in an arc from gully to leg slip. One particular delivery had come close to felling the square leg umpire. ‘He’s the craziest cricketer I’ve ever seen,’ said Wasim.
Yet the Lahore selectors soon began to take the kid seriously. In the next two Under-19 games, Imran was to show an at least rudimentary grasp of line and length, taking three for 19 and five for 42 respectively. He wasn’t, perhaps, as inherently gifted as some other up-and-coming bowlers around the world. He lacked the fluid hydraulics of even the teenaged Michael Holding. He wasn’t as squarely built as Ian Botham, or quite as lithely fast as Dennis Lillee or Richard Hadlee. Yet no young cricketer ever brought together such an amalgam of carefully nurtured talents. Imran was relentless in his pursuit of excellence. At least one observer saw him in the light of the 20th century’s approved canon for success, as ‘literally a self-made man’. Wasim Raja would long remember that ‘Imran was invariab[ly] the first on the ground every morning, where he would run circuits of the playing area’ — a novelty in the cricket culture of those days — ‘before repair[ing] to the nets to practise bowling at a single stump for an hour or more before the start of play.’
Fanatically determined as he was, Imran may also have enjoyed a certain degree of old-fashioned patronage in his early career. He made his full first-class debut for Lahore against Sargodha when he was just turning 17. The chairman of the Lahore selectors was Imran’s uncle, and the captain and two of the senior players were his cousins. It was another only sporadically successful start. Bowling a lively mixture of bouncers and prodigously fast outswingers, Imran took two wickets at some 20 runs apiece. That was to be the highlight of his contribution to the match. During a subsequent rain delay, Imran wandered off to his nearby bedroom, fell asleep and returned to the ground to find he’d missed his turn in the batting order. When he did bat he was run out, and Lahore lost the match.
Wasim Raja remarked of Imran’s bowling technique at the time that, while generally effective, ‘it wasn’t pretty … He more or less just ran in and hurled it.’ Other accounts of the young Imran recall that he had a slinging action much like that of the Australian Jeff Thomson. All parties agree that, in Wasim’s words, ‘It was awkward and unorthodox … You wouldn’t find it in the MCC manual.’ Perhaps as a result Imran tore a back muscle in his next match and missed nearly a season’s competitive cricket. He didn’t waste the time, however. He was the ‘most hard-working, the most focused student of cricket ever,’ a man closely familiar with the game in Lahore told me. ‘Everybody else would be gone at the close of play, and he would still be there. At that age, most of the kids in the team wanted to have fun. He wanted to be … Imran Khan.’ As soon as he was physically able to do so, he resumed his lengthy workouts, spending afternoons in the nets and evenings in indoor ‘skull sessions’ with men like Javed Burki and Majid, discussing the finer points of the game. In time he made a gradual comeback through the ranks of Lahore juniors and Lahore B, often coming on first change, before returning to the senior team. Wasim Raja saw an immediate difference in Imran’s action. ‘He was bowling chest-on, which looked even more awful. He’d also grown another inch and put on some muscle, and the whole effect [was] highly intimidating from the batsman’s point of view.’ Another Lahore colleague recalls Imran carefully smoothing down his hair on his brisk trot back to his mark, and his subsequent snorting approach to the bowling crease, ‘like that of a well-groomed bull’. His repertoire now included a ‘devastatingly fast’ inswinger as well as his stock bouncer, which ‘on average, he employed three times an over’.
Imran had, meanwhile, left Aitchison College, whose vaunted enthusiasm for sports seems not to have extended to sharing one of their own with a professional cricket team. He spent his sixth-form year at the nearby Cathedral School. Although founded and run by a Christian mission, and thus somewhat at odds with both Niazi and Burki family tradition, the school ‘more or less indulged [Imran]’, as one of the staff remembers. ‘He was a special case, [someone] who just seemed to be in a hurry to get to somewhere else. He was always driving and pushing, even as a teenager.’
