Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
the club in 1973, restricting each affiliate side to a maximum of two overseas players. As Worcestershire already had New Zealand’s Glenn Turner and the West Indian bowler Vanburn Holder on their books, the club had mobilised on their somewhat unappreciative young all-rounder’s behalf.
‘At the end of Imran Khan’s time at Oxford, the TCCB decided, to my surprise, that his qualification for us lapsed,’ Vockins recalls. As far as the board were concerned, Imran had effectively become a Pakistani again after graduating. ‘It seemed totally illogical, and was also at odds with what both the club and more to the point Imran himself wanted. Not only did we appeal, but we were determined that we should present our case as well as we could and duly retained John Field-Evans QC, later to be a High Court judge, to fight our corner. It was quite an anxious time. I didn’t want Imran to be unduly worried, and so sought to give him confidence that the appeal would be successful and otherwise didn’t involve him directly.’ Another source then on the Worcestershire committee told me that it had cost ‘a lot of money, certainly in the several hundreds of pounds’ to appeal against the TCCB’s ruling, and that ‘that should answer any questions about whether or not we were fully committed to Mr Khan and his welfare’. (Even so, there remained Imran’s core point that ‘all my Oxford friends had moved to London, and I was stuck in Worcester … I was bored to tears there,’ he told me.) After several ‘trying’ months the club had prevailed and ‘both we and the player in question were happy to continue our association together’. Imran omits the episode of the TCCB registration from both his autobiographies, but it does seem to refute the idea that he’d been utterly miserable at Worcestershire from the start, or that the club had ever been less than wholehearted about keeping him on their books.
Imran went back to Pakistan that autumn, for only his second visit home in four-and-a-half years. He marked the occasion by making a few low-key appearances in the BCCP Patron’s Trophy on behalf of Dawood Industries, a ‘manure and insurance combine’ based in Karachi, as it intriguingly described itself. The same tournament hosted sides from the federal Water and Power Development Agency and a heavily fancied Income Tax (Collections) Department. In the second half of the season Imran represented Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in the Quaid-e-Azam Cup. He took six for 68 and five for 79 against Punjab, gave a bravura all-round performance in the tie against National Bank by taking three for 53 and six for 48 as well as scoring a second-innings century, and followed up with another six-wicket haul against Sind. Imran finished his short involvement in the domestic season with 446 runs at a touch under 30, and 52 wickets at 19 apiece. PIA paid him the equivalent of some £75 a month for his services. Back in Worcester, Mike Vockins was sitting down to write to Imran: ‘The committee has agreed that your basic salary for 1976 should be £2,000, on top of which you will receive appearance money, win money and team prize monies in the normal way … We shall also contribute £100 towards your air fare back to this country.’ On 19 November Imran wrote back to thank Vockins for his offer. The financial terms were ‘very satisfactory’, although he evidently still had doubts about the quality and cost of his local digs, for which ‘last summer I had to pay about £9.50 a week until John Inchmore moved in with me’. Imran’s eventual contract for 1976 bears the handwritten codicil: ‘I would like it to be noted that my accommodation should be subsidised if the rent is too high.’
Imran’s devotion to the grail of constant self-improvement was again kindled during his winter in Pakistan. When not playing competitively in the domestic competitions he found time to practise at the Lahore Gymkhana, next to his family home in Zaman Park. Imran had greatly disappointed the citizens of that cricket-mad enclave by not showing up during any of his Oxford vacations over the previous three years. Now crowds of them came to the Gymkhana to watch him work out (he had a young net bowler throw bouncers at him from 15 yards to improve his hook shot) and mill around the pavilion door for autographs. ‘Every young boy in Lahore wanted to shake Imran’s hand,’ one friend recalls, ‘and many of their elder sisters also worshipped him in their own way.’
