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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Even in the John Player (or ‘Sunday’) League, Imran evidently decided that this was to be his year. He turned in some impressively consistent figures: three for 23 off his allotted eight overs against Glamorgan; another three for 23 against Yorkshire; three for 34 against Gloucestershire; three for 39 against Middlesex; and so on. If the match warranted, he generally added a brisk 30 or 40 runs with the bat. The message seemed to be that he would take an average of three wickets in each one-day outing, and bowl that much faster than anyone else. It was the same story in the Benson and Hedges trophy, where Worcestershire went all the way to the final against Kent, which they lost. If Imran’s bowling was often, as one observer put it, ‘fast to the point of dementia’, it was also successful more times than not. He left everyone stunned in a Gillette Cup tie against Gloucestershire at Bristol when he began to bounce his friend Mike Procter, who was then widely regarded as not the best man to provoke. Sure enough, Procter retaliated when it was his turn to bowl. After a couple of hooked fours, Imran appeared to have won this particular duel, only for him to fall to the more innocuous seam of Tony Brown.

      Imran’s combative temperament helped make him the supreme bowler he now became. ‘I’ve always hated taking a beating lying down — something essential to a medium-pacer,’ he says. ‘Sometimes [I] just saw blood in front of my eyes … It was during those moments that an increase of adrenalin would add an extra yard or two to my pace.’ People who played against him at the time generally agree that he was a difficult, extraordinarily driven opponent. Several of them described him as having been ‘intense’ or even ‘manic’ when he came ‘hurtling in’, his ‘fiery brown eyes’ with an ‘electric glaze’. With his fist clenched and his knees pumping up and down ‘he seem[ed] like a loose power line crackling around, and just as dangerous’. One Worcestershire colleague thought Imran’s intensity on the field ‘took a lot out of him as far as being a human being was concerned. You don’t turn that kind of competitive drive on and off. He was always away by himself somewhere, and we didn’t see him socially.’ Mike Vockins, a professional acquaintance for six years, ‘never got that close’ to Imran, and remembers that he would ‘disappear pretty frequently to London or Birmingham, presumably to visit Pakistani friends or family.’ You hear a lot about this sense of him having been a man apart from the rest of the team. Imran had a ‘persecution complex’, one former colleague believes. ‘One thing most cricketers have is a sense of humour — you need it — but he pretty well totally lacked the ability to laugh at himself.’ Set against this is the testimony of a well-known former Test player and academic, who remarked that Imran was ‘warmly accessible to all sorts of people on the periphery of the action like autograph collectors and dressing-room attendants and programme sellers, and a complete mystery to his team-mates. Without stretching it too far, you could see some of the elements of the classic cowboy type there in the way he did the business and then just silently walked off into the sunset. I always thought there was a touch of Clint Eastwood to the guy.’

      So it seems fair to say that Imran wasn’t regarded as the life and soul of the party among his English county team-mates. But even those who had doubts about him as a person admired the often thrilling and always robust quality of his all-round cricket as seen in 1976. It remained a moot point whether Imran would ever thaw out as a human being, but clearly he’d already made the leap from journeyman county professional to world-class entertainer.

      In the three-day match against Somerset in early June, Imran scored a full-bodied 54 in the first innings and 81 in the second. There was a raw fury to some of his strokes that made his partner D’Oliveira’s seem merely polite by comparison. Imran added an equally lusty 57 against Kent — and the pattern was set. He then beat Lancashire virtually single-handed, with bowling figures of seven for 53 and six for 46, as well as an unbeaten 111 in Worcestershire’s only innings. Another century followed against Leicestershire. And another against a Northants attack led by Sarfraz. Fast bowlers didn’t generally hope for glamorous figures against the Surrey of the mid-1970s, whose top order typically read: Edrich, Butcher, Howarth, Younis, Roope, Test players all. Imran took five for 80 against them. There were wickets or runs, and frequently both, right up to the game against Gloucestershire in the second week of September. Imran managed a single victim (ironically, his Test colleague Sadiq), having for once — exhausted, perhaps — forsaken pace for control. The local paper speaks of his ‘almost robot accuracy’ in the Gloucester first innings. Little did the reporter or anyone else know it at the time, but Imran had played his last match for Worcestershire.

      In retrospect, his departure was logical enough. A fractious relationship with certain colleagues, occasional friction with the club authorities and that oft-quoted boredom with Worcester itself all added up to a strong case against Imran’s returning for a seventh season at New Road. The reason his decision came as a shock to so many there was that they saw СКАЧАТЬ