Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
a talented underachiever. As it was, the odds were that he would go on to play perhaps one or two obscure seasons of county cricket. Then a professional career in Pakistan, possibly involving the civil service, along with an arranged marriage, and the occasional weekend appearance for the Gymkhana or a similar club; retirement; death; appreciative but not long obituaries, followed by a footnote recalling him as a ‘one Test wonder’ in the cricket reference books — that would have been it. The reason Imran succeeded where other, more naturally gifted, players failed was that he put his first year in England to such good effect, emerging from it fitter and faster than ever. More determined, too. Reflecting on Imran’s self-belief, Wasim Raja (no martyr to false modesty himself) admiringly recalled that, as a 19-year-old, he had had ‘a healthy ego [along] with the single-minded focus of a speeding bullet’.
Even so, it was a struggle. Imran would have been less than human if he hadn’t taken time to adapt to single life in an English provincial town just as early autumn approached. Worcestershire initially accommodated their overseas signing in a rather spartan room in the market square’s Star Hotel. Local folklore has it that, while staying at the Star, Imran put his mattress on the floor each night, and each morning the chambermaid, ignorant of the oriental custom, returned the mattress to the bed. He was not selected for the county side in the remaining part of the season, but played seven matches for the Second XI, and less formally in the Under-25 groups and assorted knock-ups. Once again these gave scant evidence of any latent genius, although the newcomer ‘absorbed’ everything, I was told, and was a ‘quick study’. Imran was once seen to take a thick coaching book with him back to his digs. He had apparently combed through it overnight and mentally photographed what he needed, because the next morning ‘he could quote the book’s exact captions [and] whole chunks of the actual text,’ an impressed colleague recalled.
On 9 August, Imran arrived at the unprepossesing County Ground, Derby, with his usual baggage: style. Clad in tailored whites and a Pakistan touring cap, a polka-dot handkerchief sticking out of a pocket, he treated the sparse Tuesday morning crowd to 110 of the best runs possible, out of a grand total of 222. Regrettably, this early-career promise wasn’t to be entirely fulfilled. By the beginning of September, the Worcestershire Second XI had lost four of their last five games and were drifting near the bottom of the 14-team league. The county still seem to have thought of Imran, to the extent that they did so at all, as a middle-order belter who could bowl a bit. It wasn’t an entirely illogical preconception, since they had engaged him in the first place after watching him hit the International XI’s Neil Hawke around the park at Lahore. Although not exceptionally wristy, Imran had developed a series of taut, slightly robotic arm shots which could give the ball an almighty thump. Even so, one or two good judges including Henry Horton appeared to think he had the makings of an all-rounder, a natural replacement for the seemingly ageless but actually 40-year-old Basil D’Oliveira. Though not perhaps the most accurate, Imran’s bowling was pretty spectacular by county, let alone Second XI or Club and Ground standards. He knew it. Beset though he often was at Worcester by nagging doubts about his overall prospects, his claims for himself weren’t small — and weren’t on the whole misguided.
On 1 September, Imran was selected to play for Worcestershire in a three-day match against the touring Indians. It seems somehow fitting that his opponents for his debut should be his nation’s mortal enemies. Imran drew some attention to himself before play started by appearing in the net swinging three bats at once, a practice favoured by professional baseball players to make the bat they hit with feel lighter. To his bemused team-mates, though, it’s possible it merely looked eccentric. He wasn’t to follow up this preliminary flourish when in the middle, scoring 0 and 15 and failing to take a wicket. At least one of the Indian team thought him ‘a hype’.
