Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician

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 impulsive captain, not immune to occasional erratic streaks yet fortified by common sense. His third Test in office, against England at Headingley, saw what Imran calls some ‘truly bizarre’ decisions by the English umpires, notably one that arguably cost Pakistan both the match and series. This was David Constant’s keenly debated lbw against the Pakistan batsman Sikander Bakht, a verdict which put those with long memories in mind of the Idrees Beg fiasco at Peshawar 26 years earlier. Of course, mistakes happen. But Imran was so stung by the incident that when Pakistan returned to England in 1987 he formally asked that Constant be appointed for only one Test, if even that, of the five-match series. At the time, Constant, still only 44, was widely regarded, at least by his employers, as being at the top of his game. The Test and County Cricket Board declined Imran’s request and then leaked details of it to the press, resulting in ever more colourful variants of Today’s ‘WHINGEING PAKIS’ headline at intervals throughout the tour. (Imran and his board were to prove similarly unresponsive to England’s concerns about the appointment of certain Pakistani umpires to officiate in the return series six months later.) By the time of the third one-day international, before the Tests had even begun, the tabloids were accusing Imran’s team of out-and-out cheating — not a charge any fair-minded man of some integrity, let alone one descended from a long line of Pathan warriors, was apt to ignore. And he didn’t. The repeated allegation was a blow Imran felt personally, if only because of its implied slur on his family honour — ‘The carping never let up. It got to me,’ he told a close English friend. Still, if the general intention of the headlines had been to undermine Pakistan’s or more specifically Imran’s confidence, they seem to have backfired spectacularly. If anything, they galvanised him. The tourists duly won their first ever rubber in England. Their captain, with 21 wickets, was the player of the series. As a rule, Imran wasn’t a belligerent man, but his back went up when he was attacked or put on the defensive. From then on things were never quite the same between the English cricket authorities and the world’s foremost all-rounder.*

Since the generally tempestuous atmosphere in which Imran operated for so long is such a significant part of the story, it’s perhaps worth dwelling on this relationship just a moment longer. The folk memory of Pakistan’s England tour of 1987 has it that the visitors were ‘serial cheats’, ‘con artists’ who had ‘perfected the art of intimidation’ by histrionic appealing, frequently accompanied by the fielders ‘racing maniacally at the umpires [while their] English opponents could only watch in disbelief … Imran’s men were the most undisciplined team yet seen on these shores.’ This account perhaps requires correction. It’s true a certain petulance occasionally crept into the proceedings, and more than once Imran’s direct intervention was required to prevent what threatened to become a full-scale evacuation of toys from the visitors’ crib. But some background context might be in order. In trying to assess the barely concealed mutual hostility between the Pakistan team and most non-partisan observers, we have to acknowledge that both sides in the debate had ‘form’. That the Pakistanis could be a touch excitable was no newsflash. But the roots of their particular problem with specifically English officialdom were almost certainly deeper and more intricate than the Sun or Mirror let on, and included a whole gamut of neuroses, ranging from rank paranoia to what psychologists call a ‘morbid utterance of repressed infantilism’ — or resentment — towards the former mother country. It’s admittedly unlikely that many of the Pakistani bowlers decided to appeal quite as often as they did because of some sense of post-colonial, psychic frustration on their parts. But it would be fair to say that there was a mutual edge to the proceedings. Imran later reportedly remarked that the ‘utterly unprincipled and vicious smear campaign’ unleashed by his exposure of incompetent authority figures had been one of the hallmarks of his career.

The following list of incidents is by no means exhaustive.

The second Test, at Lord’s, of the England-Pakistan series of 1974 ended in some disarray when the tourists’ manager Omar Kureishi called a press conference to protest at the inadequate covering of the pitch, which had opened up a conveniently placed crack for the English bowler Derek Underwood to exploit. Kureishi’s opening remark was, ‘Gentlemen, I am not accusing you of cheating but of gross negligence.’ Harsher words followed, in the privacy of the Pakistanis’ hotel, over how such conditions could ever have existed at the ‘so-called headquarters of cricket’. It would be true to say that there was a broad tendency among many of the tourists, Imran included, to interpret such incidents in a racist light.

Two years later, the touring Pakistani captain Mushtaq Mohammad made much of the ‘absurd’ umpiring that he believed had cost his side the series. This time the venue was the West Indies. Seeming to confirm the Pakistanis’ impression of institutionalised bias against them from whatever quarter, the next major incident, in October 1978, came at Faisalabad. The final day’s play in a generally ill-tempered encounter between Pakistan and India was delayed by 15 minutes to allow the umpire Shakoor Rana to harangue several of the players. This was not to be an entirely isolated incident in Rana’s long career. Nine years later, standing at the same ground, he became embroiled in a discussion about gamesmanship with the England captain Mike Gatting. The language employed throughout the exchange was basic. Six hours of playing time were then lost while Gatting, to his very vocal displeasure, eventually composed a written apology acceptable to Rana. As a result of this and other perceived slights, the Pakistan board initially withheld a substantial slice of the guarantee money owed to their English counterparts. The England authorities replied by awarding £1,000 to each of their players by way of a ‘hardship bonus’, a move that did not visibly improve the host team’s mood at the post-tour press conference.

