engaged in an as yet quiet but ugly spat with the Worcestershire committee, his decision to quit the club seemingly only hardened by his triumphs of the past 12 months. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that there were no obvious personal confrontations before that. But by late 1976 Imran was clearly impatient to move on. In retrospect, Mike Vockins believes that it was ‘inevitable … the real reason for his departure was to be somewhere nearer London, and the party life that went with that’. Seeming to confirm this thesis, Imran’s friend and occasional landlord, the journalist Qamar Ahmed, told me that it wasn’t about ‘cricket as such … he left to have a more exciting life and to enjoy the bright lights’. Worcester must have seemed even more dreary a prospect to Imran after his having tasted international fame, although the same problem never seems to have applied to Basil D’Oliveira, the best-known sportsman in the world for a time in 1968–69 following his controversial omission from an England tour of South Africa on allegedly racial grounds. ‘I love it here,’ D’Oliveira once told me as we enjoyed the hospitality of an after-hours club in central Worcester. ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.’
In his own quiet way, Imran now measured himself against the modern giants: Lloyd, Richards, the Chappell brothers and Lillee. Though he didn’t bluster about ‘climbing in the ring’ with Larwood and Voce in the way Fred Trueman occasionally had, he aspired to belong in their company; as Asif Iqbal recalls, he was ‘always going to do more than the rest of us’. Some of the same self-assurance was evident in Imran’s handling of the protracted judicial wranglings with Worcestershire. By all accounts, the county appears to have initially accepted the inevitable with some good grace. Dropping the club a note on a souvenir postcard while on an overseas tour, Imran wrote, ‘I am sorry to inform you that I really do want to leave … I genuinely feel guilty I’m letting [people] down, but I am afraid I have also to think whether I am happy living in a place I don’t like. Moreover I was treated pretty poorly by the club as regards my accommodation.’ ‘I was distressed to read the contents of your note,’ Mike Vockins wrote back, urging him only to ‘keep an open mind’ and ‘achieve a truly objective decision’. On 1 January 1977, the day he was to tear out the heart of the Australian batting at Melbourne, Imran was formally released from his contract and thus able to negotiate with other counties. He chose Sussex, on account of his friendship with Tony Greig as well as the club’s relative proximity to London. To his evident displeasure, Worcestershire then objected to the move, claiming to have a ‘proprietary interest’, to quote the subsequent legalese, in a player they might reasonably have felt they had discovered in the first place. Their creative solution to ‘Mr Khan’s withdrawal of labour’, as the lawyers put it, was for him to serve a suspension for the entire 1977 season, after which he would be free to play for whomever he chose.* Later that winter the parties met before the TCCB registration committee at Lord’s, where Worcestershire’s barrister cross-examined Imran over the course of two ‘intense’ sessions about his ‘capricious’ motives for leaving the county. The judicial process as a whole had been ‘almost like [a] criminal trial,’ he later complained. At the end of the hearing, the TCCB formally found Imran’s case ‘not proven’ and agreed to suspend his registration until January 1978. The curt, one-paragraph ruling made reference to ‘the player hav[ing] put forward reasons … deriving solely [from] his own personal enjoyment and social convenience to reside away from Worcestershire’. To the men in the committee room, this was ‘not grounds for his [immediate] registration with Sussex’, nor was it ‘in the best interests of competitive County Cricket as a whole’.
At that stage Imran and Sussex appealed to the 25-man Cricket Council, the sport’s ultimate governing authority in the British Isles, and a body hardly less august than the medieval Star Chamber. In due course there was another all-day hearing at Lord’s before the Council’s independent tribunal, accompanied by an epistolary scrap between the various lawyers over who exactly would pay the estimated £7,000 bill for the two proceedings. The event was umpired by Oliver Popplewell, QC, aged 50, a distinguished Cambridge University and Free Foresters wicketkeeper in his day and more recently Recorder of the Crown Court. Each side arrived for the encounter with a full complement of barristers, solicitors and expert witnesses. Among those appearing for the appelate was the former Sussex and England captain Ted Dexter, who told me:
I didn’t know Imran. But I got a call from Tony Greig seeking my help in securing a ‘free’ transfer to Sussex. Next thing I found myself speaking in a panelled room at Lord’s along these lines: ‘Imran is a very unhappy young man. He has been unable to make friends. His natural habitat is the London area and though he would prefer to move to Middlesex, Sussex is willing to ensure his access to old haunts and a reconnection with old acquaintances, male or female …’ It’s the only time in my life that I have knowingly committed perjury. I still get a cold shiver when I think back to the quizzical looks that came my way that day at Lord’s. Just as well it was not a court of law or I might have spent time inside at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
After only ten minutes’ deliberation, the tribunal found for Imran, whose ‘special registration’ for Sussex would be completed on 30 July 1977. In his ruling Mr Justice Popplewell noted: ‘We are impressed by the argument that Khan’s unhappiness was a genuine one, and that there was no evidence of financial motivation in his movement … The strict application of the requirement of 12 months prior residence [in Sussex] can be mitigated.’
It was not a universally popular decision. On 26 May, Worcestershire formally wrote to the TCCB secretary, Donald Carr (of Idrees Beg fame), to express their ‘very considerable misgivings over the procedural arrangements adopted for the Appeal’. Carr volleyed back on 29 May that the matter was ‘closed’. There was talk of some county pros refusing to play against the ‘disloyal’ Pakistani, who further earned the censure of the Cricketers Association for ‘hasten[ing] the onset of a football-style transfer system’. Reading the correspondence now, one is struck by the quaint sense of outrage at the notion that a professional athlete should feel free to take his services wherever he chose. ‘Cricket and its relationship between authority and players has suffered a grievous blow,’ the Association’s Jack Bannister thundered on 25 May. Bannister subsequently revealed that acting in his professional capacity he had ‘contacted the 17 county sides with the question, “In your dressing-room, is there a totally unanimous view either for or against the decision allowing Imran Khan to play in August?”’ The results showed nine sides ‘totally opposed’ and four sides ‘largely opposed’ to Imran, with only two in favour and one neutral. Curiously enough, according to Bannister ‘No reply [had] yet been received from Sussex, for whom John Spencer says that the players want more time to consider the matter.’
In the end, the boycott never materialised. Bannister and the other parties dropped their protest. Imran was, however, subjected to some choice abuse on his later visits to play Worcestershire. Of this Mike Vockins says, ‘I was so incensed with the crowd on more than one occasion that I felt minded to get on the PA and insist that spectators show the normal sporting courtesies, before swiftly recognising that this would just have goaded further those who behaved in that unacceptable way.’ In time Vockins himself inherited Imran’s locker in the Worcester dressing-room ‘along with some abandoned cricket gear which was in pretty dire straits. “Festering” would just about sum it up. The boys believed that on occasion, rather than getting kit laundered he rang the sponsors for a new lot and threw the old stuff in the locker.’ Despite this rather dubious personal legacy, Vockins, an eminently fair-minded man who went on to take holy orders, has ‘delightful’ memories of Imran, a view broadly shared by the current Worcestershire regime 30 years after the acrimonious events at Lord’s.
In between dressing up in a dark suit and tie to go into the witness box, Imran had continued his scintillating run of form on Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies. The first Test at Bridgetown featured some notably robust bowling from the home team’s Roberts, Garner and Croft. But even they appeared sluggish in comparison with the ‘Orient Express’, who announced himself with three consecutive bouncers to the opener Gordon Greenidge. The former England wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans told me that he had watched this blitz while standing
