Rank, Swansea, only to find that his room-mate Saeed Ahmed had reported him for breaking the team curfew: fined £1.50. A day or two later a catch went down off Saeed’s bowling, causing him to break into tears and Imran in turn to burst out laughing, resulting in another visit to the manager’s office. One wet afternoon in the Pakistan dressing-room, Sadiq Mohammad, at 26 one of the senior members of the team, asked Imran to get him a cup of tea, whereupon Imran told him to do it himself. It was a characteristic response by a man whose hallmark was the untugged forelock. Sadiq had ‘gone berserk,’ I was told. ‘He shouted at Imran, prodding his fingers towards his face, and said, “I’ll finish you now!” and “You’ll pay!”’ Imran had calmly looked the older player in the eye and said, ‘I’m not your servant.’
Even at this early stage, Imran attracted an entourage of flattering male followers who proved no threat to his ego and who acted as loyal buffers between him and the outside world. Or at least that was their role in later years, when a key duty was to restrain the more persistent of Imran’s female admirers. The 1971 entourage was only the first in a series of royal courts, often made up of junior colleagues. Players like Talat Ali and Azmat Rana, neither of whom appeared in a Test on the tour, were typically part of the group. A then 20-year-old legal secretary named Judy Flanders well remembers Imran’s activities at a popular lar Manchester nightspot: ‘He sat around, smouldered, muttered a bit to his mates, didn’t dance, drank only milk, and rested his hand affectionately on my thigh.’
There was something of a heroes’ welcome waiting for the Pakistanis when they flew home in the middle of July. Losing an overseas series to England 1–0 was considered a rare achievement, given both the negative pre-tour publicity and the team’s generally dismal track record over the past decade. The relative success on the field in turn fed into a renewed public enthusiasm for the national game. With hindsight, the centre of gravity of international cricket was already shifting towards South Asia, where most of the potential spectators, much of the wristy talent and a fair amount of the available gambling money all were. Imran himself was not on hand to hear the cheers and wolf-whistles of the crowd at Karachi airport. Later that week he treated himself to a final evening’s entertainment at the Mecca dance-hall in London’s Leicester Square, then caught the early train to Worcester, his principal English home for the next five years.
Had Imran gone back to Lahore and taken up engineering, as his father still periodically urged him to, he’d be remembered today as a talented underachiever. As it was, the odds were that he would go on to play perhaps one or two obscure seasons of county cricket. Then a professional career in Pakistan, possibly involving the civil service, along with an arranged marriage, and the occasional weekend appearance for the Gymkhana or a similar club; retirement; death; appreciative but not long obituaries, followed by a footnote recalling him as a ‘one Test wonder’ in the cricket reference books — that would have been it. The reason Imran succeeded where other, more naturally gifted, players failed was that he put his first year in England to such good effect, emerging from it fitter and faster than ever. More determined, too. Reflecting on Imran’s self-belief, Wasim Raja (no martyr to false modesty himself) admiringly recalled that, as a 19-year-old, he had had ‘a healthy ego [along] with the single-minded focus of a speeding bullet’.
Even so, it was a struggle. Imran would have been less than human if he hadn’t taken time to adapt to single life in an English provincial town just as early autumn approached. Worcestershire initially accommodated their overseas signing in a rather spartan room in the market square’s Star Hotel. Local folklore has it that, while staying at the Star, Imran put his mattress on the floor each night, and each morning the chambermaid, ignorant of the oriental custom, returned the mattress to the bed. He was not selected for the county side in the remaining part of the season, but played seven matches for the Second XI, and less formally in the Under-25 groups and assorted knock-ups. Once again these gave scant evidence of any latent genius, although the newcomer ‘absorbed’ everything, I was told, and was a ‘quick study’. Imran was once seen to take a thick coaching book with him back to his digs. He had apparently combed through it overnight and mentally photographed what he needed, because the next morning ‘he could quote the book’s exact captions [and] whole chunks of the actual text,’ an impressed colleague recalled.
On 9 August, Imran arrived at the unprepossesing County Ground, Derby, with his usual baggage: style. Clad in tailored whites and a Pakistan touring cap, a polka-dot handkerchief sticking out of a pocket, he treated the sparse Tuesday morning crowd to 110 of the best runs possible, out of a grand total of 222. Regrettably, this early-career promise wasn’t to be entirely fulfilled. By the beginning of September, the Worcestershire Second XI had lost four of their last five games and were drifting near the bottom of the 14-team league. The county still seem to have thought of Imran, to the extent that they did so at all, as a middle-order belter who could bowl a bit. It wasn’t an entirely illogical preconception, since they had engaged him in the first place after watching him hit the International XI’s Neil Hawke around the park at Lahore. Although not exceptionally wristy, Imran had developed a series of taut, slightly robotic arm shots which could give the ball an almighty thump. Even so, one or two good judges including Henry Horton appeared to think he had the makings of an all-rounder, a natural replacement for the seemingly ageless but actually 40-year-old Basil D’Oliveira. Though not perhaps the most accurate, Imran’s bowling was pretty spectacular by county, let alone Second XI or Club and Ground standards. He knew it. Beset though he often was at Worcester by nagging doubts about his overall prospects, his claims for himself weren’t small — and weren’t on the whole misguided.
On 1 September, Imran was selected to play for Worcestershire in a three-day match against the touring Indians. It seems somehow fitting that his opponents for his debut should be his nation’s mortal enemies. Imran drew some attention to himself before play started by appearing in the net swinging three bats at once, a practice favoured by professional baseball players to make the bat they hit with feel lighter. To his bemused team-mates, though, it’s possible it merely looked eccentric. He wasn’t to follow up this preliminary flourish when in the middle, scoring 0 and 15 and failing to take a wicket. At least one of the Indian team thought him ‘a hype’.
Imran hadn’t forgotten his promise to his parents to finish his education in England, and shortly after the India game he entered Worcester Royal Grammar school as a boarder, with a view to taking A levels and going on to university. His ten months there don’t appear to have been happy ones. Apart from the institutional food and the cold, he was miserably homesick, his one friend in England being his cousin Majid, who was far away at Cambridge. At half-term and on other holidays, Imran stayed behind and moved into an attic room in his headmaster’s house. One retired staff member described him to me, perhaps not surprisingly, as ‘a bit of a loner’. The English boarding school system was not then troubled, as it was later, by counsellors. Had it been, Imran would no doubt have been thought worthy of concern. In the event, he seems to have been somewhat of an object of satire to the other boys, to whom he had, in any case, little to talk about, preoccupied as they were with glam rock and soccer. Even so, the familiar determination and ambition were to the fore. Despite a still imperfect grasp of English, Imran passed Economics and Geography with an A and a C grade respectively. He completed the two-year course in the equivalent of just over two terms, or nine months.*
One winter Saturday afternoon Imran and Majid visited Mike Selvey, the future Surrey, Middlesex and England bowler (and Guardian cricket correspondent), at his flat in Cambridge. Selvey thought the nearly invisible teenager swathed in a heavy overcoat and a variety of scarves to be ‘very quiet and shy. [Although] Imran said very little, years later he told me how much he appreciated it. I always got on well with him and called him Fred, as in Karno.’
It seems most people who met Imran during his first year or so in England had the same general impression Selvey did. Away from the cricket field, he was basically ‘shy’ and ‘rather mousey — a bit of a mumbler,’ two grammar school contemporaries recalled. Older and more sophisticated people reacted similarly, finding Imran a very different proposition
