was umpired by Oliver Popplewell, QC, aged 50, a distinguished Cambridge University and Free Foresters wicketkeeper in his day and more recently Recorder of the Crown Court. Each side arrived for the encounter with a full complement of barristers, solicitors and expert witnesses. Among those appearing for the appelate was the former Sussex and England captain Ted Dexter, who told me:
I didn’t know Imran. But I got a call from Tony Greig seeking my help in securing a ‘free’ transfer to Sussex. Next thing I found myself speaking in a panelled room at Lord’s along these lines: ‘Imran is a very unhappy young man. He has been unable to make friends. His natural habitat is the London area and though he would prefer to move to Middlesex, Sussex is willing to ensure his access to old haunts and a reconnection with old acquaintances, male or female …’ It’s the only time in my life that I have knowingly committed perjury. I still get a cold shiver when I think back to the quizzical looks that came my way that day at Lord’s. Just as well it was not a court of law or I might have spent time inside at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
After only ten minutes’ deliberation, the tribunal found for Imran, whose ‘special registration’ for Sussex would be completed on 30 July 1977. In his ruling Mr Justice Popplewell noted: ‘We are impressed by the argument that Khan’s unhappiness was a genuine one, and that there was no evidence of financial motivation in his movement … The strict application of the requirement of 12 months prior residence [in Sussex] can be mitigated.’
It was not a universally popular decision. On 26 May, Worcestershire formally wrote to the TCCB secretary, Donald Carr (of Idrees Beg fame), to express their ‘very considerable misgivings over the procedural arrangements adopted for the Appeal’. Carr volleyed back on 29 May that the matter was ‘closed’. There was talk of some county pros refusing to play against the ‘disloyal’ Pakistani, who further earned the censure of the Cricketers Association for ‘hasten[ing] the onset of a football-style transfer system’. Reading the correspondence now, one is struck by the quaint sense of outrage at the notion that a professional athlete should feel free to take his services wherever he chose. ‘Cricket and its relationship between authority and players has suffered a grievous blow,’ the Association’s Jack Bannister thundered on 25 May. Bannister subsequently revealed that acting in his professional capacity he had ‘contacted the 17 county sides with the question, “In your dressing-room, is there a totally unanimous view either for or against the decision allowing Imran Khan to play in August?”’ The results showed nine sides ‘totally opposed’ and four sides ‘largely opposed’ to Imran, with only two in favour and one neutral. Curiously enough, according to Bannister ‘No reply [had] yet been received from Sussex, for whom John Spencer says that the players want more time to consider the matter.’
In the end, the boycott never materialised. Bannister and the other parties dropped their protest. Imran was, however, subjected to some choice abuse on his later visits to play Worcestershire. Of this Mike Vockins says, ‘I was so incensed with the crowd on more than one occasion that I felt minded to get on the PA and insist that spectators show the normal sporting courtesies, before swiftly recognising that this would just have goaded further those who behaved in that unacceptable way.’ In time Vockins himself inherited Imran’s locker in the Worcester dressing-room ‘along with some abandoned cricket gear which was in pretty dire straits. “Festering” would just about sum it up. The boys believed that on occasion, rather than getting kit laundered he rang the sponsors for a new lot and threw the old stuff in the locker.’ Despite this rather dubious personal legacy, Vockins, an eminently fair-minded man who went on to take holy orders, has ‘delightful’ memories of Imran, a view broadly shared by the current Worcestershire regime 30 years after the acrimonious events at Lord’s.
