Pakistan had overrun the New Zealanders, with Imran taking a respectable 14 wickets (including his best Test analysis to date, four for 59, at Hyderabad) over the three matches. It possibly says something for the Pathan revenge ethic that, years later, he was to speak of his particular satisfaction at dismissing Glenn Turner, ‘who had said that I didn’t have it in me to become a fast bowler’. Although onesided, the series wasn’t entirely free of incident. Early in the proceedings, Imran had occasion to speak to the umpire in Urdu to ask him to stand back from the stumps, whereupon the non-striking batsman had requested that he confine himself to English when addressing the match officials. Some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives had followed. In the third Test at Karachi, Imran was prohibited from completing his over against Richard Hadlee and temporarily removed from the bowling attack by another umpire, Shakoor Rana, who felt he had been over-generous in his use of the bouncer.
Six weeks later the Pakistanis arrived in Australia to find that the home press didn’t much fancy their chances there. ‘COBBLERS!’ was the initial assessment of the West Australian, while the Herald Sun restricted itself to the only marginally more charitable ‘PAK IT IN!’ Dennis Lillee took the opportunity of his own newspaper column to remark that, though Pakistan had a few talented batsmen, their bowling attack (with Imran himself dismissed as ‘a trundler’) was rubbish. The first Test at Adelaide seemed to confirm the generally low opinion of the tourists. Australia got the better of a high-scoring draw, even though they lost their nerve when chasing a relatively modest 285 to win on the last day. The Melbourne Test, played over the New Year, followed a broadly similar pattern, at least up to the half-way point. Australia’s Greg Chappell won the toss and batted. A day and a half later he was able to declare on 517 for eight, Imran having been ‘tonked around’, to again quote the Herald Sun, with figures of none for 115 off 22 overs. Pakistan, who had seemed to be cruising at 241 for one, were then dismissed for 333.
Under the circumstances, and now faced by a vocally derisive 60,000-strong crowd, certain other bowlers might have quietly given up the fight. But that was rarely to be an option that appealed to Imran. In the next two sessions he took five Australian wickets, including that of Dennis Lillee, whom he clean bowled. According to those who saw it (and Lillee himself, who didn’t) it was very possibly the fastest ball ever sent down at the Melbourne ground. Richie Benaud told me that, on the basis of this performance, which proved to be in a losing cause, ‘I promptly chalked Imran up as extremely interesting.’ In Benaud’s measured technical opinion, ‘he was [quite] determined, and had markedly increased his pace and improved his balance in delivery’. Cricket, of course, is played as much with the brain as it is with the body. Here, too, Imran was quite well fixed. That same week, he had happened to meet his old sparring partner Geoff Boycott, who was spending the winter playing for an Australian club side rather than with England in India and Sri Lanka. Boycott remembers that he took Imran aside and advised him to bowl ‘really quick’, preferably aiming ‘about four inches outside off stump’ in short, controlled bursts to make the most of the conditions. The Pakistan tour management seemed to concur. Seven days after leaving Melbourne, Imran went on to take six for 102 and six for 63 in the course of the third and final Test at Sydney, which the tourists won by eight wickets. It was their first such victory in Australia, and only their fifth anywhere overseas, and a major turning-point both for the team and for the ‘Orient Express’, as the Herald Sun now hurriedly renamed him. Some of the hyperbole might have been a touch overdone, but after this match there was no longer any question that Imran was a fast bowler to be reckoned with. Both the Australian and, more particularly, Pakistani press were highly complimentary. When the reader wasn’t swept along by the lively similes — ‘like a rampant stallion’, ‘like a blistering typhoon’, ‘like a runaway truck’ and so on — there was the statistical evidence to back the imagery up: in just three innings, Imran had taken 17 Australian wickets at slightly over 16 apiece. His departure from the field at Sydney, his shirt sleeve ripped off his arm from all the effort, had brought the house down; as he led his team into the pavilion, spectators of all ages pummelled the railings of the lower terraces, and jaded critics broke into wide grins up in the press box. The next minute saw a steady crescendo in the sort of rowdy whoops and high-pitched acclaim normally associated with a major rock star. Geoff Boycott was in the home dressing-room. ‘Even the Aussie players were standing up applauding,’ he recalls. ‘They thought it was bloody fantastic.’
