Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
John Parker was to be specially registered ahead of me.’ Imran’s account doesn’t entirely square with that of the incoming county secretary, Mike Vockins, who, while not a party to the original deal struck in the pavilion at Lahore, had ‘all the bumph’ at his disposal. ‘There would have been only limited opportunities to play [Imran] in that 1972 season, although under the rules he would have automatically become eligible and registered once he went up to Oxford. I can’t recall any occasion during my 30 years as Secretary when any players’ wages were reduced,’ says Vockins.
Even at that stage, Imran seems to have had distinctly mixed views about the appeal of playing county cricket seven days a week. As he quickly recognised, the sheer repetitiveness of it, often cited as a weakness, can be a marked asset from the player’s point of view; if you make a mistake, you get a chance to atone for it on an almost daily basis for five months. Set against that was the irksome routine of humping one’s kit up and down the British motorway system, and lodging in a series of guest-houses or hotels with little pretension to luxury. The wages were unspectacular — £800 to £1,200 per annum was typical for an uncapped player. For reasons of both background and temperament, Imran never fully integrated into the general banter of the county dressing-room or indeed of the pub. He never drank alcohol, a major handicap in almost every aspect of life as a professional sportsman in the Britain of the early 1970s. ‘We didn’t know quite what to make of him,’ one Worcestershire colleague recalls. ‘He certainly wasn’t one of the boys in the sense of going out on the pull, though I gather he did pretty well in that area by himself.’ Basil D’Oliveira, the South African-born player then in his tenth year with Worcestershire, told me, ‘I’m not surprised if there were misunderstandings, seeing most English county cricketers knew as much about Pakistan as they did about the dark side of the moon.’ Imran came to think that the ‘old pros’ on the county circuit were hopelessly negative in their approach to the game, and ‘slightly racist’ to boot. D’Oliveira confirmed that he had once heard an opposition bowler greet the new recruit ‘with a whole string of ethnic stereotypes, in which the word “chutney” somehow stood out’, and that ‘Immy’s response was to hit the second or third ball he faced from the guy out of the park.’ D’Oliveira added that it ‘wasn’t that unusual a scene’.
Imran eked out the balance of a forgettable season for Worcestershire Seconds, distinguishing himself only with a four-wicket haul against Leicestershire and their perhaps less than stellar middle order of Schepens, Stringer, Wenban and Stubbs. While on the road he roomed alone, generally ate alone, and found ways to kill time alone before and after games. In another departure from standard practice Imran spent long hours wandering through museums and art galleries, browsing in public libraries and visiting the historic sights in various provincial towns. He seems not to have bonded with any of his team-mates, or to have gone out of his way to make friends. Writing of his time at Worcestershire as a whole, Imran was to note, ‘I just didn’t enjoy myself … Either the players were married and had their own lives, or they were unmarried and spent their evenings in pubs. Being a teetotaller, I was lonely and bored.’ About the best that could be said of the experience was that it allowed him to play cricket at a marginally more competitive level than would have been the case in Pakistan, whose domestic contests between various state agencies, transportation conglomerates and banks proved of only limited appeal to players and spectators alike.
The crash course in culture served Imran well at Oxford, where he initially read Geography before switching to Politics and Economics. On the whole it seems to have been a more congenial atmosphere than that of the county Second XI circuit. One of his contemporaries told me that, at 20, Imran had been ‘a bit green’ and had stayed the course academically only through his own freelance efforts and the good grace of Paul Hayes, the senior tutor at Keble, who had evidently taken a shine to him. Imran had been ‘socially agile’, however — ‘If it was female and had a pulse, he pursued it.’ After a year living in college he moved out to a series of digs, getting around town on an ancient Bantam motorbike. It’s remembered that he liked to ride this at top speed, often preferring a zigzag pattern to a straight line, and even in winter carried his cricket bat slung over the back wheel. One Saturday night Imran rasped up on the bike to a party in Oxford’s Summertown area, accompanied by a ‘ravishing looking’ girlfriend. A certain amount of drinking and substance abuse had gone on among his fellow guests, I was told. Perhaps as a result, later in the evening a fresh-faced chemistry student reeled up to Imran and said, ‘I’m Cassius Clay and I’m going to knock the shit out of you.’ Imran, who was somewhat taller than his antagonist, put his hand on the man’s right shoulder and held him patiently at arm’s length while ‘the little guy punched the air in between them’.