In between dressing up in a dark suit and tie to go into the witness box, Imran had continued his scintillating run of form on Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies. The first Test at Bridgetown featured some notably robust bowling from the home team’s Roberts, Garner and Croft. But even they appeared sluggish in comparison with the ‘Orient Express’, who announced himself with three consecutive bouncers to the opener Gordon Greenidge. The former England wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans told me that he had watched this blitz while standing immediately in front of the pavilion with a ‘strangely silent’ Sir Garry Sobers. While Godders himself had characteristically cheered and whistled in appreciation, his illustrious companion had merely followed proceedings with narrowed eyes. When the third ball in rapid succession ‘nearly decapitated’ the batsman, Sobers finally spoke: ‘Bit brisk, this chap.’ The words were uttered with a thin smile and seemed to Evans to be a sort of ‘royal warrant’ coming from the man who was arguably cricket’s greatest ever all-rounder. That Test was drawn, and the West Indies won the second, at Trinidad, by six wickets. Imran reports that he had lost his temper and ‘bowled appallingly’ after being attacked (something of a role reversal) by Greenidge and Roy Fredericks in the latter match. There was then another draw at Georgetown.
Following this, Imran’s tour, hitherto only intermittently dazzling, took much the same upward trajectory as it had at a comparable stage in Australia. Reviewing his performance in the series as a whole, one Jamaican paper wrote, in an only slight case of overstatement, that ‘his fame soared like a rocket and hung high over Caribbean skies for weeks’. In more prosaic terms, in the fourth Test at Trinidad Imran took four for 64 off 21 of the most hostile overs imaginable in the West Indies’ first innings. There was a moment in mid-afternoon when, with the ball flying round the batsmen’s heads and some in the crowd calling their disapproval, the atmosphere threatened to grow ‘iffy’, to again quote Evans. But Imran and Pakistan had stuck to it, eventually winning by 266 runs. The West Indies then generally did Pakistan for pace at Kingston, to take the series 2–1. Imran took six for 90 in the first innings and two for 78 in the second, as well as contributing much-needed runs in the lower middle order. Short of staying behind to sweep up the pavilion, it was hard to see what more he could have done. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s specialist batsmen failed to similarly rise to the occasion. Set 442 to win, they were soon 51 for four. At that stage, in a show of less than total confidence in the outcome, the tour management saw fit to change the date of the team’s return flight to Pakistan from Wednesday, the last scheduled day of play, to Tuesday; an admission of ‘a general lack of resolve’, Imran notes ruefully.
In the five Tests Imran took 25 wickets at 31.60 apiece. He’d clearly taken his time to find his form early in the tour, as great players frequently do in unfamiliar conditions; only mediocrity being always at its best. Generally speaking, the series confirmed that Pakistan for all their occasional frailties deserved their place at cricket’s top table. It also did no harm at all to Imran’s reputation. ‘I want to be known as a good bowler … My ambition is to dominate … What I’m always after is penetration,’ he’d once remarked. Within a few short months his textbook technique, iron will and unshakable self-confidence had convinced even the most sceptical that his targets were well within his scope.
His fame was already secure in Pakistan, where satellite technology had allowed huge numbers to watch their team’s two winter tours. As a result, cricket soon reached the plateau occupied only by soccer or rock music in Britain. This was the era in which the journalist Fareshteh Aslam refers to Imran as a combined Superman and Spiderman, ‘this exotic-looking guy doing battle on our behalf’. Mobs now followed him about, and Imran, who a year earlier had been known to stop and chat with fans at his local Lahore milk bar, learnt to hurry out of the players’ entrances of cricket grounds around the world and make his way to safety through side streets and roped-off alleyways.
As it happened, there was something of a precedent for this level of intense adulation of a Pakistani cricketer. A hard-hitting batsman named ‘Merry Max’ Maqsood had played for his country 16 times in the 1950s, while enjoying a particularly active social life. Equally famous for his strokeplay on and off the cricket field, he had soon acquired a substantial cult following. At the end of the 1954 tour of England, Merry Max had stayed behind to take a local bride. Since he was allegedly already married the news initially caused something of a splash in Pakistan, though even the Star eventually held this to be a ‘largely private matter’ between him and the lawful Mrs Maqsood. No such restraint greeted the news of Imran’s various affairs 30 years later, for which the press deployed their full, 24-point size headlines. He was the first