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

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СКАЧАТЬ used the club as a sort of paid finishing school. According to this theory, he had joined the county as a promising but erratic young seamer and, thanks to men like Henry Horton, left again as a devastatingly hostile ‘quick’ of international class. This was perhaps to downplay the role the bowler himself played in the transformation. In the same vein, certain of the county membership remained stubbornly convinced that they had subsidised Imran’s education at Worcester Royal Grammar School, whereas in fact the fees were paid in full by his father. (The members might have been on firmer ground had they raised the matter of the help given him in areas such as his work permit and TCCB registration.) There were equally persistent and unfounded rumours that he had been poached by another team with the promise of higher wages. As the whole dispute became noticeably more bitter in the autumn of 1976, a senior member of the Worcester committee summoned Imran and put it to him that he was leaving ‘because there aren’t enough girls in this town for you to roger’. This same general thesis was aired in the local press, and was eventually widely reproduced in Pakistan.

      The opinions of most Pakistani news organisations are not noted for nuance, so the varying fortunes of their Test side tended to get the most graphic possible treatment. ‘WORLD BEATERS!’ the Karachi Star had insisted following a short, unofficial tour to Sri Lanka in January 1976 in which Imran participated. Taken as a whole, the media believed the appointment of Mushtaq Mohammad as national captain to be a major turning-point in the history of Pakistan cricket. ‘We have seen some heated exchange of words between the Board and several of the players,’ the main Lahore morning paper conceded. ‘But those days are over. We can go to the extent of predicting our men will remain successful, peaceful and united for many decades to come.’

      It lasted about nine months. Once back in Pakistan, Imran promptly joined his fellow members of the Test squad in protesting their rates of pay, which currently stood at 1,000 rupees (or £50) a man for each five-day match — substantially better than their 1971 levels, but still leaving them firmly at the foot of international cricket’s financial league table. All hell again broke loose in the press. One imaginative and much-quoted report in Lahore insisted that the dispute was really about the players’ hotel and travel arrangements, and that the entire squad would take strike action were their ‘nine-point list of perks’ not met in full. Had a request for a chauffeur-driven limousine apiece made it a round 10, there could not have been more public outrage. The whole matter came to a head in the middle of the three-Test series against New Zealand in October 1976, when the Pakistan team wrote to the board to confirm that they would down tools unless their grievances were at least taken under consideration. The board responded in kind, with a telegram stating that anyone who didn’t immediately accept the existing terms would be banned from Test cricket for life. Five of the team promptly dropped their demands. The remaining six, including Imran, were in negotiation with the board until 90 minutes before the start of play in the second Test, which Pakistan won by 10 wickets.

      Not untypically, there appears to have been some misunderstanding between the two sides about the exact terms of the deal that had been thrashed out to allow the match to go forward. Imran recalls that the board chairman Abdul Kardar had ‘admitted our demands were not that unreasonable’ and ‘agreed to a full dialogue’. A fortnight later, Kardar was quoted in the press calling the players ‘unpatriotic bandits’. The board’s subsequent threat to ban the so-called rebels from the winter tours of Australia and the West Indies made headlines even in England, where a ‘distraught’ Mushtaq Mohammad suggested that he would resign from the captaincy. At that stage the Pakistan head of state, Fazal Chaudhry, intervened. The board’s selection committee (though not Kardar himself) were sacked, eventually to be replaced by a government-appointed sports authority, and the players were each awarded 5,000 rupees (£250) a Test, sufficient to ensure that the winter’s itinerary went ahead as scheduled.

