a gold medallion walked through the gate of the municipal cricket ground on Pavilion Lane in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His arrival was noted by a solitary reporter, who saw the man nod to one or two friends, then sit down in one of a sea of empty seats, essentially unrecognised by those few duffle-coated spectators in attendance. The reporter was intrigued to learn the man’s identity. It was an ‘almost comically mild-mannered’ Imran, already one of the world’s most famous sportsmen, who would spend the early part of the season playing a variety of modest Yorkshire league and club matches while waiting to qualify for Sussex. He seems to have enjoyed the substantially less formal atmosphere of rural northern grounds and all the familiar icons associated with the lower reaches of English cricket: deckchairs, long grass, tiny plastic cups of volcanic tea and a sparse but surprisingly loyal fan base. Imran took the opportunity to put in place some final refinements to his bowling action, running in closer to the stumps and occasionally going round the wicket in order to stand up straighter at the moment of delivery. By the end of his first season in Sussex, he reports, he felt ‘more confident of putting the ball where I wanted it’.
That year Imran saw rather more of London than had been the case before, often staying at the Shepherd’s Bush flat of the journalist Qamar Ahmed. Also there while passing through town was another young rising Pakistani star, Javed Miandad, a ‘feisty little bugger’ of a cricketer, to quote one good friend. Javed, too, was beginning a four-year playing association with Sussex. According to Qamar Ahmed, ‘Imran was shy and not an extrovert, and remained so even after becoming an overnight star in that Sydney Test. He stayed with me off and on whenever he visited London. He was a lot younger person than me, basically quiet, and never any bother.’ Ahmed insists that Imran’s good nature extended toward his fellow house guest. ‘Javed was also very young, and competitive, when he joined Sussex. But he and Imran never spoke against each other. Even on tour overseas they were quite good mates and Imran would listen to him agreeably — in some ways Javed possessed a sharper brain cricketwise.’ For all that, the relationship would face a number of well-publicised snags in the years ahead. Imran would later be one of 10 players to issue a statement deploring Javed’s leadership of the Test side, and subsequently to refuse to play under him. Although the crisis was defused and they were to remain international colleagues for another decade, Imran appears to have harboured certain long-term reservations about the younger man’s character. ‘Javed’s man management was poor [and] he lacked the strength of will to drag the team along under his wing,’ he notes. I was told that Imran gave particularly short shrift to Javed’s ‘highly vocal’ complaints following the declaration that had left the batsman stranded on 280 in that 1983 Hyderabad Test against India. Coming across the 25-year-old Javed later that night in the Pakistan hotel, Imran reportedly remarked (in Urdu), ‘This is a team game, son. I don’t believe in playing for personal records.’
Wasim Raja considered Imran ‘deeply sensuous’ and ‘somewhat cavalier’ as a cricketer, whereas ‘there wasn’t much sensuousness’ about the practical-minded Javed. ‘In most cases, [Miandad] would have one eye on the scoreboard, while Imran didn’t give a damn about averages — nor was he ever frightened to lose, if it came to that.’ Imran was interior, self-referring; Javed was more up front and superficial, concerned with material rewards and acclaim. Another well-placed source told me that where Javed was ‘obvious’, meticulous and ambitious, Imran was laid back, affable and self-contained. ‘You could buy most of what Javed had, if not his talent. You couldn’t buy what Imran had. He had something that’s inside.’ The result, as Wasim Raja observed, was ‘much detachment, some respect and a little distrust’, all part of an occasionally dysfunctional but long-running working relationship that was to be the making of modern Pakistani cricket.
In his memoirs, Javed recalls a somewhat curious incident when he had acted as a peacekeeper between Imran and their mutual landlord Qamar Ahmed. Evidently miffed at something the journalist had written, Imran let loose one night with a whole series of complaints, including the observation that the Shepherd’s Bush flat was ‘a pigsty’. At that Ahmed rose to his and his home’s defence. ‘All of a sudden,’ Javed writes, ‘the two men were screaming four-letter words at each other and Qamar was sticking out his chest urging Imran to take a swing. I stepped in and put an end to it.’ If so, the scene would seem to reveal hitherto under-reported diplomatic skills on the part of Javed. (Wasim Raja, when I once ran the story past him, glowered in a pained way and eventually said, ‘Bit of a turnaround, isn’t it?’)
