Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
even when he was his own captain. He rarely appeared for Oxford in the 1975 season, thanks to a commendable and possibly justified concern about passing his finals. In one of the games he did play prior to the varsity match, against Derbyshire at Burton-on-Trent, Imran surprised both the Derby batsmen and his own team by persisting in his attempts to bowl a leg break, an effect that was uneasily like that of a champion shot-putter who’d strayed inadvertently on to a badminton court. It was a curious strategic decision, or so the Oxford men thought. As it turned out, it was a repeat experiment and nothing more. After Imran’s leg spin had gone for eight in two balls he turned around, muttered something to the non-striking batsman, and measured out his full international run. A few overs later, he had taken three of the first four Derbyshire wickets to fall.
If his cricket career was somewhat erratic in the summer of 1975, his love life was a constant. Imran generally brought a ‘special’ girl with him to his matches, or even to watch him practise in the Parks nets. One female undergraduate recalls having feigned an interest in the game, ‘which I actually thought coma-inducing’, just to be near him. Imran made it immediately clear to his companion that he was a man of no small ambition, displaying ‘brass’ which impressed her. She wasn’t the only college girl who noticed the emerging star; a 21-year-old fellow politics student named Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the former Pakistan president and serving prime minister, was ‘much taken’ by Imran’s obvious talent. The elegantly shod Bhutto did not go unnoticed herself. Then in her second year of residence at Lady Margaret Hall, she was intensely outspoken both about Pakistan’s place in the world and the role of women in society. Several of Bhutto’s already quite vocal critics pointed to her Dior wardrobe and liberated lifestyle as a political symbol of conspicuous consumption, or worse, on her part. A mutual acquaintance who falls into this category told me that Bhutto had been ‘visibly impressed’ by, or ‘infatuated’ with, Imran, and that she may have been among the first to dub him affectionately the ‘Lion of Lahore’. In any event it seems fairly clear that, for at least a month or two, the couple were close. There was a lot of ‘giggling’ and ‘blushing’ whenever they appeared together in public. It also seems fair to say that their relationship was ‘sexual’ in the sense that it could only have existed between a man and a woman. The reason some allowed themselves to suppose it went further was because, to quote one Oxford friend, ‘Imran slept with everyone’ — a gross calumny, but one takes the point — rather than because of any hard evidence of an affair. On balance, I rather doubt that Pakistan’s future prime minister and future cricket captain were ever anything more than good friends, and only for a term or two at that. Even in the morally libertine days of the mid-1970s, Imran’s Oxford love life soon attained legendary status. It was the beginning of a personal myth of sexuality that led some to credit him with literally scores of spurious ‘conquests’ in addition to the real, still quite impressive, total.
Cricket’s first ever World Cup, staged in England, and in which Pakistan started among the favourites, probably wasn’t the best of times for Imran to be concentrating on his finals. Although not originally selected, he was called up to play for his country in their opening fixture against Australia at Headingley, on 7 June. In Imran’s account, he sat the first two of his five exams on the 6th, a Friday, took the evening train to Leeds and arrived at his team’s hotel at four o’clock the following morning, the day of the match.* Australia won by 73 runs, the Pakistanis, like so many others, having been done for pace by Lillee and Thomson. After an epic road-rail return journey some friends finally dropped Imran off in the centre of Oxford where, after going down with flu, he sat his final three papers just as his teammates were losing to the West Indies by one wicket, with two balls to spare, at Edgbaston. That concluded the Pakistanis’ World Cup. Under the circumstances, Imran did well to get a 2.1 for Politics, if only a Third in Economics. ‘I could have exceeded that,’ he remarks. Two days later he was back playing for his country in a meaningless victory over Sri Lanka. The West Indies went on to win the cup. In stark contrast to the protracted seven-week ordeal of the 2007 tournament, the entire competition was completed in 14 days, Pakistan’s campaign in just seven. Majid Khan, again back in charge of the team following an injury to Asif, had won himself a considerable reputation as a specialist in English conditions, as well as being something of a thinker. His own run-a-ball innings of 65 against Australia was a classic of its kind. But Majid’s tenure proved an only limited success, in part because up to half his men would be bickering with the other half at any given time. And even his fondest admirers have never maintained that he was a particularly charismatic or inspiring leader. Pakistan, then, returned home in June 1975 in some disarray. The board sacked Majid, and replaced him with Mushtaq.