      Meanwhile, Pakistan had overrun the New Zealanders, with Imran taking a respectable 14 wickets (including his best Test analysis to date, four for 59, at Hyderabad) over the three matches. It possibly says something for the Pathan revenge ethic that, years later, he was to speak of his particular satisfaction at dismissing Glenn Turner, ‘who had said that I didn’t have it in me to become a fast bowler’. Although onesided, the series wasn’t entirely free of incident. Early in the proceedings, Imran had occasion to speak to the umpire in Urdu to ask him to stand back from the stumps, whereupon the non-striking batsman had requested that he confine himself to English when addressing the match officials. Some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives had followed. In the third Test at Karachi, Imran was prohibited from completing his over against Richard Hadlee and temporarily removed from the bowling attack by another umpire, Shakoor Rana, who felt he had been over-generous in his use of the bouncer.

      Six weeks later the Pakistanis arrived in Australia to find that the home press didn’t much fancy their chances there. ‘COBBLERS!’ was the initial assessment of the West Australian, while the Herald Sun restricted itself to the only marginally more charitable ‘PAK IT IN!’ Dennis Lillee took the opportunity of his own newspaper column to remark that, though Pakistan had a few talented batsmen, their bowling attack (with Imran himself dismissed as ‘a trundler’) was rubbish. The first Test at Adelaide seemed to confirm the generally low opinion of the tourists. Australia got the better of a high-scoring draw, even though they lost their nerve when chasing a relatively modest 285 to win on the last day. The Melbourne Test, played over the New Year, followed a broadly similar pattern, at least up to the half-way point. Australia’s Greg Chappell won the toss and batted. A day and a half later he was able to declare on 517 for eight, Imran having been ‘tonked around’, to again quote the Herald Sun, with figures of none for 115 off 22 overs. Pakistan, who had seemed to be cruising at 241 for one, were then dismissed for 333.

      Under the circumstances, and now faced by a vocally derisive 60,000-strong crowd, certain other bowlers might have quietly given up the fight. But that was rarely to be an option that appealed to Imran. In the next two sessions he took five Australian wickets, including that of Dennis Lillee, whom he clean bowled. According to those who saw it (and Lillee himself, who didn’t) it was very possibly the fastest ball ever sent down at the Melbourne ground. Richie Benaud told me that, on the basis of this performance, which proved to be in a losing cause, ‘I promptly chalked Imran up as extremely interesting.’ In Benaud’s measured technical opinion, ‘he was [quite] determined, and had markedly increased his pace and improved his balance in delivery’. Cricket, of course, is played as much with the brain as it is with the body. Here, too, Imran was quite well fixed. That same week, he had happened to meet his old sparring partner Geoff Boycott, who was spending the winter playing for an Australian club side rather than with England in India and Sri Lanka. Boycott remembers that he took Imran aside and advised him to bowl ‘really quick’, preferably aiming ‘about four inches outside off stump’ in short, controlled bursts to make the most of the conditions. The Pakistan tour management seemed to concur. Seven days after leaving Melbourne, Imran went on to take six for 102 and six for 63 in the course of the third and final Test at Sydney, which the tourists won by eight wickets. It was their first such victory in Australia, and only their fifth anywhere overseas, and a major turning-point both for the team and for the ‘Orient Express’, as the Herald Sun now hurriedly renamed him. Some of the hyperbole might have been a touch overdone, but after this match there was no longer any question that Imran was a fast bowler to be reckoned with. Both the Australian and, more particularly, Pakistani press were highly complimentary. When the reader wasn’t swept along by the lively similes — ‘like a rampant stallion’, ‘like a blistering typhoon’, ‘like a runaway truck’ and so on — there was the statistical evidence to back the imagery up: in just three innings, Imran had taken 17 Australian wickets at slightly over 16 apiece. His departure from the field at Sydney, his shirt sleeve ripped off his arm from all the effort, had brought the house down; as he led his team into the pavilion, spectators of all ages pummelled the railings of the lower terraces, and jaded critics broke into wide grins up in the press box. The next minute saw a steady crescendo in the sort of rowdy whoops and high-pitched acclaim normally associated with a major rock star. Geoff Boycott was in the home dressing-room. ‘Even the Aussie players were standing up applauding,’ he recalls. ‘They thought it was bloody fantastic.’

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