spinner. Imran and Qadir hailed from the north of the country, Javed and Qasim from the south. Javed’s and in turn Wasim Akram’s leadership of the team both ended in tears, amid impassioned if unsubstantiated allegations of regional bias and cronyism.
As captain, Imran (who was proven right about Qadir) ‘seem[ed] to care less about the individual player than about winning as a team’, recalls a Karachi Jang editor, who often heard the private misgivings. His men were proud of the success he brought, but admired rather than liked him. Imran’s entire tenure was characterised by a distinctly personal and hands-on approach to matters such as team selection, tactics and discipline of the kind conspicuously lacking both before and since, and whose results speak for themselves. Pakistan won 14, lost 8 and drew 26 of the 48 Tests they played under him, including three hotly contested tied series against the West Indies at their peak, before going on to win the 1992 World Cup.* Factional grudges and private intrigues were out, he made it abundantly clear, to be replaced by a steely professionalism which placed the premium on winning by any legitimate means. No detail was too small to escape Imran’s notice in this new, centralised regime. When the Pakistan team came off the field at the end of the third day’s play against India at Bangalore in March 1987, the same Karachi Jang journalist went up to Imran in the dressing-room and asked him why, out of interest, some of the Pakistan non-bowling fielders had played in as many as three sweaters, while others had appeared in shirt sleeves. ‘“Oh, I decide all that,” Imran answered casually. Apparently it was all part of some climate-control system impos[ed] from above, to keep each man fresh.’
Imran’s elevation to the Test captaincy obscured for the moment the continuing frailties both of Pakistan cricket as a whole everywhere below international level, and more specifically of a Board of Control for whom nepotism and zonal ‘quotas’ had long been an integral part of the selection process. It also ushered in a period of sustained achievement in both the five- and the one-day game, and a commensurately increased, not to say rabid public support. While the new regime successfully replaced the air of unpredictable charm traditionally surrounding the Pakistan team with one of collective responsibility, it relied heavily (some thought excessively) on the undeniable charisma, all-round bravura performances and fanatical dedication of one man. Even his critics agreed that if greatness consists of the taking of infinite pains, then Imran was a great national leader. Paradoxically, as the Pakistan Test side grew more successful, certain individuals close to it grew more unhappy, apparently believing that a personality cult had been allowed to develop at the expense of a more communal team ethic. No doubt this explains why a former senior colleague of Imran’s, while ‘admir[ing] his talent to the skies’, admitted to certain reservations when I asked him about his captain’s unique leadership style. ‘He was like Stalin,’ he told me, with just a touch of hyperbole.
As we’ve seen, the particular Pakistani gift for self-destructive behaviour, both on and off the cricket field, preceded Imran’s own playing days. In October 1969, to give just one example, the home board took the decision to appoint Intikhab Alam as captain in place of Saeed Ahmed. Saeed did not take the news well. After publicly threatening to brain the chairman of selectors he was suspended for the series and appeared again only sporadically (though with personally bitter consequences for Imran) before his early retirement.*
Imran’s own tenure as captain got off to an unpromising start when, on the morning of his first Test in charge, against England at Edgbaston in July 1982, he left his senior professional Majid Khan, who was 35, out of the side. Majid had not only been Imran’s mentor; he was also his first cousin. It would be hard to exaggerate the shock at the decision, both as expressed by Majid himself and in Pakistan as a whole. Anyone who remembers the circumstances of Margaret Thatcher’s enforced departure from office in 1990 has only to think of that same level of drama, with an added touch of the Pathan tribal tradition of cousins hating each other, to get a bit of the flavour. By all accounts, Imran and Majid didn’t speak for the next ten years, even when Pakistan won the World Cup, although peace broke out again between them later in the 1990s.
Before the tour of England there had been the home series with Sri Lanka in the spring of 1982, when the Pakistan team took the field for the first Test without eight of their senior men, including Imran. The same group had come to share certain private misgivings about Javed Miandad’s leadership of the side, and shortly afterwards they released a public statement to that effect. Imran then unilaterally signalled his intention to return for the second Test, only for the other mutineers to prevent him from doing so. After further protracted negotiations, Pakistan eventually fielded a full-strength team for the third Test at Lahore. Imran took eight for 58 in the Sri Lanka first innings and six for 58 in the second. Pakistan won the match by an innings and 102 runs. Javed then diplomatically announced that he would be ‘unavailable’ to lead his country in England, leaving Imran himself to step in.
In January 1983 Pakistan played India in the fourth Test at Hyderabad, already 2–0 up in the six-match series. In the Pakistan first innings Javed and Mudassar put on 451 for the third wicket, tying the record for the most lucrative partnership in Test history. Javed finished the second day’s play on 238 not out, 127 short of the then highest ever individual score in Tests, Garry Sobers’s 365 not out for the West Indies against Pakistan in 1958. Javed notes that at that stage, ‘there was no talk of a declaration. Imran never brought it up … I took this to mean that I was actively being given a chance to go for all possible records.’ He wasn’t. Much to Javed’s obvious displeasure, Imran declared midway through the following morning’s session, leaving his predecessor as captain stranded on 280. A mutual colleague, reflecting on the two men’s contrasting cricket philosophies, told me that ‘Javed [was] a feisty little bugger, which I say in all affection. He wanted to score tons of runs, and in doing so he wanted to crush the opposition. It was a case of kill or be killed. By contrast, Imran took the view that you played your hardest, but that at the end of the day you shook your opponent’s hand and went off to dinner. He wasn’t demoralised by defeats. He wasn’t aggrandised by victories.’ Pakistan won that particular Test by an innings and 119 runs, with most of the last day to spare.
Zaheer Abbas, the bespectacled batting genius of Pakistan cricket, then led the team in Australia in the winter of 1983–84, when Imran suffered a recurrence of a serious shin injury. Zaheer’s first act was to issue a statement saying that it was not the side he would have chosen and complaining that he was only a caretaker, with inadequate resources, which would appear to have been a tactical own goal on his part. Pakistan duly crumpled in the first two Tests. The third was only marginally more competitive, producing a draw. As a result, the home Board of Control in Lahore was toppled by a coup. Zaheer, meanwhile, took the opportunity of a local newspaper column to publicly castigate his predecessor for everything from his influence over team selection to his various alleged tactical foibles. Despite this rather muted welcome, Imran agreed to appear in the fourth Test at Melbourne as a specialist batsman. On a fast pitch against a still fiery Dennis Lillee, he scored 83 in the first innings and an unbeaten 72 in the second. After that tour Imran would be out of Test cricket for nearly two years, during which Javed Miandad and Zaheer assumed what was effectively a co-captaincy of the team. Against all the odds, Imran returned to international cricket in late 1985, promptly taking 17 wickets in three outings against Sri Lanka. In the course of the series, Javed let it be known that he would again be resigning as captain, and Zaheer announced his retirement. Imran himself then threatened not to play for Pakistan ever again following a dispute with the selectors, but returned to lead his country in the 1987 World Cup, where against expectations they managed to lose to Australia in the semi-final at Lahore. Following the match, a mob estimated at 10,000 roamed the streets, looted stores and demanded the wholesale sacking of the team. Imran’s old fast-bowling partner Sarfraz Nawaz metaphorically fanned the flames by insisting that Pakistan had deliberately thrown the match as part of a betting scam. Evidently this was something of a fetish for Sarfraz, because he made the same allegation nine years later, when Pakistan equally unexpectedly lost a World Cup tie to India.
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