Besides cricket, that drive and push found expression in longdistance running, javelin- and discus-throwing, and various other demonstrations of adolescent physical prowess. Imran was a full-time member of the Lahore team in the 1970–71 season, where he was lucky enough to have his cousin Javed Burki as captain. Javed cannily used the 18-year-old tear away in short bursts. In the BCCP Trophy against Rawalpindi Blues (surely a song title) Imran took two for 26 and one for 10, followed by the more impressive first innings figures of 18–3–54–6 against Pakistan Railways. In the cup semi-final against Karachi he scored 17 and 60 batting at No. 3, but was said to have served up a ‘dog’s dinner’ with the new ball. Moving across to the three-day Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, Imran recorded figures of five for 75 off 16 overs against Rawalpindi, missed the grudge match against the government’s Public Works Department, but returned to play in the losing semi-final against Punjab University, where he took two for 96 in the first innings and one for 10 in the second, while scoring 36 and 68 in the middle order. At the end of the season Imran had a first-class batting average of 31.69 and a bowling average of 21.60. His first full year in domestic cricket was also to be his last, because he was rarely seen again in Pakistan after that except at representative level.
As Imran played cricket, the situation in the country as a whole was ‘desperate’, he later recalled. The first ever fully democratic national elections were due to have been held on 5 October 1970, his 18th birthday, but had to be postponed by two months because of the cataclysmic damage caused by floods in East Pakistan, where 200,000 people died and some 12 million lost their homes. It was generally agreed the relief operations were not well handled by the government. The result of the election gave the Bengali militant Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib) and his Awami League an absolute majority in the National Assembly and all but two of the 162 seats allotted to East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a champion of Islamic socialism, a strong army and ‘a 1,000-year war with India’, emerged as the leader in the West. The irreconcilable differences of the two men’s programmes and the growing threat of secession by the Bengalis set in train the breakdown first of parliamentary government and eventually of all domestic law and order. President Yahya Khan, the hard-drinking, straight-talking former army chief, first refused to honour the election results and then sent 40,000 troops to arrest Mujib and suppress the rioting that erupted in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. Unrelieved suffering from the cyclone, coupled with brutal suppression by Yahya’s army, may have killed as many as 500,000 more men, women and children over the next month. The confrontation eventually led to the events that brought about Pakistan’s dismemberment in December 1971. Even before that, Imran had seen ‘AIR-RAID SHELTER’ and ‘CARELESS CHAT COSTS LIVES’ notices being tacked up on public buildings, just as he had in 1965. More and more recruits signed up for Yahya’s, or Bhutto’s, army; I was told that the Khan family had been ‘rightly alarmed’ they would be evicted from Zaman Park, either by invading Bengalis or the Indians, if not by government fiat, and forcibly resettled, much as had happened following Partition in 1947. In the end they kept their home, although in the most harrowing circumstances. India again went to war with Pakistan in 1971 just as the latter finally tore itself apart. In the ensuing 13-day bloodbath, some 300,000 Pakistani civilians died and the country’s armed forces were crippled for a generation. As the author Tariq Ali says, in less than a fortnight the nation ‘lost half [its] navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army’. India and its Soviet ally jointly declared the outcome of the war, and the emergence of Bangladesh from the ruins of East Pakistan, to be a triumph for socialist and democratic principles.
Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Imran proved to be an aggressively patriotic sportsman, not least when it eventually came to playing against India. Already, by 1971, he’s remembered as a ‘fine adornment of Pakistani manhood’, who was widely known for his ‘impassioned if selective’ monologues on his country’s history. Physically, too, he was quite imposing, having coaxed his hair into a Beatle moptop and developed a particularly intense, piercing stare — ‘that don’t-fuck-with-me squint of his’, as one ex-girlfriend characterises it. He spoke in an almost sepulchral tone, with the occasional incongruous ‘Strewth!’ or ‘Gorblimey!’
