I never saw Wasim Raja play. Not even in that memorable Eden Gardens Test in 1979-80, when Pakistan livened up a dead match with the threat of an improbable run-chase; I was, to my eternal regret, occupied trying to impress a young lady and her family and it’s fair to say I lost out on both counts. But I remember vividly the team Raja toured with that winter; possibly Pakistan’s greatest ever, certainly their most charismatic. They hit these shores after an unprecedented build-up, the first team from across the border in 19 years. That motley crew deserved all the hype they received: it had the Oxbridge polish of Majid Khan and Asif Iqbal, the uber-cool of Zaheer Abbas and Raja, the street-smart savvy of Javed and Abdul Qadir. And of course, Imran, the alpha male who needed all his good looks to stand out in this pack. I remember the schoolgirls going wild; I remember the sister of my best friend at the time warbling, to the tune of ‘Wouldn’t it be Loverly’ — “Lots of Imran Khan for me”.

We looked at them and wondered (not for the last time) just what made them so different to us. They were big, they were tough, they were mean; shining examples of the merits of eating beef. Our boys, who’d just finished wiping the floor with a Packer-hit Australia, looked pure vegetarian. It was also our first exposure to the benefits of liberalisation; several of these players had been part of the Packer circus which our own stars had turned their backs on. Imran’s notoriety increased exponentially when he wore the T-shirt that seemed designed for him alone: Big Boys Play At Night. The pun, in those days of Doordarshan and saccharine Bollywood, was a revelation. They were, simply put, the Rolling Stones to our Abba.

... contd.