Lord’s, painted bright red, soaring out of the middle of Piccadilly Circus rather than modestly tucked away behind a wall in St John’s Wood, to get a bit of the feel. The sport was a prominent part of every young Lahorite’s life and, in fact, a focus for the entire community. It’s said by the Pakistan scholar and traveller Sean Sheehan that when the Test team was in action at Lahore ‘five hundred miles away, near the Afghan border, tribal members [would] huddle around a radio, listening with bated breath and roaring with delight at every run scored’.
Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2006, Imran recalled that ‘From when I was seven to when I was nine, I had dreams in which I would score 100 against England at Lord’s, leading Pakistan to victory. I desperately wanted to be a Test cricketer. I remember clearly wanting that, never thinking I wouldn’t make it.’ It’s a vivid and compelling story, told from the perspective of a fiercely patriotic, middle-aged Pakistani political leader. But some discrepancy exists between Imran’s Sunday Times account and the one he gives in his 1983 autobiography, whose opening sentence is, ‘The game of cricket and I travelled on distinctly separate paths for the first eleven years of my life … quite frankly, I agreed with my father that it was a boring game with too much standing around.’
It’s a small historical point, but one perhaps worth clarifying before we move on. In March 1959, when Imran was six (not seven, as he writes), his mother took him to see Pakistan play West Indies at Lahore’s old Bagh-e-Jinnah ground. It was a generally unhappy occasion, at least from the home team’s point of view. They were routed. The West Indies fast bowler Wes Hall tore through the Pakistan first innings, taking five for 87, and making life especially uncomfortable for the wicketkeeper-batsman Ijaz Butt. Butt was to be carried off with a broken nose ‘as the blood gushed down his shirt’, Wisden records. Pakistan lost the Test by an innings and 156 runs. Imran notes that he remained ‘unenthusiastic’ about cricket as a career option, particularly as angry crowds took to the streets that night to protest against their team’s performance. This was to be a fairly frequent event in the history of the national side over the next 12 years or so. At about the same time as he watched his first Test, Imran and his parents moved to Zaman Park. Not long after that he found himself taking part in family pick-up games, where he had the opportunity to measure himself against Majid, six years his senior, among others. Once again, the results weren’t encouraging. ‘I wasn’t [even] as good as other boys of my age, and was always the last to be chosen,’ Imran recalls.
The turning-point came when he was rising 13, and had moved into the upper school at Aitchison. As a result, when the new cricket season began in October, Imran found himself for the first time playing on a professionally prepared pitch. He also had access to a coach named Naseer Mohammad, a former club player with decided views about what a proper cricketer in the making should look like. ‘Correct’ was the operative word. Mr Mohammad took one look at Imran’s repertoire of cross-batted slogs and went to work on him in the nets. An Aitchison contemporary and fellow Colt remembers that ‘Naseer’s interest and enthusiasm were just almost contagious … He would practise with you — I remember hours of the forward defensive — literally until you dropped.’ When the afternoon sessions did not go well, the coach often kept his pupil at it into the misty autumn dusk, bringing out an old white cricket ball and turning on the weak pavilion lights. Imran recalls that by the time the new season began in 1966, ‘My attitude to the game had changed: all I wanted to do was play cricket … I decided that I was going to play for Pakistan, and soon.’ By this point Imran was just turning 14. He responded to maternal approval and appreciated applause. He participated enthusiastically in school Under-16 matches, impressing coaches because he took direction willingly and trained harder than anyone else did. And thanks to a sudden pubescent growth spurt, he possessed the classic fast bowler’s physique long before he was a fast bowler. Imran had caught up with his illustrious cousins through hard work, natural talent and an utter unwillingness to fail at anything he put his mind to. The consensus at Aitchison was that he was an orthodox and hard-hitting batsman, as well as a safe pair of hands in the field. No one yet thought of him as a full all-rounder, least of all Imran himself.
The next three years saw the cricketing equivalent of the Great Leap Forward, even if they proved less distinguished academically. Although not studious, Imran was a quick learner and, with his mother’s and older sister’s assistance, proved an at least adequate pupil. The portrait of him that most often emerges from those who knew him at Aitchison is of a teenager who was long on graft and determination and less so on raw intellect. Even some of his later disciples had their doubts about his mental candlepower, although, as at school, no one who knew him ever questioned his perseverance. The curricular emphasis there was on English, maths, geography and history, the last two of which generally took a dim view of India and its territorial claims in Kashmir. Aitchison, originally known as Chiefs’ College, had been founded in 1886, and was modelled strongly on the British public-school tradition. Delivering his inaugural address to the boys, the school’s benefactor Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had remarked that ‘… much, very much, is expected of you. I trust you will use well the opportunities here afforded you both for your education and for the formation of your character … This is an institution from which you will henceforth banish everything in thought and word and act that is mean, dishonourable or impure, and in which you will cultivate everything that is virtuous, true, manly and gentlemanly.’ The school (motto: ‘Perseverance commands success’) was laid out along the lines of a Mogul fort, ambitiously crossed with a traditional English church — there were steeples, cloisters and stained glass windows — and set in a tree-ringed 200-acre estate. (One well-known American travel writer insists that Aitchison could have ‘easily been found in the rolling Sussex countryside, were [it] not for its prominent central minaret’, but this merely displays his ignorance of modern English rural life.) Several graduates I spoke to about the school referred to it as ‘the Eton of Pakistan’. There was a house system, uniforms, an emphasis on organised sport and a daily routine ‘as ritualised as Edwardian English behaviour’. By and large, Imran was in his element.
Both at Aitchison and its next-door neighbour Zaman Park, he was clearly moving in a more exalted world than most Lahorites. The student body included luminaries such as the princes Salahuddin and Falahuddin, the Nawab of Kalabagh’s son and several future or present Pathan chiefs including Imran’s friend Sardar Jaffer Khan Leghari, the strongman of the Leghari tribe. Even in this company Imran was considered quite combative. He seems to have been as adept at mind games as he was at the raw aggression that was such an integral part of his cricket. ‘Imran was a merciless enemy on the sports field’, whose great strength as a batsman ‘was his ability to get his opponent off-balance’, an Aitchison contemporary recalls.
Even then, he was a crafty performer … Imran would deceive the bowler into thinking he was weak against the short ball, for instance. He would hop and jump and generally carry on like a man standing on hot coals. You could see the fielders smiling to themselves … The bowler would charge in and bowl probably the fastest bouncer of his life, and Imran would deposit it about twenty yards behind the tall trees on the square leg boundary.
Another Aitchison friend recalled an altogether gentler Imran away from the cricket field. ‘There was a boy who sometimes begged at the school gates. He was about 16, like us, and he was crippled … One evening he was dragging himself home [and] with his arms already full Imran leant down to speak to him and then picked him up. Off he staggered with the boy and crutches and books and cricket gear up the road and the steep steps to the boy’s house, where he gently set him down again. No one else was around. To me, that was the real Imran as much as the cut-throat sportsman was.’
Imran sometimes used to say that his pleasure in playing cricket every available hour of the day was enhanced by the knowledge that, in at least one sense, it was a complete waste of time. So many hours ticking past, and it not mattering. So many afternoons when other boys were in the library or diligently writing essays or studying their Koran, while Imran, immaculately turned out in whites, practised his forward defensive in the nets or carted the opposing team’s bowlers around the park. It’s worth mentioning again just how fortunate he was
