Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
an injury”,’ Dexter thought presciently. Oxford drew their match with Cambridge. A night or two later, Imran walked into the White Horse in Oxford’s Broad Street, where he became one of the first men to successfully order a glass of milk in a British pub. As usual there was a small group of acolytes at his table, including the statutory blonde girlfriend. ‘People were fawning on Imran because he was already a bit of a superstar,’ one of the party recalls. ‘But the English have always been fascinated with swarthy oriental mavericks. Or at least they were in those days. Imran would have turned heads even if he’d never picked up a cricket ball. I have a fond memory of him sitting there with his milk and his blonde, trying desperately to look unimpressed while somebody read out all the glowing references to him — how he was a tiger and a fighter and so on — in the morning press. He loved it. Who wouldn’t have?’ Imran may not have been the finished article, but good judges had begun to take serious note of him.
Fighting was what life was about. That was the reason Imran ‘worked like a cur’, to quote a Keble source, to support himself at Oxford. When he was later to claim that ‘playboys have plenty of time and money — I’ve never had either’, he didn’t exaggerate his case. In the wake of the civil war and the subsequent currency crisis, the Pakistani government had imposed strict exchange controls that made it illegal to send more than the equivalent of £15 out of the country annually, with the prospect of a lengthy gaol term for anyone breaking the law. As a result Imran had no trust fund and an only minimal allowance. To keep himself afloat in the off-season he took a series of menial jobs, including one washing dishes over the Christmas holiday at Littlewoods store in south London. It was no worse than the fate of thousands of other students over the years, but it does refute the idea that he swanned through his time at Oxford like one of the teddybear-carrying toffs in Brideshead Revisited.
Despite his claim to have been neglected by Worcestershire, Imran played for the county in 11 first-class matches in the second half of the 1973 season. The club found him new if rather basic digs in the town’s Bromyard Road, and even went to war with the Test and County Cricket Board to keep him registered with them under the board’s Rule 4, relating to ‘temporary special players’. Imran came into the team in time to play Warwickshire in a fixture starting on 14 July, just three days after appearing for Oxford at Lord’s. The more free-spirited, if not always effective, student approach to the game gave way to the trench warfare of the county championship, conducted behind the sandbag of broad pads — the main idea being for batsmen to obtain a reasonably good average each season at the minimum of risk and physical exertion to themselves. For a cricketer who abhorred the safety-first school epitomised by certain old pros, it was all mildly depressing. Imran took just 31 wickets in the 11 matches (one of them, admittedly, when he bowled Garry Sobers) at some 24 apiece. But even that modest achievement eclipsed his performance with the bat — 15 innings, 228 runs, average 16.28. Being Imran, though, what he lacked in mature ability he fully made up for in self-belief; the fact that he neither scored runs nor took wickets troubled him as little as did most of the criticism he received over the years, and had the same general effect. ‘It taught me never to stop, that when you lose you fight harder the next time.’
Back in Oxford, Karen Wishart sometimes talked to Imran about his future — Imran apparently uncertain, Wishart positive that he would play cricket for only a year or two more and then go back to a steady job in Pakistan. Both the civil service and engineering were mentioned. Wishart often urged Imran to ignore the temptation to become a fully professional sportsman who presumably might just about eke out a living for another ten years or so while his contemporaries got on with their ‘proper’ careers. Down that road, she insisted, there was nothing to gain and everything to lose. Imran frequently said he didn’t much like the idea either.
If Wishart took that for an answer, she knew less than she thought she did about a man who was born to perform.
* At which point Newsweek’s editor apologised, remarking that his story had been based on an anonymous source who now ‘wasn’t sure whether it was true or not’.
* Opening the bowling with Imran for the school’s First XI was a Kenyan-born 18-year-old named Rabi Mehta, who in the 1980s went on to author several scholarly articles about the aerodynamics of a cricket ball in flight, and thus to ‘explain’ the theory of reverse swing.
In 1974 Imran was elected captain of Oxford. It was a somewhat surprising choice, considering his only mixed form with bat and ball, untried diplomatic skills and still limited command of English. According to those with whom he discussed the club’s offer, he hesitated a day or two before agreeing, apparently concerned that ‘the guys’ might not accept him. There was also the question of whether the added responsibility would affect his own game, as has been known with cricket captains. Trying to bat, bowl, lead from the front and learn the language, one friend said bluntly, was at least one job too many.
The offer was nonetheless a heady one for a 21-year-old Pakistani who had a somewhat romantic view of the British university tradition as a whole, based as it was on the exploits of men like Majid’s father Jahangir Khan, who had been up at Cambridge in the 1930s. Accepting it would give him a certain cachet, as well as the chance to bowl himself as he saw fit. After another winter of training and periodic trips to the indoor school at Edgbaston, Imran’s action was now close to the real thing. ‘I also knew I had the temperament for fast bowling,’ he remarks. With five years of first-class cricket and one Test appearance to his credit, ‘I was ready … confident the job would [make] me a better player’ — a judgement that events bore out to a quite astonishing extent.
Imran hit the ground running, taking five for 56 against a Warwickshire side including six current or former England Test players and the West Indies’ Alvin Kallicharran. He then began to do the thing in style. Innings of 117 not out and 106 against a full-strength Nottinghamshire. Another five-wicket haul against Derbyshire. A cameo of 20 (Oxford’s top score) against a Somerset who were giving a second match to a teenager named Botham. Imran seemed to be playing some of the counties by himself, fielding tigerishly to his own bowling and driving batsmen into errors and indecision where previously there had been only confidence. As one of his colleagues told me, ‘You frequently had the feeling that he could have made up a team with just himself, a couple of serviceable all-rounders and maybe a wicketkeeper.’
At the Parks on the bitterly cold morning of 15 May, Imran went out to toss with the captain of Yorkshire, Geoff Boycott. At ten o’clock the entire playing area was covered with a sleet that had frozen in the night, and both the pavilion and the rows of deckchairs rather optimistically displayed in front of it seemed to have been varnished with ice. This gave the two men the opportunity to agree that conditions for early-season English cricket could be a bit on the crisp side. After these pleasantries were concluded, Boycott told Imran (whom he addressed as ‘young man’) that he didn’t much care for the occasion as a whole. ‘It’s not worth getting out of bed for these fucking student games,’ he complained. Someone in the sparse crowd then made an audible and rather racist remark in which he drew comparison between the ethnic make-up of the two teams. You could literally see the steam coming off Imran as he bounded back up the pavilion steps. Anyone at all familiar with him would have known what to expect next. Bowling at maximum revs for the next two hours he took four Yorkshire wickets, including that of Boycott with a late inswinger. A young boy’s perhaps ill-timed request for the Yorkshireman’s autograph a few minutes later was met in the negative. Back in the middle Imran was the most restless captain, pacing around with a frown when not actually bowling, making pantomime signals to his fielders. He took himself off at last after 39 overs, mentally perhaps, if not physically, exhausted.*
There followed a short and unremarkable match with Worcestershire, then the visit of the touring Indians, against whom Imran made 160 and 49. He began his first innings quietly enough, with just a clipping