Most Pakistan cricket fans know that 1987 was the summer when they won their first series in England, after coming within 3 wickets of series victory on the previous tour in 1982. Few recall that it was the first of three consecutive series victories in England for Pakistan. Virtually none recall that the vanquished England team had just won The Ashes. In Australia!
The social background
Like the West Indians a decade earlier, Pakistani cricket fans in England were starting to see cricket as an expression of cultural identity.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was in its ninth year in power, and won re-election a day after the First Test ended. Her government was loved by the Pakistanis who ran small businesses or whose sons and daughters were at medical school, but was despised by the tens of thousands of Pakistanis in northern cities like Bradford who had watched helplessly as she destroyed the miners’ union and then the mining industry and drove the north of England over an economic cliff.
That mattered in this Test series. The First and Third Tests were at Old Trafford (Manchester) and Headingley (Leeds) and at both grounds there were large and vocal Pakistani contingents which were outnumbered by completely silent English spectators. There was no English nationalism on view at all.
The cultural context
For the record, the hit songs of the summer were “It’s a Sin” by the Pet Shop Boys, “La Bamba” from the movie of the same name, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston and, amazingly, “Under The Boardwalk” by Bruce Willis, who still had hair and was the leading man in TV’s top rating romantic comedy!
At the movies the big hits were “Fatal Attraction”, a pair of Cher movies and “Wall Street” which was prescient as when the World Cup took place a couple of months later the world went into the economic meltdown of “Black Monday”.
The cricketing context
The West Indies was in its tenth year of dominance of world cricket.
England had won The Ashes and two ODI series in Australia the previous winter and were considered to be a powerful unit, even though the previous summer they had lost home series to India (the 6th best Test side out of 7) and New Zealand. Those series losses were discounted as being a legacy of having been thrashed 5-0 in the West Indies two months earlier.
Australia was neck-and-neck with India for 6th place out of 7 in Test cricket, with only the new boys Sri Lanka considered to be even worse than Australia and India.
Just four years earlier, Pakistan had been everybody’s pick as the second best side in the world. “The Cricketer” in England had as its 1983 World Cup cover feature a picture of Imran Khan captioned “Can Pakistan Topple the Champions?” But Imran Khan then had two years in which stress fractures of the shin had stopped him from bowling and Pakistan’s reputation plummeted as its pace attack was exposed as Imran Khan and not much else.
There were signs of a resurgence. Imran returned to bowling at the start of 1985 and was joined by Wasim Akram, who at 17 years of age took 10 wickets in his second Test away to New Zealand, who were widely recognised as the number 2 Test side behind the West Indies. Then, eight months before the tour of England, Pakistan drew a home series with the West Indies in which they won the First Test by bowling the unbeatable Windies out for 53 at Faisalabad.
It is a sign of the lack of standing that India had in Test (but certainly not ODI) cricket at the time that nobody in England thought anything of the fact that 6 weeks before arriving in England, Pakistan had won the Fifth Test at Bangalore and with it the series in India.
But between the return of Imran Khan to the bowling crease, the rise of Wasim Akram and the victory in India, there were clear signs that Pakistan should be taken seriously. But they weren’t....
The ODIs before the Tests
Pakistan played 14 – yes, fourteen – matches in England before the First Test, including a 3 ODI series. This was crucial: whereas previous Pakistan touring teams had had 6-8 players used to county cricket, the 1987 tourists had only Imran Khan and Javed Miandad with domestic English experience.
England’s Apartheid tourists were back from their bans, but Graham Gooch was in a strange state of mental fragility and after the second ODI could not continue.
Imran Khan, as in 1982, was sucked in by Mansoor Akhtar’s batting technique and blind to his mental vulnerability, and it was only after he fell for a cheap duck in the 3rd ODI that his place came under pressure. Pakistan managed to collapse from 168-3 to 170-8 that day, and Imran learned that his batting was going to need a lot of buttressing by the lower order – he could not just pick the best 4 bowlers. That lesson ruled Saleem Jaffer out of the whole Test series. For the younger amongst you, Saleem Jaffer was a lot like Rahat Ali. An excellent tall left-arm fast medium bowler, but he couldn’t bat to save his life.