When Imran began to play for Sussex, the club found him a small ground-floor flat next to the gates of the county ground in Hove. As a result he could commute to work in a minute or two, while London was only an hour away by train. Imran initially spent much of his free time with Javed, but soon reactivated his old social life. By early in his second season at Hove, he had ‘plugged himself in like an “Open” sign’, to quote one of his county colleagues. Accounts of Imran’s dating habits differ. According to his amused team-mate, ‘Immy was on the pull in London or Brighton on average four or five nights a week.’ He was allegedly vain of his appearance. The team-mate remembers Imran standing in front of the mirror grooming himself, smoothing down his thick hair, ‘adjusting the chain round his neck so it hung just so’, then happily padding off with his ‘feline lope’. According to others, Imran was actually ‘quite relaxed’ or ‘passive’ with the opposite sex, and more inclined to the role of the hunted than the hunter. The Sussex and England bowler Tony Pigott told me he had once been in a nightclub in Brighton with Imran and the county’s South African star Garth le Roux. ‘It was a mirrorball and Bee Gees sort of place; that whole thing … After a bit Le Roux and I chugged back from the dance-floor to the table where Imran was sitting alone with his glass of milk. “Come on and meet some girls,” Garth said, only to hear Imran’s superb reply, “No, thanks. If they want to meet me, they can bloody well come over here”.’
On 9 May 1977, just as Imran was settling in to life in the Yorkshire leagues, the news broke that Kerry Packer and his Australian television network had signed some two dozen of the world’s top players to appear in an exhibition round under the name of World Series Cricket. It would be hard to exaggerate the ensuing shock in certain quarters. Among several perceived villains of the piece, the press heaped special scorn on the Sussex and England captain Tony Greig, who had acted as Packer’s recruiting agent. Greig appears to have convinced most of the players involved that a compromise would be swiftly reached whereby they would still be available for Test cricket. Imran was one of 14 non-Australians initially contracted to represent a WSC World XI in Packer’s circus, as much of the cricket establishment and media came to know it. There would be particular repercussions for Pakistan, which lost five leading players, including their captain Mushtaq, to the enterprise. For his services, Imran was paid Aus $25,000, or roughly the equivalent of £10,500, for some ten weeks’ cricket. At the time he was making a hard-earned £250 per Test, £3,000 a season for Sussex and a further £70–80 a month from PIA on the rare occasions he played in Pakistan — a total income of around £4,600 from all sources.
Although Abdul Kardar had eventually resigned as chairman of the Pakistan board after the feud about match fees, his successor Mohammad Hussain took a similarly hard line when confronted with the latest demonstration of player power. The dispute that broke out in May 1977 soon threatened to make that earlier row look like a ‘little local difficulty’ by comparison. In short order, Hussain announced that the five Pakistanis who had signed for Packer would be ‘ostracised’ from Test cricket, adding that they were ‘unpatriotic … mercenaries [of] the worst stripe’. The board went on to assure the Pakistani public that there were ‘ample quality reserves’ available to cover for the defectors — a self-confidence not entirely borne out by events, in particular the 1978 Pakistan tour of England, which was a rout.
At 9.30 in the morning of 30 July 1977, Donald Carr of the TCCB sent a telex to the secretary of Sussex confirming that ‘Imran Khan, the subject of our recent discussions’ was now free to play for the county. Two hours later, the subject in question was in action in a championship match against Gloucestershire at the College Ground in Cheltenham. He took two for 52 in the first Gloucester innings and one for 15 in the second; a respectable if not electrifying debut. Opponents, press and public were soon struck by the raw pace of the now visibly stronger, broad-chested bowler — he again took the opportunity to pepper Mike Procter