walked into the ground unnoticed, it was an impressive entrance. The match itself was another draw, but a rather more distinguished one than its two predecessors. The chief honours went to Peter Roebuck and Alastair Hignell, who respectively hit 158 and 60 for Cambridge. Those items apart, Imran’s bowling had all the virtues of a cool, calculated, well-executed assault. As Hignell says, it was a ‘physically terrifying’ and ‘sickening’ barrage; no small accolade from a man who had just come through several bruising encounters with the Australian rugby team.
Imran was to have a modestly successful fifth season at Worcestershire, finishing with 46 first-class wickets at 26, almost exactly the same figures as those for his up-and-coming rival Ian Botham. Still, it was an ‘only fair’ existence. A salary of £ 1,500, paid in six instalments of £250, with a munificent £10 for each county championship win, allowed for little lavish indulgence. But over and above the financial rewards, or lack of them, it had become clear even to Worcestershire that Imran had certain deep-seated misgivings about county cricket as a whole. ‘The English professional just isn’t hungry enough for success. There’s too much cricket … the players get stale,’ he wrote of his experiences some years later. Apart from the ‘essential tedium’ of a system in which too many buckled when they should, perhaps, have swashed, Imran had a more specific objection to his working environment. As he says, ‘I simply found it boring in Worcester’, where he had moved out of the Star Hotel first into digs and then into an ‘unsalubrious’ short-term flat above a fish-and-chip shop in the town centre.
Almost from the first, Imran had vocal reservations about his English club, where he had initially played a series of ‘grim’ and ‘dead-end’ Second XI matches before being ‘bullied’ into bowling ‘military medium’ for the seniors, allegedly at a reduced salary than the one ‘Harold’ Shakespeare (who died in 1976) had promised him in the pavilion at Lahore. As we’ve seen, the eventual terms were on the slim side: as well as his basic salary, the club undertook to ‘… arrange accommodation for away games on a bed-and-breakfast, early-morning tea and one newspaper basis … A meal allowance of £1 will be paid for an evening meal when away from home and for Sunday lunches when away from home’, before adding the rather bleak assurance that ‘a sum equivalent to the Second Class Rail Fare from Worcester to the venue of [an] away match will be paid to all players participating in the match’. Imran, though one of the least materially minded of professional sportsmen, was moved to send a two-page handwritten letter to Tony Greig, the captain of Sussex, in September 1975. ‘Dear Tony, I wondered if you and [your] committee would consider the possibility of taking me on staff next year?’ he enquired, citing ‘the availability of overseas registration and the young age group of the team’ as reasons for his interest. Four days later, Greig wrote back in more measured terms: ‘In reply to your correspondence of 12 September 1975 I would suggest that you telephone our Secretary as soon as your position becomes clear. You will appreciate the implications of any approach prior to your official release from Worcester … Yours sincerely, A.W. Greig, Captain of Sussex.’
I asked Mike Vockins, the long-serving Worcestershire secretary, about all this. Among other things, Vockins mentioned that he and his committee had fought a hitherto unreported running battle with the Test and County Cricket Board to retain Imran’s services. There were various sub-plots involved, but the basic problem concerned the TCCB’s rule, already the source of a skirmish with the club in 1973, restricting each affiliate side to a maximum of two overseas players. As Worcestershire already had New Zealand’s Glenn Turner and the West Indian bowler Vanburn Holder on their books, the club had mobilised on their somewhat unappreciative young all-rounder’s behalf.