Meanwhile Abdul Qadir was yet to arrive in England as he had family health issues, and the English media had concluded that if you could see off the almost-35 year old Imran Khan, the Pakistani bowling was innocuous.
The Test tour
Imran Khan was unfit to bowl in the First Test at Old Trafford – and Abdul Qadir was still AWOL - but fortunately for Pakistan it was ruined by rain. England hit 447 and then reduced Pakistan to 140-5 before the final day was washed out. The absence of Graham Gooch was barely noticed, and Foster, De Freitas and Botham looked like a very good attack with Emburey providing off-spin variation.
The Second Test at Lords was also rain ruined. The entire match consisted of England scoring 368 while Imran Khan and the recently-arrived Abdul Qadir looked very listless. Fortunately for them, England’s poorest batsman – Bill Athey - scored a century and cemented his place in the team.
The Third Test is remembered for Pakistan dismissing England for 136 and 199 at Headingley to win by an innings, with the wickets shared in the First Innings before Imran Khan took 7-40 in the second innings. What tends to be forgotten is that the voluble Pakistan manager Haseeb Ahsan managed the rare double act of defending the keeper Saleem Yousuf for claiming a catch that he had dropped and also attacking the umpire Ken Palmer in a way which set the tone for the Shakoor Rana incident three months later at Faisalabad. In addition, Abdul Qadir used the 2 side games between Tests to regain some form and Imran gave himself 27 overs in the second of those to lift his form to where it needed to be. No such luck for Pakistan in 2016.
The Fourth Test managed in its final session to leap from being one of the worst tests of all time to one of the greatest. England by now had united Graham Dilley with Neil Foster as the opening bowlers, and that partnership was arguably better than Anderson and Broad, especially with Botham for medium-paced back-up and Edmonds and Emburey as England’s best off-spin/slow left-arm pair between Laker and Lock and finally Swann and Panesar 25 years later.
Pakistan crawled to 439 all out before England replied with 521 all out to lead by 82 after Tea on Day 4. By the end of Day 4 Pakistan had knocked off half the arears (38-0) but then the excellent English pace attack gradually chipped out the batsmen to leave Pakistan dismissed 40 minutes after Tea for 205, setting England 124 to win in 18 overs.
Imran Khan’s refusal to select Saleem Jaffer because he could not bat had paid off. Pakistan had been 156-7 when Wasim Akram came in at number 9 and then 165-8 when Abdul Qadir came in at number 10 to replace Imran Khan and score a crucial 20 in 46 minutes.
In effect, Pakistan’s short tail saved the Test. Imran and Wasim proceeded to bowl wide down the leg and off-sides to restrict England to 109-7 in 17.4 overs. But Imran learned two lessons that he never forgot.
Firstly, he had to keep the tail as short as possible, even if it meant dropping a better bowler. Long tails lose Tests.
Secondly, he could not risk a player like Mansoor Akhtar at number 3, however elegant he was. He needed to ensure that his number 4 would never come to the crease inside the first 20 overs, and for the rest of Imran’s Test career after Mansoor Akhtar failed at The Oval he played with three opening batsmen, with Shoaib Mohammad as the “third” opener at number 3. In the four remaining years of Imran’s Test career he lost only one series, by a margin of 1-0.
The Fifth Test was played on a dead track at The Oval. Pakistan batted for half the match to compile 708, and then bowled England out for 232 thanks to 7-96 by Abdul Qadir. They then reduced England to 139-4, only for Wasim Akram to get appendicitis and Imran Khan to break down, leaving Mike Gatting and Ian Botham to save the game. Haseeb Ahsan again made a fool of himself, this time calling umpire David Constant “a disgraceful person”. The Shakoor Rana incident was now only weeks away........
Conclusions
The 1987 tour was a triumph for the Pakistanis. The hosts were considered to be a strong unit and were convincingly beaten by the end.
The lessons to learn were:
1. Pakistan can do well in England even if their players have limited county experience.
2. The longer the tour, the better the preparation, the better the results.
3. Three openers is usually a good way for Pakistan to go in alien conditions outside Asia.
4. Pakistan lose more matches that they can draw if they simply pick the best 4 bowlers. The “Saleem Jaffer decision” saved the Fourth Test. The 3rd and 4th choice bowlers need to be competent with the bat to save Test matches.
