Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
only dream of.
From Pakistan’s arrival on the international cricket scene in 1952, the key piece of dressing-room wisdom handed down from player to player was ‘Keep in with the board’ — that remote and forbidding body of extravagantly mustachioed army officers which typically served at the pleasure of the head of state. It was good advice. Even at the best of times the board presided over a bewildering succession of abrupt resignations, embittered retirements and ill-advised comebacks, the direct result of their own long established habit of capriciously reversing themselves on most key decisions. Nowhere was this extreme administrative flexibility more keenly felt than in the Test captaincy. In a period of just 12 years, the national side was led by Saeed Ahmed, Intikhab Alam, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Intikhab again, Mushtaq Mohammad, Wasim Bari, Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbas and Imran. The bloody and sustained in-fighting would make even the shambolic England feud of early 2009 look like a trivial misunderstanding. There were certain Tests when up to half the Pakistan XI consisted of ex-captains. Imran’s record, then, may not be unblemished, but merely to have survived for 48 matches in charge was itself a feat. To have done so while making it clear to the board that it was he, not they, who both chose the team in the first place and then ran it on the field of play makes it even more impressive. ‘I came to admire his [Imran’s] tactics and his principles … how an organisation works and how you get things done,’ General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the former army chief of staff and state president, later said.
At the risk of hyperbole, or of sounding like an apologist, it could be said that there was no such thing as a dull Imran Khan performance in the dozen or so years that he was at his peak: weaker ones, certainly, county matches in front of a couple of hundred spectators where he failed to fire on all cylinders, or Tests where either the wicket or the umpires clearly favoured the opposition batsman (who could still expect a few irritated bouncers for his pains) — but never a truly boring spectacle, a match that was begging to be walked out on. At least part of the overall appeal was distinctly physical. Imran in his prime was a famously fine specimen of a man, with a gym-honed body, a leonine mane of shaggy dark hair and what was authoritatively described to me as a ‘knee-trembler’ of a voice. Men wanted to be like him and women wanted to go to bed with him, which a fair number of them duly did. Part was also technical, in that Imran was not only an accomplished bowler but a visually thrilling one. From a slow, crouching start he accelerated with a sprinter’s poise and balance in his approach to the wicket, which culminated in a last-second propulsive leap and a virile, full-stretch whip of the body. The sheer energy of his bowling style was such that, even from the boundary, Ken Barrington ‘fully expect[ed] to see dust and newspapers flying around in the air when he followed through, much like what happens when the Brighton Belle thunders past’. As a batsman, Imran was known as an improviser who liked to smash it around on occasion, but with an essentially sound, orthodox technique that included a full range of ground strokes. Along with the runs and the wickets he also provided a firm hand on the tiller and in general put the steel into his team. Imran himself modestly felt he did ‘as well as [he] could’ as a captain, given the available assets. Under him, Pakistan enjoyed 10 years of nearly unbroken success, all the more striking a record when measured against their ramshackle showings in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Imran, in short, changed the way Pakistan cricket was perceived around the world. The perennial cabaret turn of the international circuit was transformed into the hyper-aggressive fighting unit who lifted the World Cup. He was the figurehead of a sporting renaissance which had direct and dramatic results on national self-confidence. He personally turned in the performances with bat and ball that made most of this possible. And he did it while facing a continuing series of internecine feuds and self-inflicted crises which the Pakistan game unerringly managed to produce even amidst all the progress.
In fact, there’s a theory, no doubt highly debatable and based on selective evidence, that Imran is one of only two professional athletes of the post-war era to have transcended his sport to the point of being a universal — or at least continental — icon, someone whom tens of millions of ordinary citizens instantly recognise. (The other one is Muhammad Ali.) Certainly his dazzling social life and long list of public causes were at least as well known as his bowling average. As more than one critic has remarked, Imran turned into a shout a voice that had hitherto hardly been heard, ‘that [of] the developing world as a whole clamouring for respect’. No less an authority than Richard Nixon, a shrewd judge of geopolitics, whatever one makes of his own contribution to them (and, it emerged, something of a closet cricket fan), told me in 1992 that, in this sense, ‘Khan [was] really on a par with a head of state’. Imran knew that, for many impoverished people, cricket was never a game. To millions, it was an escape from drab reality, while for the ruling elite it was a propaganda tool no less important than, say, Bollywood or the possession of nuclear weapons. Imran himself became the most potent visual symbol not just of Pakistan, but of an entire subcontinent coming to assert its identity in the aftermath of independence and partition, a role he played with characteristic, if not messianic self-belief. What’s more, his appeal was always rather more earthy than that enjoyed by a Mahatma Gandhi. Imran’s friend Naeem-ul-Haque told me of an occasion in the early 1980s when the two of them had been walking through Harrods department store in London and a young woman, seeing Imran, ‘lost first her decorum and then her consciousness. She literally collapsed at his feet.’
Why did he do it? In his mid-forties, Imran abandoned the comfortable career of the recently retired sports superstar. Tempting as it is to see his decision to enter the unforgiving world of Pakistani politics as a clean break from his past, I think the precise opposite is the case. If anything, it was a straightforward, logical progression. After nearly three decades in Pakistani public life, he’d acclimatised to the country’s peculiar political culture and was uniquely qualified to decry the practice of politics even as he prepared to embark on a political path. President Pervez Musharraf may well have been ‘the most corrupt [and] vile … the worst’ petty dictator of Imran’s acquaintance, but many of the cricket authorities with whom he came into contact every day of his playing career would have made a strong bid for second place. A few of the Pakistan board’s internal memos and various other ‘Eyes only’ documents from the early 1980s have survived. They still exercise a morbid fascination. Taken as a whole, their bloated and sadly unwarranted complacency, and at times breathtaking disdain for their own team make the England authorities of the day seem like paragons of competence. At least one of the senior administrators concerned was to be ignominiously removed from office, an experience that did no discernible damage to his considerable self-esteem. Writing in his autobiography, Imran was to note, ‘Too much is at the whim of powerful individuals. Nepotism and favouritism are rampant … If only those at the top would sanction a radical shake-up of our system, [Pakistan] as a whole would benefit. Unfortunately, their reaction to constructive criticism has never been all that impressive.’ He was speaking of the national cricket selectors, but it would be just as insightful and relevant an overview of his political career 25 years later.
The institutional turbulence of Pakistani public life, then, if anything merely perpetuated the hostile working environment of Imran’s playing days. This extended right through his career, and managed to blight even some of his greatest triumphs. Fresh from winning the World Cup in March 1992, several of the Pakistan players expressed dissatisfaction with their captain (who top-scored in the final itself), or more specifically with his reported suggestion that certain funds go to his hospital rather than to themselves. The Board of Control conspicuously failed to back Imran, with the result that he declined to tour England that summer, signalling the end of his 21-year Test career. Any cricket team can have a falling-out when things are going badly. It takes self-destructive skills of a high order to do so when that team have just become world champions. Four years later, the cup final was staged in Lahore and, perhaps predictably, ended in organisational chaos. The prize-giving ceremony turned into a shoving match between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who watched the melee with a frozen smile, and was eventually brought under control by police in full SWAT gear, against a backdrop of exploding smoke bombs and the widespread kindling of bonfires in the stands. This was not quite the ‘simple, dignified [and] appropriate piece of ceremonial’ the home board had promised in its pre-tournament literature.
Imran’s first year in charge of Pakistan had revealed him as a tough, decisive, sometimes