Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
rested, Pakistan turned in a bravura performance against Nottinghamshire, whom they dismissed for 51 in their first innings. Sarfraz moved the ball about ‘like a boomerang’ in Derek Randall’s phrase (the pitch having been ‘a bog’, he added), and finished with eight for 27. Imran took a single wicket. The following week he managed a modest one for 56 and two for 65 against the Minor Counties, and was sufficiently worried about his finances to write a ‘Dear Mike’ letter to the Worcestershire secretary, telling him that he had been ‘made to understand by the other professionals in the touring team that their clubs keep on paying their basic wages throughout the duration of the tour. I wonder if that applies to me as well … I hope it does’ — all part of a ‘miserable’ first month back in Pakistani colours. (Javed Kureishi, even so, remembers accompanying Imran to the cinema around that same time, where the 21-year-old ‘laughed like hell’ throughout a Snow White cartoon. ‘There really was a core enthusiasm and innocence to the guy.’) As slumps go, this wasn’t quite on the scale of, say, Denis Compton’s famous bad patch of 1946, but it contained some pretty spectacular flops which inevitably caught the critics’ attention. ‘The student looked out of his depth at this level,’ was the Daily Mail’s scathing assesment. Imran was distinctly lucky to play in the first Test, at Headingley, and even then he operated as a third seamer after Sarfraz and Asif Masood had taken the new ball. If anything, he shone more with the bat: appearing at No. 8, he lashed 23 and 31 in a low-scoring match which petered out in a draw. These weren’t tail-end runs, either; Imran hit Old high and handsomely for a first-bounce four into the crowd in front of the press box, and when Arnold tried him likewise with a bouncer he found himself flat-batted down to the West Stand bookstall with, in one account, a stroke ‘like a tracer bullet’.
Imran went back to the nets and worked on his action, sending down the daily equivalent of 10 overs to a batsman and another half-dozen with just himself and a stump. Another game he evolved was to bounce a cricket ball off the side of a bat, and then try to retrieve it again with either hand as it shot off at odd angles. Wasim Raja once watched Imran spend 20 or 30 minutes by himself throwing a ball against a small upended trampoline; he would then catch the rebound and, in the same action, try to return the ball to hit the target, and again field the rebound. The performance was ‘all very impressive, because the [other] players just focused on their batting or bowling, while Imran also wanted to improve as an athlete.’
It worked, not right away in every case, but eventually in a series of improved bowling performances on the tour. The second Test, another draw, was notable chiefly for the incessant rain and the Pakistanis’ subsequent complaint about the state of the Lord’s pitch.* Little did they or the spectators know that this was to be a feast of entertainment compared with what followed. The third and final Test at The Oval — drawn again — ‘tapered off into the type of meaningless sport which only cricket can produce’, to quote the journalist Omar Noman. Imran then bowled a tidy 10 overs for 36 in his first ever one-day international, which Pakistan won, and took two for 16 in his second, with the same result. He ended with an ‘immaculate exhibition’ (Wisden) of fast bowling in the admittedly more relaxed atmosphere of a 50-over thrash against a Yorkshire League XI at Harrogate. Imran’s figures for the tour — 249 runs at an average of 31.12, and 15 wickets at 41.66 — perhaps failed to do justice to what one critic described as an ‘efficient but rather lugubrious’ young all-rounder. Wisden was kinder: ‘He should be a powerful figure in Pakistan cricket for years to come.’