‘At the end of Imran Khan’s time at Oxford, the TCCB decided, to my surprise, that his qualification for us lapsed,’ Vockins recalls. As far as the board were concerned, Imran had effectively become a Pakistani again after graduating. ‘It seemed totally illogical, and was also at odds with what both the club and more to the point Imran himself wanted. Not only did we appeal, but we were determined that we should present our case as well as we could and duly retained John Field-Evans QC, later to be a High Court judge, to fight our corner. It was quite an anxious time. I didn’t want Imran to be unduly worried, and so sought to give him confidence that the appeal would be successful and otherwise didn’t involve him directly.’ Another source then on the Worcestershire committee told me that it had cost ‘a lot of money, certainly in the several hundreds of pounds’ to appeal against the TCCB’s ruling, and that ‘that should answer any questions about whether or not we were fully committed to Mr Khan and his welfare’. (Even so, there remained Imran’s core point that ‘all my Oxford friends had moved to London, and I was stuck in Worcester … I was bored to tears there,’ he told me.) After several ‘trying’ months the club had prevailed and ‘both we and the player in question were happy to continue our association together’. Imran omits the episode of the TCCB registration from both his autobiographies, but it does seem to refute the idea that he’d been utterly miserable at Worcestershire from the start, or that the club had ever been less than wholehearted about keeping him on their books.
Imran went back to Pakistan that autumn, for only his second visit home in four-and-a-half years. He marked the occasion by making a few low-key appearances in the BCCP Patron’s Trophy on behalf of Dawood Industries, a ‘manure and insurance combine’ based in Karachi, as it intriguingly described itself. The same tournament hosted sides from the federal Water and Power Development Agency and a heavily fancied Income Tax (Collections) Department. In the second half of the season Imran represented Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in the Quaid-e-Azam Cup. He took six for 68 and five for 79 against Punjab, gave a bravura all-round performance in the tie against National Bank by taking three for 53 and six for 48 as well as scoring a second-innings century, and followed up with another six-wicket haul against Sind. Imran finished his short involvement in the domestic season with 446 runs at a touch under 30, and 52 wickets at 19 apiece. PIA paid him the equivalent of some £75 a month for his services. Back in Worcester, Mike Vockins was sitting down to write to Imran: ‘The committee has agreed that your basic salary for 1976 should be £2,000, on top of which you will receive appearance money, win money and team prize monies in the normal way … We shall also contribute £100 towards your air fare back to this country.’ On 19 November Imran wrote back to thank Vockins for his offer. The financial terms were ‘very satisfactory’, although he evidently still had doubts about the quality and cost of his local digs, for which ‘last summer I had to pay about £9.50 a week until John Inchmore moved in with me’. Imran’s eventual contract for 1976 bears the handwritten codicil: ‘I would like it to be noted that my accommodation should be subsidised if the rent is too high.’
Imran’s devotion to the grail of constant self-improvement was again kindled during his winter in Pakistan. When not playing competitively in the domestic competitions he found time to practise at the Lahore Gymkhana, next to his family home in Zaman Park. Imran had greatly disappointed the citizens of that cricket-mad enclave by not showing up during any of his Oxford vacations over the previous three years. Now crowds of them came to the Gymkhana to watch him work out (he had a young net bowler throw bouncers at him from 15 yards to improve his hook shot) and mill around the pavilion door for autographs. ‘Every young boy in Lahore wanted to shake Imran’s hand,’ one friend recalls, ‘and many of their elder sisters also worshipped him in their own way.’
Relatively few who have grown up in Lahore, as Imran did, have willingly returned for any extended time after tasting the seductions of the West. (It would be fair to say, too, that a stint in the likes of Birmingham or Dallas has, conversely, led some to appreciate Pakistani life all the more.) And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the 23-year-old native son who spent the winter of 1976 there was ‘virtually unrecognisable’ from the 18-year-old tyro who had flown off with the Pakistani team in 1971. Imran’s boyhood companion Yusuf Salahudin told me that his friend had led a ‘somewhat cloistered life’ growing up in Zaman Park, ‘surrounded by his extended family almost as if it was a colony’. When Salahudin met Imran again after some five years’ absence, ‘I thought he was more obviously mature and outgoing … A man of the world … There was a certain familiar confidence there, but also a new sense of calm. As you grow