In April 1984, the International Cricket Conference (ICC) gave its blessing to a triangular 50-over competition between Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka held in the Asian equivalent of Las Vegas, Sharjah. The venue was the newly opened 24,000-seat United Arab Emirates Association stadium, set in a vast tract of arid wasteland where Bedouin had roamed not long before. Alas, the cricket itself rarely lived up to the surroundings. But the tournament was significant nonetheless, because it was the first ICC-sanctioned series to employ exclusively ‘neutral’ umpires — umpires, that is, born and raised anywhere other than the three competing nations. From then on, this concept of non-aligned officials became something of a fetish for Imran. In October 1986, he persuaded the Pakistan board to appoint neutral umpires for the home series against the West Indies, to the evident satisfaction of both teams. Despite this initiative, the England authorities stubbornly resisted the temptation to assign two independent umpires to each Test for another 16 years. To Imran, for one, the delay was unconscionable, and could have only one explanation. ‘It reeks of colonial arrogance,’ he wrote. In the meantime his entire tenure as Test captain was punctuated by a series of umpiring controversies, often involving home officials such as Rana as well as English ones such as Constant. Highly debatable decisions, incredulous stares, on-field exchanges of pleasantries, calamitous press conferences, and spurious but widespread allegations of gambling, ball tampering and even food poisoning — these were the backdrop to the most successful career in Asian sports history.

The combustible world of Pakistan cricket was also frequently enlivened by charges of match-fixing, much of it reportedly centred on the ground at Sharjah. The ever voluble Sarfraz Nawaz would be neither the first nor the last player to go public with this particular allegation. But whether Sarfraz’s claim was deliberate or compulsive, there is no doubt the Pakistan team were affected by it. Although Imran himself was above reproach, he was made vividly aware of the rumours on a daily basis, chiefly by a Pakistani press never inclined to ignore or bury a good scandal. In fact some of the most lurid headlines on the subject came not in London but in Lahore and Karachi. It reached the point where in April 1990, at Sharjah, Imran felt compelled to gather his players together in the dressing-room before the start of play in a one-day international and have each of them swear on a copy of the Koran that none of them stood to gain by Pakistan losing.

The gladiatorial atmosphere in which Pakistan typically played their cricket also, perhaps not surprisingly, contained an element of crowd participation. In December 1980, Pakistan hosted a Test against the West Indies at Multan; Imran took five for 62 in the visitors’ first innings. Late in the match the West Indies bowler Sylvester Clarke, apparently aggrieved at being struck by an orange peel while fielding on the third man boundary, retaliated by throwing a brick into the crowd. It was an incalculably cretinous thing to do, but, even so, the response was somehow peculiarly Pakistani. A press photographer’s close-up of a victim of Clarke’s assault bleeding from a head wound was blown up and became a popular poster in bus and train stations throughout the country. Some time later, disgruntled students invaded the pitch in the course of a one-day match between Pakistan and India at Karachi. Imran, who was bowling at the time, calmly assessed the situation, removed a stump, waved it under the nose of the lead demonstrator and reportedly offered to impale him with it. After that there was a loss of interest on the student’s part in prolonging his stay on the field. Sometimes the source of the trouble was even closer to hand; at Perth, in November 1981, Javed Miandad became probably the first player to threaten to brain another one during a Test, after Dennis Lillee had kicked him. Lillee later admitted to having also given Javed some ‘verbal’, but insisted the Pakistani batsman had ‘overreacted’; a not unheard-of development.

For Imran Khan, the perennially embattled cricket superstar, a career in politics must have seemed almost tranquil by comparison. It’s rare for a player not only to operate at that level, in what he once called the ‘toxic’ atmosphere of Pakistan sport, but also to have graced the game in its every format around the world, chiefly in England. Although Imran took some time to find his feet in his adopted home, several good judges were left in no doubt, even then, that his arrival on the scene marked that of a major new talent. In July 1975, a 19-year-old Cambridge freshman named Alastair Hignell walked out to bat in the university match against Oxford at Lord’s. Hignell had been away on an England rugby tour of Australia until the eve of the game, and ‘therefore had no idea what to expect from the bowler ominously pawing at the ground before starting his run-up somewhere in the mid distance. Sure enough, it was a terrifying barrage … At one point, I took the wrong option and ducked into a bouncer which hit the fleshy part of my ear and ricocheted past the wicketkeeper in the direction of the pavilion. I was hoping for a single to fine leg to get off strike, so set off immediately. As it happened, the ball hit the boundary wall before the fielder could intercept it, but for some reason the umpire, John Langridge, didn’t bother tapping his leg for leg byes and instead signalled four runs … As I was trotting by I pointed out that the ball hadn’t hit my bat, but had bounced off my ear which by now was red, swollen and throbbing painfully. “Listen, sonny,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, as Imran again limbered up in the distance. “You’re not going to be here long, anyway. You might as well take all the runs you can get.”’

* For the statistically minded, 83.3 per cent of the Tests Pakistan played under Imran’s captaincy thus ended in a win or a draw; Mike Brearley, widely regarded as the Freud of modern Test captains, scored 89.5 per cent, while for Imran’s contemporary Ian Botham the figure falls to 66.6 per cent.

* Reflecting on the incident, the veteran journalist Antao Hassan told me that ‘It was really a question of what’s now called ageism’; Saeed was already 31 when he was dropped — ‘virtually senile’ in a national cricket culture that puts an extreme premium on youth.

* David Constant declined to comment on his feelings, if any, about Imran when I contacted him in 2008. However, Constant’s sometime colleague Dickie Bird was happy to oblige. He told me that in his experience Imran had ‘play[ed] within the spirit and the law’ of the game, and that he had ‘never had a problem with him’.

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