THE TIGER IS CORNERED

From playboy cricket star to international statesman and now a jailed politician - no one can accuse Imran Khan of being boring

- MAXINE PETERS

HE WAS the guy who put the sexy into cricket, a smouldering-eyed dreamboat who had fans swooning.

Imran Khan retired at 40, but instead of doing what most pro sports people do – some coaching, maybe a bit of business – he went into politics.

And what a mixed bag that’s turned out to be. Imran (71), who became prime minister of Pakistan in 2018, has been in jail since August. But it hasn’t stopped his popularity. The party won the most seats in the recent general election.

Yet it remains to be seen what happens next. Politics is rarely simple, and for Imran, it’s been filled with drama. A near-death experience, claims of corruption, a controversial marriage . . . Imran has been there, done that. We look at his eventful life.

RISE TO GLORY

Imran comes from an upper-middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan, and was sent to high school in the UK where he excelled in cricket.

He made his Test debut against England in 1971 and then enrolled at Oxford University for a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

By the ’80s he was one of the most famous sportsmen in the world, bringing a new glamour to “the gentleman’s game”. He was also one of the finest fast bowlers cricket had seen, and led Pakistan to glory in the Cricket World Cup in 1992 (right) after telling his team to “fight like cornered tigers” in the final.

Imran was credited with making the game more appealing to the masses. “He was more or less singlehandedly responsible for sexualising what had been an austere, male-orientated activity,” his biographer Christopher Sandford says.

CRICKET’S PLAYBOY PRINCE