that Imran was unsettled, [and] for it to be noted.’ Seeming to refute the idea that Imran had complained about his life in Worcester virtually on a daily basis, Vockins adds, ‘We were wholly unaware that he disliked living here. I have no recollection of his ever having spoken about it over the course of five years, or having talked about being unhappy to me or any senior officer of the club.’
There were, it’s true, certain ongoing administrative difficulties when it came to the matter of Imran’s lodgings. In his 1983 memoirs, written relatively soon after the events in question, he insists that he had arrived in Worcester for the start of the 1976 season, his annus mirabilis, to find that he was effectively homeless. ‘I had to sleep on Glenn Turner’s floor for the first five days, then the county put me up in what I thought was the lousiest hotel I’ve ever seen … After six weeks, I managed to find a flat of my own and then the club made me pay half the hotel bill.’ In time Imran solved the problem of his Worcester accommodation by rarely turning up there. After taking possession of a ‘lively’ second-hand Mazda, he preferred to bomb up and down the A44 to London at every opportunity. There appears to have been a familiar theme to Imran’s restiveness. Speaking of monogamy, the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow would write in his novel Dangling Man, ‘The soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisical women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?’ For Imran, the answer was clearly no. Even when he was seeing one of his ‘special girls’, he made little pretence of fidelity. Imran’s taste in women ignored all considerations of age and appearance, and also spanned the class structure. In the course of the Worcestershire years there was a ‘succession of debs, dolly birds and shopgirls’, I was told by one of his still impressed colleagues. To be fair to Imran, he also showed notable self-restraint, given that he was as often the pursued as he was the pursuer. One of his relatively few male English friends recalled an occasion when they had been sitting together on a ‘perfectly decorous night out’ in a London club, only for ‘a siren’ to walk over, sit down in Imran’s lap and place his hand on her leg. ‘Help yourself, sexy,’ she’d announced, rather unnecessarily. Although Imran declined that particular offer, he can hardly have failed to reflect on the life he left behind in Pakistan, where the authorities had recently re-introduced public flogging for ‘those who drink, gamble or sexually philander’.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Imran had reservations about Worcester, an undeniably lovely town but one which lacked any of the raw energy, vital nightlife and racy promise of neighbouring Birmingham, another of his frequent overnight haunts. His predominant sense of the place would remain its ‘soulless’ amenities, oddly enough with the sole exception of the public library, where he was a regular weekly patron. As well as the matter of his ‘lousy’ hotel and subsequent accommodations, Imran seems to have had two other particular issues with the Worcestershire club. They had waited until 1976 to award him his county cap, at which time his wages had risen from a basic £2,000 to a relatively munificient £2,500, with the prospect of various allowances and bonuses.
‘Provided I make up my mind to return to Worcester next year,’ Imran wrote to Mike Vockins in September 1976, ‘I would like the following terms: a) £4,000 basic salary; b) free accommodation; c) full return airfare.’ In time the club wrote back to offer £3,000. ‘After giving myself two months to make up my mind,’ Imran replied, ‘I have finally decided [not to return]. I have realised that even if you had agreed to everything I had demanded in that note, that still would not compensate me for the dreary existence that Worcester has to offer me … I honestly don’t think I can spend another six months of my life in such a stagnant place.’
This general dissatisfaction was compounded by Imran’s distaste for a specific ordeal he faced at Worcester, where, to a man, from the club chairman down to the lowliest programme vendor they addressed him as ‘Immy’. It was no more than the standard dressing-room lingo, which turned D’Oliveira into ‘Dolly’, Pridgeon into ‘Pridgey’, Inchmore into ‘Inchy’ (though Hemsley remained Hemsley), and so on. Although he never seems to have openly complained about it, Imran ‘absolutely loathed’ the practice, which apparently struck him as patronising. One of his local girlfriends remarked that by the time he left Worcestershire, it had become a ‘fixation’ for him and ‘definitely poisoned the atmosphere [with the club]’. He had pronounced the offending name as if he was ‘smelling a dead fish’. Early in their own relationship, she had noticed that Imran seldom gave up on that sort of grudge. ‘Once he took a dislike to someone or something, you could absolutely never get him back again.’
For their part, some at Worcestershire believed that Imran had effectively used the club as a sort of paid finishing school. According to this theory, he had joined the county as a promising but erratic young seamer and, thanks to men like Henry Horton, left again as a devastatingly hostile ‘quick’ of international class. This was perhaps to downplay the role the bowler himself played in the transformation. In the same vein, certain of the county membership remained stubbornly convinced that they had subsidised Imran’s education at Worcester Royal Grammar School, whereas in fact the fees were paid in full by his father. (The members might have been on firmer ground had they raised the matter of the help given him in areas such as his work permit and TCCB registration.) There were equally persistent and unfounded rumours that he had been poached by another team with the promise of higher wages. As the whole dispute became noticeably more bitter in the autumn of 1976, a senior member of the Worcester committee summoned Imran and put it to him that he was leaving ‘because there aren’t enough girls in this town for you to roger’. This same general thesis was aired in the local press, and was eventually widely reproduced in Pakistan.
The opinions of most Pakistani news organisations are not noted for nuance, so the varying fortunes of their Test side tended to get the most graphic possible treatment. ‘WORLD BEATERS!’ the Karachi Star had insisted following a short, unofficial tour to Sri Lanka in January 1976 in which Imran participated. Taken as a whole, the media believed the appointment of Mushtaq Mohammad as national captain to be a major turning-point in the history of Pakistan cricket. ‘We have seen some heated exchange of words between the Board and several of the players,’ the main Lahore morning paper conceded. ‘But those days are over. We can go to the extent of predicting our men will remain successful, peaceful and united for many decades to come.’
It lasted about nine months. Once back in Pakistan, Imran promptly joined his fellow members of the Test squad in protesting their rates of pay, which currently stood at 1,000 rupees (or £50) a man for each five-day match — substantially better than their 1971 levels, but still leaving them firmly at the foot of international cricket’s financial league table. All hell again broke loose in the press. One imaginative and much-quoted report in Lahore insisted that the dispute was really about the players’ hotel and travel arrangements, and that the entire squad would take strike action were their ‘nine-point list of perks’ not met in full. Had a request for a chauffeur-driven limousine apiece made it a round 10, there could not have been more public outrage. The whole matter came to a head in the middle of the three-Test series against New Zealand in October 1976, when the Pakistan team wrote to the board to confirm that they would down tools unless their grievances were at least taken under consideration. The board responded in kind, with a telegram stating that anyone who didn’t immediately accept the existing terms would be banned from Test cricket for life. Five of the team promptly dropped their demands. The remaining six, including Imran, were in negotiation with the board until 90 minutes before the start of play in the second Test, which Pakistan won by 10 wickets.
Not untypically, there appears to have been some misunderstanding between the two sides about the exact terms of the deal that had been thrashed out to allow the match to go forward. Imran recalls that the board chairman Abdul Kardar had ‘admitted our demands were not that unreasonable’ and ‘agreed to a full dialogue’. A fortnight later, Kardar was quoted in the press calling the players ‘unpatriotic bandits’. The board’s subsequent threat to ban the so-called rebels from the winter tours of Australia and the West Indies made headlines even in England, where a ‘distraught’ Mushtaq Mohammad suggested that he would resign from the captaincy. At that stage the Pakistan head of state, Fazal Chaudhry, intervened. The board’s selection committee (though not Kardar himself) were sacked, eventually to be replaced by a government-appointed sports authority,