Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 four or two against Madan Lal. But with the arrival of the spinners came one of the most ferocious onslaughts on any type of bowling which can ever have been inflicted at the Parks. The students put on 189 for the third wicket, 120 of them by Imran who, playing on the offside at one end and on the on-side at the other, struck the ball relentlessly to the near boundary, at least once with such force that it rebounded off the heavy roller half-way to the pitch. For good measure, he also took four wickets in the Indians’ first innings. Imran’s century was his highest score to date in first-class cricket. Eight days later, he broke his record with 170 against Northamptonshire. He then proceeded to dispatch the Northants middle order with three wickets in the first innings and four in the second. Imran was still bowling when Oxford won by 97 runs, having given one of the really great all-round performances.

      Imran’s well-developed sense of self-respect might go some way to explain why, time and again, he and his bowling seemed to step up a gear when he had something particular to prove. An associated element of revenge — the Pathan principle of badal — was also observable deep in the mix. Most sportsmen, of course, talk about ‘pride’, at least as an abstraction, and virtually no pre-match press conference at any level of the professional soccer world would be complete without repeated references to the concept. But Imran took it to an almost messianic degree, and an ill-advised remark such as Boycott’s was apt to have roughly the same effect as lighting the touch-paper on a particularly spectacular firework. ‘Ten of us were just students together, playing a game,’ one of the Oxford team told me. Imran, by contrast, ‘came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little slight into a life-or-death struggle. I wouldn’t say he always thought everyone was ganging up on him. That sounds a touch paranoid, whereas in my experience he saw things from a very clear cultural-historical perspective. From what I heard and saw of Imran, and charming as he often was, he had a definite thing about certain aspects of the mother country. As far as he was concerned, we were all essentially colonialist swine who had been screwing his people for centuries.’

      Such was the general backdrop to Imran’s first match as captain against Cambridge, the university which had seen fit to shun his services two years earlier. It scarcely needs adding that his bowling proved a shade brisk for the opposition. Imran took five for 44 off 20 overs in the Cambridge first innings and five for 69 off 38 overs in the second. As a rule he was very fast, variable both in length and direction, with a preference for the ballooning inswinger, and desperately hard to score from. When he was short and on line a number of the Cambridge batsmen elected to take the ball on the body anywhere between the top of the pads and the general area of the forehead, if more out of necessity than choice. Not that Imran’s robust approach to the game precluded the odd moment of light relief, as when he saw fit to amble in once or twice and lob up a gentle leg break. One Cambridge batsman thought this to have been a prime example of reverse psychology on Imran’s part. ‘It bloody nearly worked, too, because one of our guys promptly lost his head and dollied up a catch, which was dropped.’ This had been ‘poorly received’ by the bowler. Pantomime then stalked proceedings on the third day, when Oxford were chasing 205 to win. They eventually needed just 61 off the last 20 overs, with half their wickets in hand. Imran’s ‘crystal clear’ instruction to go for runs was somehow missed by the Oxford No. 5, Edward Thackeray, who proceded serenely to 42 not out in just over three hours. Towards the end the general noise from the Tavern stand dissolved into an exasperated chant of ‘Wake up, Oxford’ and ‘We want cricket’. The situation was apparently no less trying to Imran, who could be seen pacing restively from side to side on the players’ balcony, occasionally pausing long enough to scowl or shake his fist towards the middle. After what was described as a ‘strained’ tea interval, he had resorted to thumbing through a copy of the laws to see whether Thackeray’s innings could be involuntarily declared closed. It couldn’t, and the match was drawn.

      The team party, or post-mortem — there was no formal dinner — that evening was an equally stiff affair. For the most part, Imran (who left early to catch a train to Hove, where he was appearing for Worcestershire against Sussex) engaged only in uncomfortable small talk with his men, and chose not to dwell on the match at any length. Many silences resulted. At one point, apparently in an effort to warm things up, one of the less experienced members of the side reached over to the bar and offered his captain some champagne.

      ‘Thank you,’ Imran said. ‘I drink milk.’

      Since 1971 Pakistan had been gradually returning to cricketing health, if not without the occasional relapse or well-publicised temper tantrum. The national team had a new bowler in Sarfraz Nawaz and a well-remembered one in Mushtaq. Asif and Zaheer were batsmen fit to set before the world. In 1972–73, when Imran was bedding down at Oxford, his countrymen had toured Australia and acquitted themselves rather better, both on and off the field, than the 3–0 result suggests. No side including Saeed Ahmed could be entirely incident-free, even so, and the selectors had been forced to draft in the all-rounder Nasim-ul-Ghani for the Sydney Test after Saeed refused to open the batting against Dennis Lillee. Pakistan had gone on to win and draw series against New Zealand and England respectively. Along the way, Intikhab Alam had been replaced as captain by Imran’s cousin Majid, who was considered an only modest success in the job. After three consecutive draws against England, Majid stood down and Intikhab returned for his third time in charge. ‘[The captaincy] is out of control … it’s a circus,’ the СКАЧАТЬ