Imran left Oxford with a flourish, driving up in his new World Cup blazer, accompanied by his latest blonde, to play in his third varsity match at Lord’s. Several other admirers, both male and female, were seen to be waiting at the gate for a glimpse of their idol, at least one of them sporting a T-shirt customised with slogans indicating how positively she would react to any romantic overtures he might care to make to her. Inasmuch as most of the other students just walked into the ground unnoticed, it was an impressive entrance. The match itself was another draw, but a rather more distinguished one than its two predecessors. The chief honours went to Peter Roebuck and Alastair Hignell, who respectively hit 158 and 60 for Cambridge. Those items apart, Imran’s bowling had all the virtues of a cool, calculated, well-executed assault. As Hignell says, it was a ‘physically terrifying’ and ‘sickening’ barrage; no small accolade from a man who had just come through several bruising encounters with the Australian rugby team.
Imran was to have a modestly successful fifth season at Worcestershire, finishing with 46 first-class wickets at 26, almost exactly the same figures as those for his up-and-coming rival Ian Botham. Still, it was an ‘only fair’ existence. A salary of £ 1,500, paid in six instalments of £250, with a munificent £10 for each county championship win, allowed for little lavish indulgence. But over and above the financial rewards, or lack of them, it had become clear even to Worcestershire that Imran had certain deep-seated misgivings about county cricket as a whole. ‘The English professional just isn’t hungry enough for success. There’s too much cricket … the players get stale,’ he wrote of his experiences some years later. Apart from the ‘essential tedium’ of a system in which too many buckled when they should, perhaps, have swashed, Imran had a more specific objection to his working environment. As he says, ‘I simply found it boring in Worcester’, where he had moved out of the Star Hotel first into digs and then into an ‘unsalubrious’ short-term flat above a fish-and-chip shop in the town centre.
Almost from the first, Imran had vocal reservations about his English club, where he had initially played a series of ‘grim’ and ‘dead-end’ Second XI matches before being ‘bullied’ into bowling ‘military medium’ for the seniors, allegedly at a reduced salary than the one ‘Harold’ Shakespeare (who died in 1976) had promised him in the pavilion at Lahore. As we’ve seen, the eventual terms were on the slim side: as well as his basic salary, the club undertook to ‘… arrange accommodation for away games on a bed-and-breakfast, early-morning tea and one newspaper basis … A meal allowance of £1 will be paid for an evening meal when away from home and for Sunday lunches when away from home’, before adding the rather bleak assurance that ‘a sum equivalent to the Second Class Rail Fare from Worcester to the venue of [an] away match will be paid to all players participating in the match’. Imran, though one of the least materially minded of professional sportsmen, was moved to send a two-page handwritten letter to Tony Greig, the captain of Sussex, in September 1975. ‘Dear Tony, I wondered if you and [your] committee would consider the possibility of taking me on staff next year?’ he enquired, citing ‘the availability of overseas registration and the young age group of the team’ as reasons for his interest. Four days later, Greig wrote back in more measured terms: ‘In reply to your correspondence of 12 September 1975 I would suggest that you telephone our Secretary as soon as your position becomes clear. You will appreciate the implications of any approach prior to your official release from Worcester … Yours sincerely, A.W. Greig, Captain of Sussex.’
I asked Mike Vockins, the long-serving Worcestershire secretary, about all this. Among other things, Vockins mentioned that he and his committee had fought a hitherto unreported running battle with the Test