of the time, [the] images are depicted by terrorists, fanaticism, veiled women and so on. Similarly, our cricketers are looked upon as an indisciplined, unruly mob who pressurise umpires, cheat, doctor cricket balls, whinge about umpiring decisions and are generally unsporting.’ (‘Well, yes,’ some cynics might reply.)
For all that, the occasional misgivings between the Pakistan team and their English opponents may have had less to do with religous intolerance or lingering post-colonial animosity than with a specific incident that occurred at Peshawar on the North-West Frontier in February 1956. This was the tragicomic episode of the ‘kidnapped’ umpire, Idrees Beg. Its repercussions were felt for at least 20 years afterwards — well into Imran’s own tenure in the Pakistan side.
The whole affair began when, in the course of a keenly anticipated Pakistan v. MCC ‘unofficial Test’, a number of the tourists’ batsmen came to voice their concern at how receptive umpire Beg seemed to be to Abdul Kardar’s repeated and highly animated appeals for lbw: there were five such decisions in the MCC first innings alone. Kardar’s first victim, the young Ken Barrington, once told me that his dismissal had been the single worst injustice of a 15-year career not untouched by shadow. ‘You’ve heard people say, “It would have missed a second set of stumps”? This one would have missed a third set,’ Barrington recalled, still a shade rueful more than 20 years after the event. Another source assured me that Kardar, Pakistan’s imperious Test captain, ‘could [have] done no wrong in that match’. He had ‘snapped out’ his various appeals and umpire Beg, a former military man, had ‘obeyed the orders unthinkingly, [in] the time-honoured way’. The strong MCC side were all out for 188, with Kardar taking six for 40 off 28.2 overs.
On the Sunday evening of the match, a number of the MCC players, led by their captain Donald Carr, had finished dinner at a local restaurant and then taken a taxi across town to the officials’ hotel, where they went upstairs to Beg’s room and invited him to accompany them. The details of what followed are unclear, but it seems fairly certain that the Englishmen hustled Beg into a tonga, or horse-drawn carriage, and drove him back to their own hotel, where a bucket of water was poured over him. The Peshawar daily Mashriq was later to claim that a number of the visitors had been wearing handkerchiefs over their faces, giving them the impression of ‘brigands’ and ‘fiends’, and that Beg himself had been clad throughout the ordeal only in his pyjamas. (A report that he had been debagged completely, leaving him to run ‘stark bollock naked through the hotel corridors’, has proved impossible to verify.) The ‘dank and dishevelled’ umpire was then released into the night amid ‘sundry jeers and catcalls’, and made his way home without further ado. Or that was at least one account; but the accounts are as varied and colourful as the events they claim to describe, and the only certainties are that the next evening’s press ran a headline insisting that Beg had been the victim of a ‘vile assault’, that the tourists eventually lost the match by seven wickets, leaving the ground under a hail of abuse and with a police escort, and that the president of MCC subsequently offered a formal apology in response to an aggrieved telegram from the Pakistan board.
As the fall-out from the ‘Beg affair’ continued, an impression formed in some quarters that certain of the Pakistani players and officials were regrettably thin-skinned when it came to the sort of schoolboy prank that was routine, at least in those days, on the English county circuit. (It was perhaps unfortunate, even so, that the incident occurred in the politically sensitive city of Peshawar, home of the ‘Red Shirt’ movement which had played an active role in Pakistan’s struggle for independence, and that there had allegedly been an attempt to persuade Beg, a Muslim, to take alcohol.) Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, it set the scene for a mutually wary playing relationship between the two countries that, at least on the Pakistani side, lasted well into the 1970s. Somewhere along the way, a stereotype seemed to form of what one famous England player described to me as a ‘little roly-poly guy with bags of natural talent and a massive chip on his shoulder’ — the swarthy, hot-tempered ‘Paki’ of popular legend who, whether individually or collectively, seemed to positively court controversy. It’s not the least of Imran Khan’s achievements to have moulded the most mercurial of all Test sides into a cohesive unit as good as any in the world, and to have done so while actually playing much of his own cricket in England.
In fact, in the memories of his Pakistan players as well as the popular press, there sometimes seemed to be two Imrans, urbanely straddling East and West. Scores of team-mates knew him as the now imposing, now genial ‘Skip’ whose resonant voice and grandly laconic manner (‘Abdul. Come. Bowl.’) had the force of law, both on and off the pitch. Clearly, Imran wasn’t the sort of captain content merely to make the bowling changes and move the field around. He also selected the team he wanted in the first place, often over the vocal objections of his board, and personally took responsibility while on tour for such matters as determining which player needed to be in bed by 10 p.m. and which one could be trusted to turn his own light out. ‘Like God, he was everywhere,’ one colleague recalls. ‘Imran was a very intense person,’ Kerry Packer said, high praise from that particular source, remembering him striding across the shaded outfield ‘to fairly grab the ball out of the umpire’s hand’ before bowling the first session in a World Series match at Sydney. ‘He was a good listener,’ another long-time team-mate thought, ‘not the kind of guy who would ever monopolise a team talk or conversation.’ Yet one or two of the junior Pakistan players found him impatiently cutting them off, and often peremptory. ‘He was a benign dictator. He’d say, “Well shall we try ‘X’?” and you’d say “Well, what about ‘Y’?” and then in a few minutes it would be back to “X” … You listened to him explain the decision, and that was collaboration.’ Others saw him, off the field of play, as a bouffant-haired swinger and legendary Romeo, equally at home ushering a succession of sleek young women around various fashionable London nightspots as, years later, he would be campaigning among the slums of Lahore.
This combination of talent, good looks and a vibrant social life gave Imran a role in English public life and in tabloid newspapers both in western Europe and South Asia hitherto reserved for international footballers or film stars. The future cricket journalist Fareshteh Aslam, who was in her teens at about the time Imran came to prominence, recalls:
Not only did everyone in Pakistan have his poster on the wall, he was the one person the whole country could be proud of. People forget that 30 years ago Pakistan was a bit like North Korea, this hermit kingdom that was cut off from the rest of the world and horribly claustrophobic to live in. There was one television channel, state run, and no internet. If there’s such a thing as a national inferiority complex, we had one. And suddenly here was this exotic-looking guy doing battle around the world on our behalf. He was like Superman and Spiderman rolled into one.
A superhero, it should be added, who faced formidable home-grown obstacles as well as the external kind. When Imran inherited the captaincy of Pakistan in 1982, players from the different regions were often quite unfamiliar with one another and had typically never met off the field. The factional rivalries in the game as a whole were such that even Hanif Mohammad, the Karachi-based founding father of modern Pakistani cricket, had been barracked by the crowd when, in February 1969, he walked out to bat for his side against England at Lahore. Over the succeeding years, open verbal confrontations between various players of diverse social or geographical backgrounds did little for team morale. Imran himself recalls the case of Talat Ali, a promising young opening bat and occasional medium-pace bowler who was dropped first by Pakistan and then by his club side, PIA, officially because he was deemed ‘too old’ at 28. His place in the team was taken by the son of the PIA head of selectors. That same year, the successful Pakistan Test captain Mushtaq Mohammad was unseated in favour of Asif Iqbal. When Mushtaq then read in his local paper that he was no longer needed even as a player, he reportedly spent two days trying to phone the members of the board to discuss the matter. Not one of them was available to take his call. It was all somehow a representative case study of a culture whose leading practitioners tended to lack the gift of recognising their own limitations and compensating for them by drawing on the strengths of others. For some years, Imran would conduct a cold war by proxy with his illustrious colleague