5. If a batsman keeps failing, he’s probably going to keep failing.
The social background
Like the West Indians a decade earlier, Pakistani cricket fans in England were starting to see cricket as an expression of cultural identity.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was in its ninth year in power, and won re-election a day after the First Test ended. Her government was loved by the Pakistanis who ran small businesses or whose sons and daughters were at medical school, but was despised by the tens of thousands of Pakistanis in northern cities like Bradford who had watched helplessly as she destroyed the miners’ union and then the mining industry and drove the north of England over an economic cliff.
That mattered in this Test series. The First and Third Tests were at Old Trafford (Manchester) and Headingley (Leeds) and at both grounds there were large and vocal Pakistani contingents which were outnumbered by completely silent English spectators. There was no English nationalism on view at all.
The cultural context
For the record, the hit songs of the summer were “It’s a Sin” by the Pet Shop Boys, “La Bamba” from the movie of the same name, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston and, amazingly, “Under The Boardwalk” by Bruce Willis, who still had hair and was the leading man in TV’s top rating romantic comedy!
At the movies the big hits were “Fatal Attraction”, a pair of Cher movies and “Wall Street” which was prescient as when the World Cup took place a couple of months later the world went into the economic meltdown of “Black Monday”.
The cricketing context
The West Indies was in its tenth year of dominance of world cricket.
England had won The Ashes and two ODI series in Australia the previous winter and were considered to be a powerful unit, even though the previous summer they had lost home series to India (the 6th best Test side out of 7) and New Zealand. Those series losses were discounted as being a legacy of having been thrashed 5-0 in the West Indies two months earlier.
Australia was neck-and-neck with India for 6th place out of 7 in Test cricket, with only the new boys Sri Lanka considered to be even worse than Australia and India.
Just four years earlier, Pakistan had been everybody’s pick as the second best side in the world. “The Cricketer” in England had as its 1983 World Cup cover feature a picture of Imran Khan captioned “Can Pakistan Topple the Champions?” But Imran Khan then had two years in which stress fractures of the shin had stopped him from bowling and Pakistan’s reputation plummeted as its pace attack was exposed as Imran Khan and not much else.
There were signs of a resurgence. Imran returned to bowling at the start of 1985 and was joined by Wasim Akram, who at 17 years of age took 10 wickets in his second Test away to New Zealand, who were widely recognised as the number 2 Test side behind the West Indies. Then, eight months before the tour of England, Pakistan drew a home series with the West Indies in which they won the First Test by bowling the unbeatable Windies out for 53 at Faisalabad.
It is a sign of the lack of standing that India had in Test (but certainly not ODI) cricket at the time that nobody in England thought anything of the fact that 6 weeks before arriving in England, Pakistan had won the Fifth Test at Bangalore and with it the series in India.
But between the return of Imran Khan to the bowling crease, the rise of Wasim Akram and the victory in India, there were clear signs that Pakistan should be taken seriously. But they weren’t....
The ODIs before the Tests
Pakistan played 14 – yes, fourteen – matches in England before the First Test, including a 3 ODI series. This was crucial: whereas previous Pakistan touring teams had had 6-8 players used to county cricket, the 1987 tourists had only Imran Khan and Javed Miandad with domestic English experience.
England’s Apartheid tourists were back from their bans, but Graham Gooch was in a strange state of mental fragility and after the second ODI could not continue.
Imran Khan, as in 1982, was sucked in by Mansoor Akhtar’s batting technique and blind to his mental vulnerability, and it was only after he fell for a cheap duck in the 3rd ODI that his place came under pressure. Pakistan managed to collapse from 168-3 to 170-8 that day, and Imran learned that his batting was going to need a lot of buttressing by the lower order – he could not just pick the best 4 bowlers. That lesson ruled Saleem Jaffer out of the whole Test series. For the younger amongst you, Saleem Jaffer was a lot like Rahat Ali. An excellent tall left-arm fast medium bowler, but he couldn’t bat to save his life.
Meanwhile Abdul Qadir was yet to arrive in England as he had family health issues, and the English media had concluded that if you could see off the almost-35 year old Imran Khan, the Pakistani bowling was innocuous.
