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Did Imran Khan use to do intense ball tempering frequently?

rtramdas

U19 12th Man
is this true? i couldn't believe this at first. but his own admission that he had tampered with the condition of the ball during a county match with a bottle top once prompts me to believe so.

“I have occasionally scratched the ball and lifted the seam. Only once did I use an object.Indeed, the most startling admission so far released concerns a county match between Sussex and Hampshire in 1991. 'The ball was not deviating at all,' Imran is quoted as saying. 'So I got the 12th man to bring on a bottle top and it started to move around a lot. I occasionally scratched the side (of the ball) and lifted the seam.'

Aamir Sohail : “Imran damaged Pakistan cricket by encouraging our bowlers to tamper with the ball. This has led to a culture where we can’t produce good new ball bowlers or quality openers.”

“After every lunch or tea interval the ball did crazy things,” recalled Ravi Shastri of an early tour to Pakistan. Once, after the final Indian wicket went down, the ball rolled down behind the wicket to the fine boundary and was picked up by veteran cricket journalist Rajan Bala. There seemed to be something sticky on the red cherry. When Bala asked Imran, his answer was combined acerbic wit and skilful evasion: “Must have been something the Indian batsmen left behind.”


When Imran took six for six from 23 deliveries, including a hat-trick, for Sussex against Warwickshire in 1983, umpire Don Oslear voiced his suspicions. Although Alvin Kallicharran, who saw the destruction from the non-striker’s end, deemed it the best bowling he had ever seen, others were not that effusive. England seamer Chris Old told the Daily Mirror, “I saw the ball [Imran] had tampered with, and it looked like a dog had chewed it.”
According to Oslear, “This was the first time I had seen one side of the ball scratched and torn with pieces of leather ripped out. The quarter seam had been opened up at a point where it meets the stitched seam and it appeared that some of the stitches had been cut. This allowed a triangle of leather to be pulled up from the surface of the ball, it was a piece large enough to be gripped between forefinger and thumb, and by which the ball could be suspended.”A report was sent to Lord’s.

Allan Lamb reported a relaxed exchange between Imran Khan and Robin Smith outside the wine bar at St John’s Wood before the start of the Lord’s Test against West Indies in 1991. Imran asked Smith, the Hampshire captain, how Aaqib was doing. According to Lamb: “Robin said, ‘Very well — he is doing a good job for us but has got warned on numerous occasions for tampering with the ball.’ Imran replied, ‘Yes, I’ve told him to be more discreet when he does it’”

Ian Botham said : i suggest that the best thing imran can do is just shut up because he has done enough damage to this game.


Mohinder Amarnath in an interview after the tour said that he once saw the Pakistani team take the ball with them to their dressing room during lunch. When he protested to the umpire, he was told quite rudely to keep quiet and bat.I have always wondered about what really was the difference between the two sides on that tour. The kind of movement Imran was getting on those tracks was, quite frankly, very hard to achieve without some sort of thing being done to the ball. Of course, this sort of thing is conjecture and nothing can be conclusively proved either way.My suspicion about the state of the ball on that tour was later again aroused when Imran admitted to using a bottle top in a sussex game in 1981 - ie the year before we toured Pakistan. He said that "the ball was doing absolutely nothing, so I had the 12th man bring out a bottle top and then it started moving all over the place" or something to this effect. If he was motivated enough to use such means in a game for sussex when the ball was
not doing much, it is hard to believe he would not use such means in a game against India.Imran was a great bowler, but I do think that his feats in that particular
series were achieved with some amount of help from factors other than just bowling skill. Indeed, his performance in that series still stands as a record (42 wickets IIRC).


Maninder singh :It was so blatant. Whenever the Pakistani team took the field after a break, the ball would start doing strange things. I also felt it was never the same ball used after each break. Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz would come out and make the ball talk; it used to move all over the place. The ball would cut back and hit the batsman in the midriff and chest. Everyone knows GR Viswanath was once out shouldering arms to a ball.

Imran Khan was genuinely quick and the “made up” ball only made things worse for us. After a while we stopped protesting. The reverse swing made them unplayable. The thing with reverse swing is it cuts back so late that batsmen find it very difficult to adjust to the pace.


Balwinder sandhu : By the way, according to me, they hold the copyright when it comes to ball-tampering. They are masters at it and they taught others," Sandhu told MiD DAY. During his debut series in Pakistan, 1982-83, Sandhu suspected something was being done to the ball by the Pakistani bowlers and fielders during drink intervals.

"Our doubts were confirmed when some of their players, who were dropped during the series told us that the ball was tampered with," said Sandhu.


John Reid, the New Zealand Cricket president, believes a lack of video evidence will not harm the allegations of ball-tampering against Pakistan...

..Reid said Imran Khan, who last week labelled Hair a "mini-Hitler", was one of the pioneers of tampering. "He wrote a book about it," he said. "Have a look at the book. There was a chapter in there saying how to do it. It's a joke, I'm afraid." ..


all these quotes from quite a handful of cricketers makes me firmly believe that he did it on several occasions and that too exceeding all the limits.hence i doubt his credentials as a top player of all time. your thoughts.
 

kyear2

Cricketer Of The Year
He did and a lot of posters here conveniently ignore it. I used to not want to believe it before I heard a past Pakistan player admit one game during a lunch break that not only did Imran tamper with the ball but he taught and encouraged them to do it as well.