Imran was particularly fortunate to play his cricket at the Parks, a handsome, tree-lined ground that was only a short walk from Keble. In the summer term his practice was to go directly from his early morning tutorial to the playing field, returning home again for a late dinner. An Oxford team-mate named Simon Porter remembers him as ‘more inherently gifted, obviously, [but] also more driven’ than his colleagues. ‘Imran spent hours trundling away in the nets, essentially in an effort to perfect his inswinger. He always wanted to know if you could “read” him, which I, for one, couldn’t — and I had the bruises all over my leg to prove it.’ It wasn’t unknown for Imran to attract a ‘small harem’ of supporters to the ground for even the most insignificant fixture. Another colleague remembers that, on losing his wicket in one inter-college game, Imran ‘strode straight through the front door of the pavilion, grabbed a bag, and strode straight out the back one, where a blonde in a sports car was waiting for him. He jumped in, and that was the last we saw of him for two days.’ A subsequent Oxford girlfriend, another blonde now called Karen Wishart (not her name at the time), thought Imran a ‘physically beautiful’ man whose charm was nonetheless limited in its scope. One evening the two of them went off together to ‘a little flat above a fruit and veg shop’ in the Oxford suburbs. Looking back on the episode years later, Wishart was left to conclude that Imran was a ‘music and roses at night, pat on the bum in the morning’ type. It would be only fair to add that another woman found him an ‘attentive, funny and charming’ partner, who nonetheless struck her as the kind who would ‘hug you politely and then just stroll away once you broke up’. The words proved prophetic.
One of Imran’s earliest appearances for Oxford was against Worcestershire, where he clearly had something to prove. Over the years, some of these county versus university encounters could be the ultimate in boredom, and many of the old pros saw them as little more than an agreeable way to improve their averages. That wasn’t to be the case here, at least in Oxford’s second innings. A powerful Worcester attack of Holder, Pridgeon, D’Oliveira and Gifford appeared to be sending down half-volleys and long hops all afternoon. It wasn’t so, but Imran’s polished innings of 54 more than had the measure of the professionals’ line-up. He followed it by scoring 47 and 51 against Sussex, a match I illicitly cycled over from my nearby boarding school to watch. Nothing seemed to better crystallise events than the straight six with which Imran greeted Sussex’s highly regarded off-spinner Johnny Barclay; 2–0–4–2–6 followed, all in the direction of the River Cherwell. After the over, Barclay took his sweater and came back to field at third man, still muttering to himself. Something similar happened a fortnight later against Gloucestershire. Imran scored 59 out of 106 in the Oxford second innings, peppering the old wooden scorebox-cum-groundsman’s hut with sixes. Others landed in the copse of trees behind square leg. Generally speaking Imran did rather less with the ball, but was still in a class of his own compared with his fellow undergraduates, a tall poppy among shrinking violets.
It was the same story against Cambridge in the varsity match. Imran top-scored with 51 in the Oxford first innings (caught off the bowling of Phil Edmonds), but took only a modest three wickets throughout. One or two of his Oxford colleagues wanted him to bowl faster, of which he was fully capable, rather than to concentrate on line and length as Worcestershire always insisted. Both Imran and his new bowling action were still works in progress. Although tall, he wasn’t as well upholstered as he would be when he filled out two or three years later, and the ‘little jump’ was a formidable physical feat that wasn’t yet invariably effective when it came to getting the ball on the wicket. In those days, the former England captain Ted Dexter told me, ‘Imran used to come charging in [and] plant