illustrious companion had merely followed proceedings with narrowed eyes. When the third ball in rapid succession ‘nearly decapitated’ the batsman, Sobers finally spoke: ‘Bit brisk, this chap.’ The words were uttered with a thin smile and seemed to Evans to be a sort of ‘royal warrant’ coming from the man who was arguably cricket’s greatest ever all-rounder. That Test was drawn, and the West Indies won the second, at Trinidad, by six wickets. Imran reports that he had lost his temper and ‘bowled appallingly’ after being attacked (something of a role reversal) by Greenidge and Roy Fredericks in the latter match. There was then another draw at Georgetown.
Following this, Imran’s tour, hitherto only intermittently dazzling, took much the same upward trajectory as it had at a comparable stage in Australia. Reviewing his performance in the series as a whole, one Jamaican paper wrote, in an only slight case of overstatement, that ‘his fame soared like a rocket and hung high over Caribbean skies for weeks’. In more prosaic terms, in the fourth Test at Trinidad Imran took four for 64 off 21 of the most hostile overs imaginable in the West Indies’ first innings. There was a moment in mid-afternoon when, with the ball flying round the batsmen’s heads and some in the crowd calling their disapproval, the atmosphere threatened to grow ‘iffy’, to again quote Evans. But Imran and Pakistan had stuck to it, eventually winning by 266 runs. The West Indies then generally did Pakistan for pace at Kingston, to take the series 2–1. Imran took six for 90 in the first innings and two for 78 in the second, as well as contributing much-needed runs in the lower middle order. Short of staying behind to sweep up the pavilion, it was hard to see what more he could have done. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s specialist batsmen failed to similarly rise to the occasion. Set 442 to win, they were soon 51 for four. At that stage, in a show of less than total confidence in the outcome, the tour management saw fit to change the date of the team’s return flight to Pakistan from Wednesday, the last scheduled day of play, to Tuesday; an admission of ‘a general lack of resolve’, Imran notes ruefully.
In the five Tests Imran took 25 wickets at 31.60 apiece. He’d clearly taken his time to find his form early in the tour, as great players frequently do in unfamiliar conditions; only mediocrity being always at its best. Generally speaking, the series confirmed that Pakistan for all their occasional frailties deserved their place at cricket’s top table. It also did no harm at all to Imran’s reputation. ‘I want to be known as a good bowler … My ambition is to dominate … What I’m always after is penetration,’ he’d once remarked. Within a few short months his textbook technique, iron will and unshakable self-confidence had convinced even the most sceptical that his targets were well within his scope.
His fame was already secure in Pakistan, where satellite technology had allowed huge numbers to watch their team’s two winter tours. As a result, cricket soon reached the plateau occupied only by soccer or rock music in Britain. This was the era in which the journalist Fareshteh Aslam refers to Imran as a combined Superman and Spiderman, ‘this exotic-looking guy doing battle on our behalf’. Mobs now followed him about, and Imran, who a year earlier had been known to stop and chat with fans at his local Lahore milk bar, learnt to hurry out of the players’ entrances of cricket grounds around the world and make his way to safety through side streets and roped-off alleyways.
As it happened, there was something of a precedent for this level of intense adulation of a Pakistani cricketer. A hard-hitting batsman named ‘Merry Max’ Maqsood had played for his country 16 times in the 1950s, while enjoying a particularly active social life. Equally famous for his strokeplay on and off the cricket field, he had soon acquired a substantial cult following. At the end of the 1954 tour of England, Merry Max had stayed behind to take a local bride. Since he was allegedly already married the news initially caused something of a splash in Pakistan, though even the Star eventually held this to be a ‘largely private matter’ between him and the lawful Mrs Maqsood. No such restraint greeted the news of Imran’s various affairs 30 years later, for which the press deployed their full, 24-point size headlines. He was the first tabloid superstar of Asian sport.
