garb, and on the other by a collection of hip-hugging velvet flares, garishly loud shirts splayed open to the chest and chunky jewellery such as might have been favoured by Gary Glitter in his ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ era.
This was the self-admittedly ‘bumptious’ individual who, on 4 March 1971, strode out into the Lahore Stadium to play for the BCCP side against a touring International XI, marking his first representative appearance for his country. The short goodwill visit by the Internationals had not been entirely free of incident up until then. In fact, the team’s previous match at Dhaka had come to an abrupt end shortly after England’s John Murray, who was batting at the time, ‘happened to notice the Pakistani who had been fielding at long leg edging up to the slips and furtively muttering to them, “There will be trouble” about a split second before someone set the main stand on fire. The next thing I knew we were in the middle of an army escort screaming down a dark road towards the airport, where we caught the last plane out to Lahore.’ Conditions there were ‘marginally more tranquil’, Murray says. Imran eventually took three wickets in the match and, coming in at No. 9, hit 51 not out after his team had collapsed to 80 for seven. The Internationals’ Australian bowler Neil Hawke, the man who saw most of the batsman, recalled his ‘not being aware [he] was in the presence of an obvious genius’. Another player I spoke to couldn’t even remember that Imran had taken part in the match. But it was apparently enough of an all-round performance to impress the then 77-year-old Wing Commander William (or ‘Harold’) Shakespeare, the chairman of Worcestershire, and his outgoing county secretary Joe Lister, both of whom were accompanying the tour. According to the written minutes, they particularly admired the 18-year-old’s ‘attitude’ and ‘obvious passion’ for the game. As a result, Worcestershire offered Imran a one-year contract, with an option to renew, at a basic salary of £35 a week along with a somewhat vague promise to secure his ‘special registration’ as the county’s primary overseas player. The momentous deal was consummated with a simple handshake in the pavilion. Imran’s parents initially withheld permission, but were eventually won over by the argument that he could finish his education at Oxford or Cambridge, as several Khans had before him.
Later in the spring Imran received a letter from the Pakistan national selectors, offering him a place in the party to tour England that summer. He was more than five months shy of his 19th birthday, and was still notionally studying for his A levels at Cathedral School. The country was just then embarking on the process of ripping itself apart. Displaying some of the same self-destructive qualities, the Test team had acquired the name of ‘Panikstan’ for its consistent ability to lose from a winning position. Impatient with the practice, the home crowds had increasingly taken to verbally or physically abusing their cricketers. After one Test at the National Stadium in Karachi, the Pakistanis’ team bus had been set on fire. Even so, in a nation still struggling for its identity, playing representative sports remained the peak of most young male Pakistanis’ ambitions. ‘A cricketer then could be like a rock star today,’ said Wasim Raja. The ‘distinct [and] high honour’ of the occasion was reflected in the board’s printed invitation received by Imran, which one family member who saw it remembers as a ‘really elaborate affair’ bearing the signature of a ‘government dignitary or minister’, which may have helped soften Ikramullah Khan’s disappointment that his only son had apparently shunned a technical career and instead taken up with so ‘boring’ a sport. It’s possible that, like many fathers of his generation, he took a restrained approach to showing his emotions. I was told that Mr Khan had later been in a crowded shop in central Lahore when a radio news report announced that the Pakistan team had won a match in England. Everyone in the place had ‘gone wild [and] started cheering’. He did not tell them that the young fast bowler who had helped bring about the victory was his son. When Mr Khan later told the story in private to a colleague at Republic Engineering, he was ‘as proud as if Imran had been elected prime minister of Pakistan’.
No major team travelled overseas with less expectation than the Pakistanis did in late April 1971. Led by Intikhab Alam, who had finished on the winning side only once in his 26 Tests, the squad boasted the stylish but frail middle-order batting of Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal and an as yet only locally famous 23-year-old named Zaheer Abbas. The bowling resources, as Majid recalled, were ‘thin, not to say gaunt’ and focused on the young Lahore seamer Asif Masood, the man whose crouching approach to the wicket reminded John Arlott of ‘Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress’. In the event Masood took nine wickets in his first Test against England, only to suffer a dramatic decline in form from then on, leading to his premature retirement from all cricket in 1976. The tour itself took place against the backdrop of the Pakistani civil war, which both split the party along ethnic lines and provoked mass demonstrations against its supposed regional bias even before the players left their home soil. Earlier in the spring, the national Under-25 side’s visit to England had had to be cancelled when Bangladeshi separatists threatened to firebomb the team’s hotel. Right up to the last moment, there was a lively debate about the propriety of 16 cricketers ‘fly[ing] off to sun themselves in England’, as one report put it, at that particular point in their nation’s history. Hence, perhaps, the BCCP president’s masterly understatement at the pre-tour press conference, when he admitted that his team was in ‘a little bit of turmoil’.
For all that, Imran records that he was ‘brimming with excitement’ at the prospect not only of his first cricketing tour but of his first time out of Pakistan. Although not exactly a household name, he was beginning to acquire some of the trappings of being a local celebrity, a status he enjoyed. The Lahore newspaper ran a long if factually flawed profile of the schoolboy ‘heavy hitter’ who was sure to ‘knock the spots [off] the English attack’. Family friends converged on Zaman Park with pre-tour congratulations and advice. Imran’s father is said to have taken special pleasure in seeing his son kitted out for the first time in his navy blue Pakistan blazer. Shaukat Khan was ‘beside herself’ with maternal pride, I was told, although anxious that Imran should not return from his travels with an English wife; it was a ‘long tradition of the Jullandari Pathans’ — words Imran heard often as a boy — to marry inside the fold. The many cricketing Khan relatives can be presumed to have heartily joined in the celebrations. On the eve of the team’s departure to London Imran came out on to the street in front of his family home and signed autographs for a small but vocal crowd who had gathered there, while some of the adolescent girls among them shouted endearments and threw rose petals at his feet.
Now all that remained was the tour, which did not go well.
Given the nature of Pakistani cricket, it’s somehow inevitable that there would be various factors behind the scenes that contributed to a generally lacklustre performance on the field of play. The country’s arrival on the Test-playing circuit in the 1950s and their periodic successes against all five of their international opponents had been one of the early bonds of nationhood. Less than 20 years later, that initial wave of optimism had given way to what Imran calls an ‘inferiority complex … The English team was thought to be invincible [and] I was told it would be impossible for me to take any wickets there.’ An air of mild apology, or deference, seemed to attach to the blazered figure of Masud Salahuddin, the 56-year-old Pakistan manager (and another of Imran’s cousins), whose self-professed lifelong ambition was to win honorary membership of the MCC. Early in the tour, Mr Salahuddin formally thanked his side’s hosts by remarking in a speech that ‘England [had] taught us Pakistanis much-needed discipline through the game of cricket’, including the protocol of how to eat with a knife and fork. Imran reports that he had been too embarrassed to listen to the rest. To be fair, the manager was not conspicuously well served by his home board, whose most senior positions were now a sinecure of the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). Whatever their skills in managing a public utilities company, the WAPDA officials were not, for the most part, ideally suited to the job of supervising a national sports tour taking place thousands of miles away, whose day-to-day running at least one senior player thought ‘a joke, even by our standards’. While in England Imran would receive just 150 rupees, or roughly £7.50, for every five-day Test he played. The fee for a three-day match against one of the counties was some 80–100 rupees, depending on attendances, and even this pittance was often slow in coming. The players’