So while others here rank him as one of the top 4 or 5 players of all time, I state my objections and am generally accused of bias but he was a blatant cheat and also while his overall record looks great his record away from home is not to an ATG status and his godly home record was probably somewhat assisted by what even he termed as "patriotic umpires".

So between the cheating, difference between home and away record (considering the dead pitches in Pakistan compared to the helpful ones in England during the era) I can't consider him a top 5 player of all time.
He was though still an ATG player and an inspirational if somewhat o er rated captain who played his heart out for his team and adaptable as showed how he reinvented himself after his injury and worked on his batting.
 

rtramdas

U19 12th Man
Imran was my top all rounder (yes Sobers included) till the arrival of Kallis.but his own admitting and the testimony of several players to the same thing has now changed my opinion about him considerably. i now consider him one of the greats of the game. not the all time great all rounder any more.after all how can that be for some one who has been criticised by several players for tampering issue.
 

smash84

The Tiger King
Imran was my top all rounder (yes Sobers included) till the arrival of Kallis.but his own admitting and the testimony of several players to the same thing has now changed my opinion about him considerably. i now consider him one of the greats of the game. not the all time great all rounder any more.after all how can that be for some one who has been criticised by several players for tampering issue.
Dude, did you even watch the video that was posted?
 

rtramdas

U19 12th Man
Dude, did you even watch the video that was posted?
no... sound quality not good due to some technical problems this side...yet from what ever data gathered by browsing, i am forced to conclude that he was guilty.after all why several players accuse him of the same. the allegations by many of these may not be of a direct nature, several circumstantial , but common sense force me to believe that he indeed was not always perfect.
 

kyear2

Cricketer Of The Year
haha.....good stuff mate :laugh:

Here is something from the horse's mouth. Not great quality video but clear enough to hear Imran talking about it on Channel 4.

Imran Khan on Scratching the Cricket Ball. - YouTube
Basically the audio says yes I cheated, but when I was playing county cricket I also scratched the ball and cheated but the other bowlers on the team still weren't good enough to take advantage of it.

Pathetic. He institutionalized cheating in a team and ensured it was passed on.
 
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karan316

State Vice-Captain
Basically the audio says yes I cheated, but when I was playing county cricket I also scratched the ball and cheated but the other bowlers on the team still weren't good enough to take advantage of it.

Pathetic. He institutionalized cheating in a team and ensured it was passed on.
Hence proved, Kapil was better than him:ph34r:Kapil didn't cheat
 
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karan316

State Vice-Captain
I find it stupid when people say "look this guy can reverse swing the ball", but its always more to do with the condition of the ball, some can make good use of the reverse swing available and some can't. And I won't say that all guys who reverse swing the ball are cheats, it also depends on the pitch, outfield,etc. But in case of Imran, if he has himself accepted it(I m not able to stream the video) than I would say he's being honest unlike many others who have never accepted that they tampered the ball.
 

harsh.ag

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
I have no idea how many bowlers outside Imran did the same, but he does admit scratching the ball (while refuting allegations of lifting the seam). My ethical stance on the issue would depend on how many bowlers (including the greats) were doing it before him.
 

fredfertang

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Botham and Lamb aren't worth quoting on this issue given that Imran turned them over in the High Court
 

smash84

The Tiger King
Basically the audio says yes I cheated, but when I was playing county cricket I also scratched the ball and cheated but the other bowlers on the team still weren't good enough to take advantage of it.

Pathetic. He institutionalized cheating in a team and ensured it was passed on.
No, he didn't say that. He said that if reverse swing was all about scratching the ball then how come other people who used the same ball were unable to do it? You're being disingenuous as usual.

Really now. When the rest of the world catches on to it then it is reverse swing but when Pakistan bowlers do it, it is called institutionalizing cheating 8-)
 

harsh.ag

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
No, he didn't say that. He said that if reverse swing was all about scratching the ball then how come other people who used the same ball were unable to do it? You're being disingenuous as usual.

Really now. When the rest of the world catches on to it then it is reverse swing but when Pakistan bowlers do it, it is called institutionalizing cheating 8-)
But Smali, he does admit to scratching the ball, which is (under law 42, subsection 3) not legal.

As I said, my ethical standpoint on this totally depends on who else was doing it before him on a regular basis. If many, then I wouldn't worry about it. But if Imran fashioned this, then he would go down in my estimation. Would you consider that fair?
 

smash84

The Tiger King
The below are excerpts from Ivo Tennant's book titled Imran Khan, which actually gave birth to this controversy

"Imran's real objection seems to have been that it was when Pakistan
were caught or accused of fiddling with the ball that the C... word
was trotted out.

"Imran's viewpoint ... was that ball tampering had gone on in one form
or another since the game had begun. If Pakistan were to gouge chunks
out of the ball then that, he felt, was no worse than lifting the seam
which he had seen Dennis Lillee, John Snow and 'almost every other
seamer' do.

"Seam lifting, Imran felt, had become almost an accepted practice. And
he knew it was hard for an umpire to spot methods of applying
substances such as cream and hair oil, which might have been
intermingled with grease and sweat. This had gone on without anybody
being called a cheat. Even if any bowler or fielder did gouge holes in
the ball, it would be hard for the umpires to know if the scratches
were made by the roughness of the pitch, the advertising boards or the
player's nails.
(Imran Kahn by Ivo Tennant 0-575-05936-2). "
 

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