Imran was 24, and he was famous.
Back in England, Imran’s representatives were engaged in an as yet quiet but ugly spat with the Worcestershire committee, his decision to quit the club seemingly only hardened by his triumphs of the past 12 months. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that there were no obvious personal confrontations before that. But by late 1976 Imran was clearly impatient to move on. In retrospect, Mike Vockins believes that it was ‘inevitable … the real reason for his departure was to be somewhere nearer London, and the party life that went with that’. Seeming to confirm this thesis, Imran’s friend and occasional landlord, the journalist Qamar Ahmed, told me that it wasn’t about ‘cricket as such … he left to have a more exciting life and to enjoy the bright lights’. Worcester must have seemed even more dreary a prospect to Imran after his having tasted international fame, although the same problem never seems to have applied to Basil D’Oliveira, the best-known sportsman in the world for a time in 1968–69 following his controversial omission from an England tour of South Africa on allegedly racial grounds. ‘I love it here,’ D’Oliveira once told me as we enjoyed the hospitality of an after-hours club in central Worcester. ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.’
In his own quiet way, Imran now measured himself against the modern giants: Lloyd, Richards, the Chappell brothers and Lillee. Though he didn’t bluster about ‘climbing in the ring’ with Larwood and Voce in the way Fred Trueman occasionally had, he aspired to belong in their company; as Asif Iqbal recalls, he was ‘always going to do more than the rest of us’. Some of the same self-assurance was evident in Imran’s handling of the protracted judicial wranglings with Worcestershire. By all accounts, the county appears to have initially accepted the inevitable with some good grace. Dropping the club a note on a souvenir postcard while on an overseas tour, Imran wrote, ‘I am sorry to inform you that I really do want to leave … I genuinely feel guilty I’m letting [people] down, but I am afraid I have also to think whether I am happy living in a place I don’t like. Moreover I was treated pretty poorly by the club as regards my accommodation.’ ‘I was distressed to read the contents of your note,’ Mike Vockins wrote back, urging him only to ‘keep an open mind’ and ‘achieve a truly objective decision’. On 1 January 1977, the day he was to tear out the heart of the Australian batting at Melbourne, Imran was formally released from his contract and thus able to negotiate with other counties. He chose Sussex, on account of his friendship with Tony Greig as well as the club’s relative proximity to London. To his evident displeasure, Worcestershire then objected to the move, claiming to have a ‘proprietary interest’, to quote the subsequent legalese, in a player they might reasonably have felt they had discovered in the first place. Their creative solution to ‘Mr Khan’s withdrawal of labour’, as the lawyers put it, was for him to serve a suspension for the entire 1977 season, after which he would be free to play for whomever he chose.* Later that winter the parties met before the TCCB registration committee at Lord’s, where Worcestershire’s barrister cross-examined Imran over the course of two ‘intense’ sessions about his ‘capricious’ motives for leaving the county. The judicial process as a whole had been ‘almost like [a] criminal trial,’ he later complained. At the end of the hearing, the TCCB formally found Imran’s case ‘not proven’ and agreed to suspend his registration until January 1978. The curt, one-paragraph ruling made reference to ‘the player hav[ing] put forward reasons … deriving solely [from] his own personal enjoyment and social convenience to reside away from Worcestershire’. To the men in the committee room, this was ‘not grounds for his [immediate] registration with Sussex’, nor was it ‘in the best interests of competitive County Cricket as a whole’.
At that stage Imran and Sussex appealed to the 25-man Cricket Council, the sport’s ultimate governing authority in the British Isles, and a body hardly less august than the medieval Star Chamber. In due course there was another all-day hearing at Lord’s before