On a bitingly cold morning in late May 1977, a shaggy-haired, tanned young man wearing a silk shirt splayed open to display a gold medallion walked through the gate of the municipal cricket ground on Pavilion Lane in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His arrival was noted by a solitary reporter, who saw the man nod to one or two friends, then sit down in one of a sea of empty seats, essentially unrecognised by those few duffle-coated spectators in attendance. The reporter was intrigued to learn the man’s identity. It was an ‘almost comically mild-mannered’ Imran, already one of the world’s most famous sportsmen, who would spend the early part of the season playing a variety of modest Yorkshire league and club matches while waiting to qualify for Sussex. He seems to have enjoyed the substantially less formal atmosphere of rural northern grounds and all the familiar icons associated with the lower reaches of English cricket: deckchairs, long grass, tiny plastic cups of volcanic tea and a sparse but surprisingly loyal fan base. Imran took the opportunity to put in place some final refinements to his bowling action, running in closer to the stumps and occasionally going round the wicket in order to stand up straighter at the moment of delivery. By the end of his first season in Sussex, he reports, he felt ‘more confident of putting the ball where I wanted it’.
That year Imran saw rather more of London than had been the case before, often staying at the Shepherd’s Bush flat of the journalist Qamar Ahmed. Also there while passing through town was another young rising Pakistani star, Javed Miandad, a ‘feisty little bugger’ of a cricketer, to quote one good friend. Javed, too, was beginning a four-year playing association with Sussex. According to Qamar Ahmed, ‘Imran was shy and not an extrovert, and remained so even after becoming an overnight star in that Sydney Test. He stayed with me off and on whenever he visited London. He was a lot younger person than me, basically quiet, and never any bother.’ Ahmed insists that Imran’s good nature extended toward his fellow house guest. ‘Javed was also very young, and competitive, when he joined Sussex. But he and Imran never spoke against each other. Even on tour overseas they were quite good mates and Imran would listen to him agreeably — in some ways Javed possessed a sharper brain cricketwise.’ For all that, the relationship would face a number of well-publicised snags in the years ahead. Imran would later be one of 10 players to issue a statement deploring Javed’s leadership of the Test side, and subsequently to refuse to play under him. Although the crisis was defused and they were to remain international colleagues for another decade, Imran appears to have harboured certain long-term reservations about the younger man’s character. ‘Javed’s man management was poor [and] he lacked the strength of will to drag the team along under his wing,’ he notes. I was told that Imran gave particularly short shrift to Javed’s ‘highly vocal’ complaints following the declaration that had left the batsman stranded on 280 in that 1983 Hyderabad Test against India. Coming across the 25-year-old Javed later that night in the Pakistan hotel, Imran reportedly remarked (in Urdu), ‘This is a team game, son. I don’t believe in playing for personal records.’
Wasim Raja considered Imran ‘deeply sensuous’ and ‘somewhat cavalier’ as a cricketer, whereas ‘there wasn’t much sensuousness’ about the practical-minded Javed. ‘In most cases, [Miandad] would have one eye on the scoreboard, while Imran didn’t give a damn about averages — nor was he ever frightened to lose, if it came to that.’ Imran was interior, self-referring; Javed was more up front and superficial, concerned with material rewards and acclaim. Another well-placed source told me that where Javed was ‘obvious’, meticulous and ambitious, Imran was laid back, affable and self-contained. ‘You could buy most of what Javed had, if not his talent. You couldn’t buy what Imran had. He had something that’s inside.’ The result, as Wasim Raja observed, was ‘much detachment, some respect and a little distrust’, all part of an occasionally dysfunctional but long-running working relationship that was to be the making of modern Pakistani cricket.
In his memoirs, Javed recalls a somewhat curious incident when he had acted as a peacekeeper between Imran and their mutual landlord Qamar Ahmed. Evidently miffed at something the journalist had written, Imran let loose one night with a whole series of complaints, including the observation that the Shepherd’s Bush flat was ‘a pigsty’. At