Relatively few who have grown up in Lahore, as Imran did, have willingly returned for any extended time after tasting the seductions of the West. (It would be fair to say, too, that a stint in the likes of Birmingham or Dallas has, conversely, led some to appreciate Pakistani life all the more.) And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the 23-year-old native son who spent the winter of 1976 there was ‘virtually unrecognisable’ from the 18-year-old tyro who had flown off with the Pakistani team in 1971. Imran’s boyhood companion Yusuf Salahudin told me that his friend had led a ‘somewhat cloistered life’ growing up in Zaman Park, ‘surrounded by his extended family almost as if it was a colony’. When Salahudin met Imran again after some five years’ absence, ‘I thought he was more obviously mature and outgoing … A man of the world … There was a certain familiar confidence there, but also a new sense of calm. As you grow older, you begin to realise more and more what works for you and what doesn’t, and I think he’d settled into himself in his twenties more than as a fanatically ambitious teenager.’ But for all his cosmopolitanism, Imran clearly remained a Pakistani to his core. ‘London’s most famous socialite’, as Today called him in 1986, wasn’t born in England and apparently preferred not to live there either, once his playing days were over, even if it meant being separated from his two young sons. Years later Imran was to refer to the ‘sad spectacle’ of ‘timid and alienated Pakistanis losing their identity [in] Britain’, a fate he conspicuously avoided.*
There’s nothing quite like the gathering of players, officials and press on the first day of training before the beginning of a new English cricket season. The start-of-term atmosphere, with its ambient smell of embrocation and linseed oil, is often enlivened by tropical rain or even snow falling on the newly cut playing area. They still talk about having to swim for the pavilion in Worcester. By contrast, the spring and summer of 1976 were the hottest for 30 years, with outfields that were baked to a shade of burnt yellow and white. On the grass banks in front of the stands during Test matches, bare chests and floppy hats were in order. This was the series in which the England captain Tony Greig ill-advisedly spoke of making the West Indies ‘grovel’, only for the tourists to take the rubber 3–0, the beginning of some 15 years’ domination of world cricket. Back at Worcester, Imran seems to have rapidly appraised the situation and concluded that these were conditions ideally suited to out-and-out fast bowling. The pitches were rock hard, and with the hook shot now in his repertoire he was able to bowl bouncers with the confidence that he could handle any return bombardment that happened to come his way. About the only cloud on the horizon was again the knotty and apparently insoluble matter of Imran’s accommodation. There’s a note in his file suggesting that Worcestershire had ‘made arrangement for [Khan] to meet a local Estate Agent’, but that even this had not fully resolved the long-running problem. ‘On two occasions the player failed to take advantage of that arrangement,’ the note concludes.
Imran announced his intention right from the start, when the county hosted Warwickshire at the end of April. This was one of those matches that begin in a downpour and end in a heatwave. After a briefly delayed start, Worcestershire scored 322. The visitors, for whom Amiss made 167, were able to see off the somewhat benign Worcester new-ball attack of Inchmore and Pridgeon without undue difficulty. There was an opening stand of 146. Imran then appeared and proceeded to bowl a selection of inswingers and bouncers at speeds of around 90 miles an hour, hurling the ball down like a live coal. Wickets fell. At the other end, Paul Pridgeon continued to plug away on a line and length for most of the second afternoon session. After just a few overs of this contrasting attack, the senior Warwickshire batsman had called a midwicket conference with the junior one. ‘I’ve assessed the situation, son,’ he announced solemnly, ‘and if you take the Pakistani, I can look after Pridgey.’ A minute or two later, the junior batsman took the opportunity of the tea interval to slip off to hospital for a precautionary X-ray to his skull after Imran had dropped in another short one. (This was to be the last full English season before the introduction of helmets.) The Warwickshire bowlers, led by England’s Bob Willis and David Brown, duly returned the favour on the third day, by which time the wicket appeared ‘like concrete’, with the addition of ‘several deep cracks, off which the ball shot like a skipping rock’, to quote the local paper. Coming in at No. 4, Imran scored 143 at slightly less than a run a minute.
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