Back before he was an ousted prime minister, or an incumbent prime minister, or an aspiring prime minister, back before he was the captain of the Pakistan national team, or one of the game’s great all-rounders, Imran Khan was, for a short spell, a very English sort of bowler. You know the type; measured effort, fast-medium, a little seam, a little swing, licks his lips when it’s cloudy out. It was a game he learned as an 18-year-old at RGS Worcester and then perfected over four years of six-day-a-week county cricket for Worcestershire, where he was told, by a senior pro, that he ought to stop fooling himself that he was ever going to be fast if he wanted to get on in the game.
And, because he’s Imran Khan, he was pretty good at it, too. He took 68 wickets at 26 in 1973, 60 at 30 in ’74, and 46 at 27 in ’75. Then he went back to Pakistan. And Khan found, all of a sudden, that most of what he had spent four years learning wasn’t a whole lot of use on the slow, low, flat pitches they played on at home. “That trip to Pakistan made up my mind,” Khan wrote afterwards, “from then on I would be a fast bowler or nothing”. He learned, as Osman Samiuddin wrote in The Unquiet Ones, that “the way of the English was no way at all” in Pakistan.