The Test tour
Imran Khan was unfit to bowl in the First Test at Old Trafford – and Abdul Qadir was still AWOL - but fortunately for Pakistan it was ruined by rain. England hit 447 and then reduced Pakistan to 140-5 before the final day was washed out. The absence of Graham Gooch was barely noticed, and Foster, De Freitas and Botham looked like a very good attack with Emburey providing off-spin variation.
The Second Test at Lords was also rain ruined. The entire match consisted of England scoring 368 while Imran Khan and the recently-arrived Abdul Qadir looked very listless. Fortunately for them, England’s poorest batsman – Bill Athey - scored a century and cemented his place in the team.
The Third Test is remembered for Pakistan dismissing England for 136 and 199 at Headingley to win by an innings, with the wickets shared in the First Innings before Imran Khan took 7-40 in the second innings. What tends to be forgotten is that the voluble Pakistan manager Haseeb Ahsan managed the rare double act of defending the keeper Saleem Yousuf for claiming a catch that he had dropped and also attacking the umpire Ken Palmer in a way which set the tone for the Shakoor Rana incident three months later at Faisalabad. In addition, Abdul Qadir used the 2 side games between Tests to regain some form and Imran gave himself 27 overs in the second of those to lift his form to where it needed to be. No such luck for Pakistan in 2016.
The Fourth Test managed in its final session to leap from being one of the worst tests of all time to one of the greatest. England by now had united Graham Dilley with Neil Foster as the opening bowlers, and that partnership was arguably better than Anderson and Broad, especially with Botham for medium-paced back-up and Edmonds and Emburey as England’s best off-spin/slow left-arm pair between Laker and Lock and finally Swann and Panesar 25 years later.
Pakistan crawled to 439 all out before England replied with 521 all out to lead by 82 after Tea on Day 4. By the end of Day 4 Pakistan had knocked off half the arears (38-0) but then the excellent English pace attack gradually chipped out the batsmen to leave Pakistan dismissed 40 minutes after Tea for 205, setting England 124 to win in 18 overs.
Imran Khan’s refusal to select Saleem Jaffer because he could not bat had paid off. Pakistan had been 156-7 when Wasim Akram came in at number 9 and then 165-8 when Abdul Qadir came in at number 10 to replace Imran Khan and score a crucial 20 in 46 minutes.
In effect, Pakistan’s short tail saved the Test. Imran and Wasim proceeded to bowl wide down the leg and off-sides to restrict England to 109-7 in 17.4 overs. But Imran learned two lessons that he never forgot.
Firstly, he had to keep the tail as short as possible, even if it meant dropping a better bowler. Long tails lose Tests.
Secondly, he could not risk a player like Mansoor Akhtar at number 3, however elegant he was. He needed to ensure that his number 4 would never come to the crease inside the first 20 overs, and for the rest of Imran’s Test career after Mansoor Akhtar failed at The Oval he played with three opening batsmen, with Shoaib Mohammad as the “third” opener at number 3. In the four remaining years of Imran’s Test career he lost only one series, by a margin of 1-0.
The Fifth Test was played on a dead track at The Oval. Pakistan batted for half the match to compile 708, and then bowled England out for 232 thanks to 7-96 by Abdul Qadir. They then reduced England to 139-4, only for Wasim Akram to get appendicitis and Imran Khan to break down, leaving Mike Gatting and Ian Botham to save the game. Haseeb Ahsan again made a fool of himself, this time calling umpire David Constant “a disgraceful person”. The Shakoor Rana incident was now only weeks away........
Conclusions
The 1987 tour was a triumph for the Pakistanis. The hosts were considered to be a strong unit and were convincingly beaten by the end.
The lessons to learn were:
1. Pakistan can do well in England even if their players have limited county experience.
2. The longer the tour, the better the preparation, the better the results.
3. Three openers is usually a good way for Pakistan to go in alien conditions outside Asia.
4. Pakistan lose more matches that they can draw if they simply pick the best 4 bowlers. The “Saleem Jaffer decision” saved the Fourth Test. The 3rd and 4th choice bowlers need to be competent with the bat to save Test matches.
5. If a batsman keeps failing, he’s probably going to keep failing.