That ‘efficient but lugubrious’ might have given pause to anyone who knew Imran only as the priapic Oxford smoothie who charmed his way into a succession of beds. (‘About thirty’ over the three years, I was told — an impeccably moderate figure for the mid-1970s, although another well-placed source thought it had been more like one a week.) But spending any extended amount of time in close quarters with the Pakistan cricket team and its management would have tried the most equable of personalities. As Imran himself recalls, ‘My overall performance on the tour had been adequate, yet snide remarks were still being made about my connections, and statements to the effect that better men had been left behind.’ By all accounts there were one or two unflattering references behind his back to what one famous contemporary later dubbed his ‘Olympic ego’. (When you talk to people who knew the young Imran professionally, the word ‘humility’ comes up a lot. They say he was extremely sparing with it.) The 21-year-old’s self-confident manner occasionally chafed the other players, but in 1974 he encountered little overt hostility except from Asif Masood, who apparently disliked him almost on sight. Intikhab was fairly friendly, and Majid remained a firm ally. Mostly, though, Imran’s colleagues just ignored him, which was the usual practice with the younger players. None of them seems to have known or cared much about his life in England. ‘Imran was thought to have a superior attitude,’ Wasim Raja recalled. ‘People backed away and left him in his own castle.’
The demands of university and Test cricket, as well as of the Oxford examiners, left little time for Worcestershire, and as a result Imran made only a handful of one-day appearances for his county over the summer. He used most of the brief gap between the varsity game and the Pakistani tour to bowl in a Gillette Cup tie against Sussex that ran long, thanks to rain. That would have made his schedule over the course of one six-day period: Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, captaining Oxford at Lord’s; Wednesday and Thursday, playing the knockout game at Hove; early Friday, reporting for international duty with Pakistan at Birmingham. On most of those days, Imran also had to give interviews, attend functions and generally roam around the country by British Rail. It was a full workload, even by his standards. The people who knew him best also knew how utterly unsparing of himself he was apt to be — how ‘he gave 200 per cent, whatever the competition’, as Wasim Raja put it. ‘No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew Imran would work harder than anyone else.’ But even they didn’t know how hard he would work.
Back in Oxford, Imran made a friend out of a fellow third-year student on his Politics and Economics course. Now a 55-year-old television pundit and author of various self-help books, he had heard that the ‘famous Khan’ could be a bit standoffish. He adds that when he met Imran for the first time he’d been expecting someone ‘as warm as a December night on an ice floe’, but in the event ‘he turned out to be almost absurdly polite, in that rather courtly way some Asians have. Between the accent and the blazer, he was almost like a Terry-Thomas stereotype. Better-looking, though.’ After banking his admittedly meagre appearance money from Pakistan and Worcestershire, Imran was able to rent a small flat close to Oxford town centre. There were framed hunting prints on the wall, a wolfskin rug and reportedly rather more in the way of furniture than the average student digs of the era. On several mornings in the autumn of 1974, a plump young woman with the word ‘IMRAN’ daubed on her forehead kept up a forlorn vigil outside the main gate at Keble (where, these days, her quarry rarely appeared), displaying a ‘Fatal Attraction’ form of obsession, erotomania, of which Imran would come to see more over the next 20 years. The trappings of fame were starting to come fast.
The future Somerset and England bowler Vic Marks went up to Oxford in that same term. Thirty-five years on, he remains one of the game’s more astute critics. I asked him if at that stage in his university career Imran had ever appeared the least bit shy around his English teammates. ‘No,’ Marks replied. ‘More aloof.’ He added that Imran had been ‘hard on those he didn’t know and didn’t rate, declining to bowl them or encourage them … He knew he was better than the rest, [but] if he rated you he would try to help and advise.’ Still, at least one other colleague in the Oxford side remained bemused by Imran’s insecurity. ‘The guy generally had bags of self-confidence, sure, but oddly enough not when it came to his bowling. I thought he was a natural. Thousands of fans thought he was a natural. Just about every batsman he ever played against thought he was a natural. Imran remained unconvinced.’
Perhaps Imran’s qualms had something to do with the distinctly mixed signals he was still getting from his two principal teams. At Worcester, he notes, ‘I [was] bullied into bowling medium pace line-and-length stuff which didn’t suit my temperament.’ The key message from Pakistan was very different. Imran was astonished and overjoyed when Intikhab had thrown him the ball early on in the Test series