Nawaz would be neither the first nor the last player to go public with this particular allegation. But whether Sarfraz’s claim was deliberate or compulsive, there is no doubt the Pakistan team were affected by it. Although Imran himself was above reproach, he was made vividly aware of the rumours on a daily basis, chiefly by a Pakistani press never inclined to ignore or bury a good scandal. In fact some of the most lurid headlines on the subject came not in London but in Lahore and Karachi. It reached the point where in April 1990, at Sharjah, Imran felt compelled to gather his players together in the dressing-room before the start of play in a one-day international and have each of them swear on a copy of the Koran that none of them stood to gain by Pakistan losing.
The gladiatorial atmosphere in which Pakistan typically played their cricket also, perhaps not surprisingly, contained an element of crowd participation. In December 1980, Pakistan hosted a Test against the West Indies at Multan; Imran took five for 62 in the visitors’ first innings. Late in the match the West Indies bowler Sylvester Clarke, apparently aggrieved at being struck by an orange peel while fielding on the third man boundary, retaliated by throwing a brick into the crowd. It was an incalculably cretinous thing to do, but, even so, the response was somehow peculiarly Pakistani. A press photographer’s close-up of a victim of Clarke’s assault bleeding from a head wound was blown up and became a popular poster in bus and train stations throughout the country. Some time later, disgruntled students invaded the pitch in the course of a one-day match between Pakistan and India at Karachi. Imran, who was bowling at the time, calmly assessed the situation, removed a stump, waved it under the nose of the lead demonstrator and reportedly offered to impale him with it. After that there was a loss of interest on the student’s part in prolonging his stay on the field. Sometimes the source of the trouble was even closer to hand; at Perth, in November 1981, Javed Miandad became probably the first player to threaten to brain another one during a Test, after Dennis Lillee had kicked him. Lillee later admitted to having also given Javed some ‘verbal’, but insisted the Pakistani batsman had ‘overreacted’; a not unheard-of development.
For Imran Khan, the perennially embattled cricket superstar, a career in politics must have seemed almost tranquil by comparison. It’s rare for a player not only to operate at that level, in what he once called the ‘toxic’ atmosphere of Pakistan sport, but also to have graced the game in its every format around the world, chiefly in England. Although Imran took some time to find his feet in his adopted home, several good judges were left in no doubt, even then, that his arrival on the scene marked that of a major new talent. In July 1975, a 19-year-old Cambridge freshman named Alastair Hignell walked out to bat in the university match against Oxford at Lord’s. Hignell had been away on an England rugby tour of Australia until the eve of the game, and ‘therefore had no idea what to expect from the bowler ominously pawing at the ground before starting his run-up somewhere in the mid distance. Sure enough, it was a terrifying barrage … At one point, I took the wrong option and ducked into a bouncer which hit the fleshy part of my ear and ricocheted past the wicketkeeper in the direction of the pavilion. I was hoping for a single to fine leg to get off strike, so set off immediately. As it happened, the ball hit the boundary wall before the fielder could intercept it, but for some reason the umpire, John Langridge, didn’t bother tapping his leg for leg byes and instead signalled four runs … As I was trotting by I pointed out that the ball hadn’t hit my bat, but had bounced off my ear which by now was red, swollen and throbbing painfully. “Listen, sonny,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, as Imran again limbered up in the distance. “You’re not going to be here long, anyway. You might as well take all the runs you can get.”’
* For the statistically minded, 83.3 per cent of the Tests Pakistan played under Imran’s captaincy thus ended in a win or a draw; Mike Brearley, widely regarded as the Freud of modern Test captains, scored 89.5 per cent, while for Imran’s contemporary Ian Botham the figure falls to 66.6 per cent.
* Reflecting on the incident, the veteran journalist Antao Hassan told me that ‘It was really a question of what’s now called ageism’; Saeed was already 31 when he was dropped — ‘virtually senile’ in a national cricket culture that puts an extreme premium on youth.
* David Constant declined to comment on his feelings, if any, about Imran when I contacted him in 2008. However, Constant’s sometime colleague Dickie Bird was happy to oblige. He told me that in his experience Imran had ‘play[ed] within the spirit and the law’ of the game, and that he had ‘never had a problem with him’.
TWO Of Hospitality and Revenge
‘Once, when I was 13,’ Imran recalls, ‘I was stopped by the police while I was driving my father’s motor car. Of course, I didn’t have a licence. So I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I bribed the policeman. He took the money and I drove away again scot-free. But later that day the chauffeur, who’d been sitting next to me in the car, reported the incident to my mother. She was livid.’ According to at least one reliable account of the ensuing five minutes of ‘peak-volume drama’ this was, if anything, to underestimate Mrs Khan’s reaction. She ‘literally turned purple’. Those who witnessed (or even heard of) the fury of this normally serene, well-bred lady would long marvel at the scene, speaking of it like old salts recalling a historic hurricane. The gist of her remarks was that by resorting to bribery Imran had brought a terrible shame both on himself and his family. No punishment was too severe for this uniquely heinous offence. Had she had anything to do with it, he would have been sent to gaol. Imran’s spluttering attempt at a defence, in which he protested that other boys of his age had done the same thing — or would have done so, given the chance — was cut short by his mother’s abrupt verdict on the matter. ‘You’re not other boys,’ she reminded him, decisively. ‘You are a Pathan.’
The story illuminates Imran’s childhood, and perhaps his later life, on a number of levels. There’s the fact that his family even owned a car (which one party insists was ‘a sort of limousine — perhaps even a Mercedes’) in the first place, at a time when most Pakistanis travelled exclusively by the country’s notoriously congested train or bus network, if not on foot. At Partition in 1947 the entire Pakistan road system covered just 17,500 kilometres (10,900 miles), of which asphalt roads made up less than 20 per cent; as late as 1967, a couple of years after the bribery incident, the number of privately owned vehicles was estimated at only 240,000, more than half of which were motorcycles, out of a population of some 62 million. Then there’s the matter of the chauffeur, one of four servants employed in the Khans’ home in the exclusive Zaman Park suburb of Lahore, and the significant detail that the 13-year-old Imran had the sort of resources about him with which to bribe the policeman in the first place, let alone the chutzpah to pull it off. The hardship and rawness of the country as a whole, the family’s striving to ‘compete and contribute … [their] utter disdain of sitting around by the pool’, or of aristocratic languor of any sort, were real enough. But the five well-dressed Khan children, the car and the driver, the domestic help, the generous pocket money — all belied the later, well-publicised images of poverty certain Western political commentators would call on to promote Imran as a ‘man of the people’.
Clearly the key message, though, lay in his mother’s terse summation, ‘You are a Pathan.’ To her, as he later wrote, ‘that was synonomous with pride and honesty’. Central to the tribal identity of the Pathans (or ‘Pakhtuns’) is strict adherence to the male-centred code of conduct, the pakhtunwali. Foremost in this is the notion of honour, or nang, followed in turn by the principle of revenge, or badal. It would be fair to say that the two concepts are closely linked, as the pakhtunwali makes clear that offences to one’s honour must be avenged, or else there is no honour. Although minor problems may be settled by negotiation, murder demands blood revenge, and until recent times women caught in illicit
