best all-rounder. Worcestershire had enjoyed record attendances and reached a cup final at Lord’s. Some of his colleagues could only puzzle at the fact that, as one of them puts it, ‘Imran chose to fix something that wasn’t broken’.
Nonetheless, living abroad turned out to be an only mixed blessing for the ‘fanatically patriotic’ young star. On the positive side, it was liberating for him, as it was for so many other Test colleagues, from Asif to Zaheer, and more personally fulfilling, perhaps, than the likely alternative of a career in the middle reaches of the Pakistani civil service and an arranged marriage. Exposure to English county cricket, for all its flaws, also had the advantage of allowing him to develop as a bowler under the sharp eye of men like the Worcestershire coach Henry Horton and the evergreen D’Oliveira. Imran was doubly fortunate to play so much of his cricket at New Road, not only a picturesque ground in its own right, but in those days also a pitch that more often than not rewarded an attacking bowler like himself. Of his 65 first-class wickets in the 1976 season, 42 came on his home turf. Imran was an immeasurably better all-round cricketer when he left Worcester than when he joined them.
On the debit side, it’s clear that in more than five years there he never really settled in his adopted home. ‘Exile’ may be too strong a word for it, but Imran’s sense of isolation — not only from his English team-mates but from those ‘timid and alienated’ fellow expats — was something he repeatedly spoke of at the time. Instead of ‘fawn[ing] over British institutions’ the way so many displaced Pakistanis of his generation did, he seems to have regarded the host culture, personally gratifying though it was, as all too often wallowing in a mire of frivolity and decadence. Since Imran wasn’t the sort of man to insert metal studs in his face or to stab someone after a bout of drinking, he was clearly always going to be out of step with a significant part of British society as it developed during his time there. Nor was he that impressed with the ‘right-wing Tory regime’ of Edward Heath or the equally feckless Labour government that succeeded it. One or two friends and colleagues in England saw the first stirrings of Imran’s demotic, broadly speaking anti-West politics 20 years before he launched his Tehreek-e-Insaf (‘Movement for Justice’) party.
It’s also easy to believe that Imran was simply homesick in Worcester in a way that he wasn’t in the more collegial atmosphere of Oxford. Although most people in the club went out of their way to make him feel welcome, not every member of the local community was as obliging. These were still early days for the multicultural society, and many Britons avoided the shackles of excessive deference to what became known as political correctness. As it happened, there was one distressingly widespread illustration of the UK’s still somewhat rudimentary concept of race relations as a whole: ‘Paki-bashing’, of which Worcester saw its fair share around pub closing time most Saturday nights. As far as is known, Imran was never directly targeted, but he attracted his quota of muttered asides both on and off the cricket field. For some reason, a disproportionately high number of these seem to have occurred while playing against Yorkshire. There was apparently one occasion when Imran went out to bat on an overcast evening at Leeds, to be greeted by the home team’s bowler ostentatiously peering down the pitch at him and enquiring, ‘Where are you, lad? Give us a clue. I can’t see nowt’ — all ‘standard, knockabout stuff, [but] not appreciated by Khan’, I was told by one of his team-mates, speaking of such antics in general. As we’ve seen, he tended not to fraternise with his own colleagues, though this seems to have been more out of choice than necessity. As Mike Vockins notes, ‘Worcester had a good group of very personable young cricketers around then. I’m confident that there would have been enough sensitivities among them for one or other to have dropped a word if they felt that Imran was unsettled, [and] for it to be noted.’ Seeming to refute the idea that Imran had complained about his life in Worcester virtually on a daily basis, Vockins adds, ‘We were wholly unaware that he disliked living here. I have no recollection of his ever having spoken about it over the course of five years, or having talked about being unhappy to me or any senior officer of the club.’
There were, it’s true, certain ongoing administrative difficulties when it came to the matter of Imran’s lodgings. In his 1983 memoirs, written relatively soon after the events in question, he insists that he had arrived in Worcester for the start of the 1976 season, his annus mirabilis, to find that he was effectively homeless. ‘I had to sleep on Glenn Turner’s floor for the first five days, then the county put me up in what I thought was the lousiest hotel I’ve ever seen … After six weeks, I managed to find a flat of my own and then the club made me pay half the hotel bill.’ In time Imran solved the problem of his Worcester accommodation by rarely turning up there. After taking possession of a ‘lively’ second-hand Mazda, he preferred to bomb up and down the A44 to London at every opportunity. There appears to have been a familiar theme to Imran’s restiveness. Speaking of monogamy, the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow would write in his novel Dangling Man, ‘The soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisical women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?’ For Imran, the answer was clearly no. Even when he was seeing one of his ‘special girls’, he made little pretence of fidelity. Imran’s taste in women ignored all considerations of age and appearance, and also spanned the class structure. In the course of the Worcestershire years there was a ‘succession of debs, dolly birds and shopgirls’, I was told by one of his still impressed colleagues. To be fair to Imran, he also showed notable self-restraint, given that he was as often the pursued as he was the pursuer. One of his relatively few male English friends recalled an occasion when they had been sitting together on a ‘perfectly decorous night out’ in a London club, only for ‘a siren’ to walk over, sit down in Imran’s lap and place his hand on her leg. ‘Help yourself, sexy,’ she’d announced, rather unnecessarily. Although Imran declined that particular offer, he can hardly have failed to reflect on the life he left behind in Pakistan, where the authorities had recently re-introduced public flogging for ‘those who drink, gamble or sexually philander’.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Imran had reservations about Worcester, an undeniably lovely town but one which lacked any of the raw energy, vital nightlife and racy promise of neighbouring Birmingham, another of his frequent overnight haunts. His predominant sense of the place would remain its ‘soulless’ amenities, oddly enough with the sole exception of the public library, where he was a regular weekly patron. As well as the matter of his ‘lousy’ hotel and subsequent accommodations, Imran seems to have had two other particular issues with the Worcestershire club. They had waited until 1976 to award him his county cap, at which time his wages had risen from a basic £2,000 to a relatively munificient £2,500, with the prospect of various allowances and bonuses.
‘Provided I make up my mind to return to Worcester next year,’ Imran wrote to Mike Vockins in September 1976, ‘I would like the following terms: a) £4,000 basic salary; b) free accommodation; c) full return airfare.’ In time the club wrote back to offer £3,000. ‘After giving myself two months to make up my mind,’ Imran replied, ‘I have finally decided [not to return]. I have realised that even if you had agreed to everything I had demanded in that note, that still would not compensate me for the dreary existence that Worcester has to offer me … I honestly don’t think I can spend another six months of my life in such a stagnant place.’
This general dissatisfaction was compounded by Imran’s distaste for a specific ordeal he faced at Worcester, where, to a man, from the club chairman down to the lowliest programme vendor they addressed him as ‘Immy’. It was no more than the standard dressing-room lingo, which turned D’Oliveira into ‘Dolly’, Pridgeon into ‘Pridgey’, Inchmore into ‘Inchy’ (though Hemsley remained Hemsley), and so on. Although he never seems to have openly complained about it, Imran ‘absolutely loathed’ the practice, which apparently struck him as patronising. One of his local girlfriends remarked that by the time he left Worcestershire, it had become a ‘fixation’ for him and ‘definitely poisoned the atmosphere [with the club]’. He had pronounced the offending name as if he was ‘smelling a dead fish’. Early in their own relationship, she had noticed that Imran seldom gave up on that sort of grudge. ‘Once he took a dislike to someone or something, you could absolutely never get him back again.’
