We remember Imran Khan as a stately man. To Australian sensibilities, he might have come across sometimes as a poseur, or, as we say here, a “poser”, a patrician, primping Oxbridge coxcomb, but for a certain disarming nobility. At first, this was difficult for us to understand, as it was not the sort of nobility Australians witnessed in real life. Imran was like a realisation of some quaint cinematic ideal – the fine-looking, valiant hero, borrowed from nineteenthcentury stage melodrama.
There’s one thing about Aussies: though we take a man on face value, for better or worse, we’re willing to change that opinion once we witness performance. By 1992, the triumphant end to a long, impressive career, we’d come to know Imran well. His substance had justified all that syrupy…
