Imran Khan: The Cricketer, The Celebrity, The Politician. Christopher Sandford
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for 23 off his allotted eight overs against Glamorgan; another three for 23 against Yorkshire; three for 34 against Gloucestershire; three for 39 against Middlesex; and so on. If the match warranted, he generally added a brisk 30 or 40 runs with the bat. The message seemed to be that he would take an average of three wickets in each one-day outing, and bowl that much faster than anyone else. It was the same story in the Benson and Hedges trophy, where Worcestershire went all the way to the final against Kent, which they lost. If Imran’s bowling was often, as one observer put it, ‘fast to the point of dementia’, it was also successful more times than not. He left everyone stunned in a Gillette Cup tie against Gloucestershire at Bristol when he began to bounce his friend Mike Procter, who was then widely regarded as not the best man to provoke. Sure enough, Procter retaliated when it was his turn to bowl. After a couple of hooked fours, Imran appeared to have won this particular duel, only for him to fall to the more innocuous seam of Tony Brown.
Imran’s combative temperament helped make him the supreme bowler he now became. ‘I’ve always hated taking a beating lying down — something essential to a medium-pacer,’ he says. ‘Sometimes [I] just saw blood in front of my eyes … It was during those moments that an increase of adrenalin would add an extra yard or two to my pace.’ People who played against him at the time generally agree that he was a difficult, extraordinarily driven opponent. Several of them described him as having been ‘intense’ or even ‘manic’ when he came ‘hurtling in’, his ‘fiery brown eyes’ with an ‘electric glaze’. With his fist clenched and his knees pumping up and down ‘he seem[ed] like a loose power line crackling around, and just as dangerous’. One Worcestershire colleague thought Imran’s intensity on the field ‘took a lot out of him as far as being a human being was concerned. You don’t turn that kind of competitive drive on and off. He was always away by himself somewhere, and we didn’t see him socially.’ Mike Vockins, a professional acquaintance for six years, ‘never got that close’ to Imran, and remembers that he would ‘disappear pretty frequently to London or Birmingham, presumably to visit Pakistani friends or family.’ You hear a lot about this sense of him having been a man apart from the rest of the team. Imran had a ‘persecution complex’, one former colleague believes. ‘One thing most cricketers have is a sense of humour — you need it — but he pretty well totally lacked the ability to laugh at himself.’ Set against this is the testimony of a well-known former Test player and academic, who remarked that Imran was ‘warmly accessible to all sorts of people on the periphery of the action like autograph collectors and dressing-room attendants and programme sellers, and a complete mystery to his team-mates. Without stretching it too far, you could see some of the elements of the classic cowboy type there in the way he did the business and then just silently walked off into the sunset. I always thought there was a touch of Clint Eastwood to the guy.’
So it seems fair to say that Imran wasn’t regarded as the life and soul of the party among his English county team-mates. But even those who had doubts about him as a person admired the often thrilling and always robust quality of his all-round cricket as seen in 1976. It remained a moot point whether Imran would ever thaw out as a human being, but clearly he’d already made the leap from journeyman county professional to world-class entertainer.
In the three-day match against Somerset in early June, Imran scored a full-bodied 54 in the first innings and 81 in the second. There was a raw fury to some of his strokes that made his partner D’Oliveira’s seem merely polite by comparison. Imran added an equally lusty 57 against Kent — and the pattern was set. He then beat Lancashire virtually single-handed, with bowling figures of seven for 53 and six for 46, as well as an unbeaten 111 in Worcestershire’s only innings. Another century followed against Leicestershire. And another against a Northants attack led by Sarfraz. Fast bowlers didn’t generally hope for glamorous figures against the Surrey of the mid-1970s, whose top order typically read: Edrich, Butcher, Howarth, Younis, Roope, Test players all. Imran took five for 80 against them. There were wickets or runs, and frequently both, right up to the game against Gloucestershire in the second week of September. Imran managed a single victim (ironically, his Test colleague Sadiq), having for once — exhausted, perhaps — forsaken pace for control. The local paper speaks of his ‘almost robot accuracy’ in the Gloucester first innings. Little did the reporter or anyone else know it at the time, but Imran had played his last match for Worcestershire.
In retrospect, his departure was logical enough. A fractious relationship with certain colleagues, occasional friction with the club authorities and that oft-quoted boredom with Worcester itself all added up to a strong case against Imran’s returning for a seventh season at New Road. The reason his decision came as a shock to so many there was that they saw it in the context of his recent performances for the county. Imran finished the 1976 season with 1,092 runs at an average of 40 and 65 wickets at 23 apiece, earning him the Wetherall Award for English cricket’s 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