AS THE Pakistan second innings began, there was something of a clearance-sale about it. For reasons that were hard to decipher, Wasim Bari opened the innings with Mohammad Ilyas. One had heard of a ‘night watchman’ being sent in near draw of stumps but to open the innings? It fell to me to try and explain this to our experts in the commentary-box who considered it an “unusual decision.”
When an Englishman uses the word “unusual”, it is not to express his puzzlement but to convey his disapproval. It was, after all, a Test match. Bari hung around for 80 minutes, like a pilot, coming in to land on a wing and a prayer. Wickets, however, kept falling from the other end, like autumn leaves on a wind-swept day. Batting conditions were far from difficult but Pakistan, it seemed, had given up, decided it wasn’t worth the effort to make a match of it. I was in the commentary-box and not in the dressing-room, but I could imagine the mood of surrender. Pakistan was 41 for 6 when Asif Iqbal came in to bat, and 65 for 8 when Intikhab Alam joined him.
In those days, commercial sponsorship was muted and there was a Horlicks man-of-the match, but BCC was not permitted to name the sponsor. But he had been chosen and it was Ken Barington, and we were not allowed to announce it till the end of the match. I remember telling John Arlott that it was a bit premature. Asif Iqbal’s batting stance was not upright, he tended to be a little square. He was mainly a front-foot player. He was slightly built, a strong gust of wind could have blown him away, but he used his bat as a surgeon uses a scalpel, delicately but with firm hands.
Intikhab Alam, on the other hand, had broad shoulders and was burly, and when he hit the ball, it was with the intention of removing the cover off it. Asif Iqbal was very quick between the wickets and he would be turning for his second run before Intikhab had completed the first, but he stuck it out. A partnership was beginning to emerge. Imagine a voice having a spring to it and the tone of my commentary changed, the excitement returned and the words started to flow and I got caught up in Asif Iqbal’s innings, as if I was wielding the willow. I said that the steps of Higgs and Arnold seemed heavier. I was aware that it was evening-time in Pakistan and people had returned from their offices and would be listening. Still others would be huddled around a radio in a shop. The radio commentary was going to all parts of the world but I was talking to Pakistani listeners, telling them our flag was flying high.
Asif’s innings was the best that I had ever seen. He may have played a false shot or two, played and missed, had danced down the wicket to Titmus, had been beaten in the flight and had to scurry back, but this was a matter of detail. The big picture was that of a flawless innings. I was on the air when he was in his nineties and handed over to John Arlott while Asif was turning for home, towards his century. But Asif was in good hands and “that’s his hundred,” John said and paused to allow the applause to carry-through the effects-mike. The BBC would give me a tape of that bit of commentary and I would present it to Asif Iqbal.
Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam put on 190 for the ninth wicket which was a world record. It meant, too, that England would have to bat again, and I persuaded John Arlott that the man-of-the-match award should be shared. He was on the jury and he agreed. I went to the dressing-room and I congratulated Asif and Intikhab and they both looked elated and both needed to take a shower. There was a jubilant mood in the dressing-room, as if Pakistan had won the Test match instead of losing it by eight wickets and the series, two-nil. It remains, in my book, the best Test innings ever played by a Pakistani, in a lost cause, admittedly, but a good cause, some timely face-saving. It was my last match of the tour and time to take leave of my colleagues in the commentary-team and the English are not sentimental. “Well, cheerio old chap, good luck.”
There was a reception in one of the committee-rooms. I do not recall who the host was, but it was one of those back-slapping, hand-shaking, end-of-the-tour functions where there is much goodwill to all and malice to none, all sorrows forgotten. John Arlott turned up and someone took a picture of him and me and Hanif Mohammad, a picture that had been used later in a book on John Arlott. Brian Close, who had been dumped as England’s captain, was also there with his wife. I told him that I thought he had been treated shabbily and the hurt must have been deep for the usually taciturn Brian Close seemed moved. He put a hand on my shoulder and told me that he appreciated my support and Mrs Close must have been on the verge of allowing the tears that were bottled-up. But she kept her dignity. It was, of course, none of my business.
David Shepherd was also there and I had never met him, though I should have. He had come down from Cambridge and played for Sussex at about the time when I was playing club cricket in Hastings. Our paths ought to have crossed, but didn’t. He was a man of the cloth, something that had not been lost on Fred Truman who was inclined to be forthright about batsmen. On one occasion, he bowled an over to him in which he had played and missed every ball. Truman fumed in frustration and at the end of the over had walked up him and said: “With your luck, you’ll end up a bloody bishop.” How right he was. David Shepherd became the Bishop of Liverpool. On another occasion, Shepherd had dropped a catch off Freddie. Truman used to put his heart and soul into his bowling and dropping catch off his bowling constituted a fit case for capital punishment. “Kid yourself it’s Sunday, Rev, and keep your hands together,” Truman said to the Reverend David Shepherd.
Gary Sobers was holding court in one corner of the room. When Sobers had toured Pakistan with the West Indies team, he had been the victim of some dodgy decisions. He had written a book in which he called Pakistani umpires “cheats” and had vowed never to tour Pakistan. I did not know him, we had shaken hands on one or two occasions on that tour. I walked over to him and he greeted me cheerfully. “Have you forgiven Pakistan or are you still mad at us?” I asked him. “It was a long time ago, Man,” he said. I asked him whether he would come to Pakistan if we invited him. I had PIA in mind. We could invite him as a guest and it would make for good public relations. “Of course, I will come,” he said and he wrote his address for me on a paper napkin. Indeed, he would visit Pakistan and on my invitation, but that was two years later.
As I was leaving The Oval, a small group of schoolboys were waiting outside Hobbs Gates with their autograph books in hand. One of them thrust one at me. I told him that I was not a cricketer. “I know,” he said, “you’re the commentator who always has the last word.” As compliments go, it couldn’t get any better. I asked his name and signed his autograph book. I felt good. Instead of taking the tube, I took a taxi back to Bayswater. That’s what the working class would have called “being a toff.”
It was time to go home, time to call it a day. There were a few good cricket memories, Hanif’s century at Lord’s, Majid Khan at Swansea and Asif Iqbal at The Oval. But I had my own personal moments that I would recall when some shadow crept into my life. The times I spent with John Arlott and Keith Miller, meeting Learie Constantine, the long drives by car, the train-rides, the English countryside, the village pubs and playing darts and strange accents and changing weather and London’s red double-decker buses.
The evening before I left, some friends turned up and we had an impromptu party. My landlord, Sardarji, turned up to inquire what the merriment was all about and became the last person to leave, long after the evening had stretched into the night. My flight was in the late afternoon, and only when I checked in at the PIA counter at Heathrow did I realize that the tour was over and so, too, was the English summer. There was still daylight outside, but the lights in the airport lounge were being turned on and the waiting passengers had that lost look, strange how they become a herd, responding to instructions over the public address system. The PIA ground-staff looked suitably harassed. Invariably, there is a ‘missing’ passenger who is locked in the toilet and he or she has to be retrieved and reprimanded with that stern look that a batsman gives his partner when he calls for a run and finds him inattentive, fiddling with his gloves. The passenger carries the guilt all through the flight. “Would you like to read a Pakistani newspaper,” the steward asked me as I fastened my seat-belt.
AS THE Pakistan second innings began, there was something of a clearance-sale about it. For reasons that were hard to decipher, Wasim Bari opened the innings with Mohammad Ilyas. One had heard of a ‘night watchman’ being sent in near draw of stumps but to open the innings? It fell to me to try and explain this to our experts in the commentary-box who considered it an “unusual decision.”