Imran hadn’t forgotten his promise to his parents to finish his education in England, and shortly after the India game he entered Worcester Royal Grammar school as a boarder, with a view to taking A levels and going on to university. His ten months there don’t appear to have been happy ones. Apart from the institutional food and the cold, he was miserably homesick, his one friend in England being his cousin Majid, who was far away at Cambridge. At half-term and on other holidays, Imran stayed behind and moved into an attic room in his headmaster’s house. One retired staff member described him to me, perhaps not surprisingly, as ‘a bit of a loner’. The English boarding school system was not then troubled, as it was later, by counsellors. Had it been, Imran would no doubt have been thought worthy of concern. In the event, he seems to have been somewhat of an object of satire to the other boys, to whom he had, in any case, little to talk about, preoccupied as they were with glam rock and soccer. Even so, the familiar determination and ambition were to the fore. Despite a still imperfect grasp of English, Imran passed Economics and Geography with an A and a C grade respectively. He completed the two-year course in the equivalent of just over two terms, or nine months.*
One winter Saturday afternoon Imran and Majid visited Mike Selvey, the future Surrey, Middlesex and England bowler (and Guardian cricket correspondent), at his flat in Cambridge. Selvey thought the nearly invisible teenager swathed in a heavy overcoat and a variety of scarves to be ‘very quiet and shy. [Although] Imran said very little, years later he told me how much he appreciated it. I always got on well with him and called him Fred, as in Karno.’
It seems most people who met Imran during his first year or so in England had the same general impression Selvey did. Away from the cricket field, he was basically ‘shy’ and ‘rather mousey — a bit of a mumbler,’ two grammar school contemporaries recalled. Older and more sophisticated people reacted similarly, finding Imran a very different proposition from the later celebrity. ‘He didn’t treat himself like a statue of himself,’ Basil D’Oliveira said after meeting him in 1971.
He seems to have been commendably focused on his studies at Worcester Grammar (whose fees of about £200 a term were paid not by the club, as popularly rumoured, but by Imran’s father). In the light of his future reputation as a sort of flannelled Austin Powers figure, it’s worth quoting one final schoolfriend, now a lecturer in psychology, who saw him as a socially naive young man. ‘He kept to himself, and didn’t show any interest in girls or sex that I was aware of.’ Sometime towards the end of the year, Imran apparently did write a well-received short story or essay, which he circulated to some of the senior boys, about a man who walks around London soliciting beautiful women. ‘He certainly didn’t do any fieldwork on it,’ his friend insists. Imran also spent hours retooling his bowling action both in the school gym and in the indoor net at Edgbaston which Worcestershire then shared. Although Henry Horton worked doggedly to convert the ‘catapault’ bowler into the well-oiled machine of later legend, it was John Parker, the young New Zealand batsman also in his first year at Worcester, who looked at Imran one day and casually suggested he ‘take a little jump’ before delivering the ball. The idea was both to gain extra momentum and to get more side-on to the batsman, who, as an added bonus, would then have to deal with ‘this crazy, vaulting Pakistani bowling at you at 90 miles an hour’, as one distinguished former England opener puts it. The improvisations in Imran’s bowling technique continued over the years. He could, and did, vary his run-up, steam in wide of the crease, move it both ways, or neither, and was apt to follow up a slower ball with a screaming bouncer that left batsmen wringing hands or standing transfixed. But what really set him apart was that ‘little jump’. It was at once superbly efficient and shamelessly flamboyant, and as such could be readily appreciated by players and spectators alike. At Edgbaston in 1982 Imran took seven for 52 in the English first innings, and was paid the compliment of the home crowd applauding their own team’s discomfiture as they savoured a bowling routine that was part athletics, part ballet and part tribal wardance. ‘It was,’ said the England captain, ‘a privilege to be there.’
In July 1972 Imran won a place at Keble College, Oxford, after being brusquely rejected by Cambridge. Before going up he played some schools and Warwick Pool cricket, making use of his new action; although the exact number is hard to establish, I was told he had taken ‘a minimum of 25 wickets’ in the course of four single-innings matches. (He also played once for Worcestershire Seconds against Glamorgan, with the more modest if economical figures of none for 16 off eight.) In his autobiography, Imran notes a shade tartly,