, if not by government fiat, and forcibly resettled, much as had happened following Partition in 1947. In the end they kept their home, although in the most harrowing circumstances. India again went to war with Pakistan in 1971 just as the latter finally tore itself apart. In the ensuing 13-day bloodbath, some 300,000 Pakistani civilians died and the country’s armed forces were crippled for a generation. As the author Tariq Ali says, in less than a fortnight the nation ‘lost half [its] navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army’. India and its Soviet ally jointly declared the outcome of the war, and the emergence of Bangladesh from the ruins of East Pakistan, to be a triumph for socialist and democratic principles.
Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Imran proved to be an aggressively patriotic sportsman, not least when it eventually came to playing against India. Already, by 1971, he’s remembered as a ‘fine adornment of Pakistani manhood’, who was widely known for his ‘impassioned if selective’ monologues on his country’s history. Physically, too, he was quite imposing, having coaxed his hair into a Beatle moptop and developed a particularly intense, piercing stare — ‘that don’t-fuck-with-me squint of his’, as one ex-girlfriend characterises it. He spoke in an almost sepulchral tone, with the occasional incongruous ‘Strewth!’ or ‘Gorblimey!’ coming to intrude on his otherwise exemplary English. Even his dress code was distinctive, eventually flaunting a conflict of styles dominated on the one hand by traditional Pakistani garb, and on the other by a collection of hip-hugging velvet flares, garishly loud shirts splayed open to the chest and chunky jewellery such as might have been favoured by Gary Glitter in his ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ era.
This was the self-admittedly ‘bumptious’ individual who, on 4 March 1971, strode out into the Lahore Stadium to play for the BCCP side against a touring International XI, marking his first representative appearance for his country. The short goodwill visit by the Internationals had not been entirely free of incident up until then. In fact, the team’s previous match at Dhaka had come to an abrupt end shortly after England’s John Murray, who was batting at the time, ‘happened to notice the Pakistani who had been fielding at long leg edging up to the slips and furtively muttering to them, “There will be trouble” about a split second before someone set the main stand on fire. The next thing I knew we were in the middle of an army escort screaming down a dark road towards the airport, where we caught the last plane out to Lahore.’ Conditions there were ‘marginally more tranquil’, Murray says. Imran eventually took three wickets in the match and, coming in at No. 9, hit 51 not out after his team had collapsed to 80 for seven. The Internationals’ Australian bowler Neil Hawke, the man who saw most of the batsman, recalled his ‘not being aware [he] was in the presence of an obvious genius’. Another player I spoke to couldn’t even remember that Imran had taken part in the match. But it was apparently enough of an all-round performance to impress the then 77-year-old Wing Commander William (or ‘Harold’) Shakespeare, the chairman of Worcestershire, and his outgoing county secretary Joe Lister, both of whom were accompanying the tour. According to the written minutes, they particularly admired the 18-year-old’s ‘attitude’ and ‘obvious passion’ for the game. As a result, Worcestershire offered Imran a one-year contract, with an option to renew, at a basic salary of £35 a week along with a somewhat vague promise to secure his ‘special registration’ as the county’s primary overseas player. The momentous deal was consummated with a simple handshake in the pavilion. Imran’s parents initially withheld permission, but were