As Imran Khan’s health deteriorates while locked up on ‘death row’, and Pakistani players are forced to turn a blind eye, the sport he played for so long deserves huge credit for refusing to let him disappear, writes OLIVER HOLT

There is a portrait hanging on the back wall of the Long Room at Lord’s, a few frames away from Jimmy Anderson’s new study and Stuart Breed which was unveiled earlier this week. It is a watercolor of Imran Khan, his head bowed, his face stern and focused, a pen in his hand. It is a beautiful, moving painting.

The Pakistani players walked past that portrait of Imran on each of the first two days of the second Test against England, as they walked down from their dressing room on the first floor of the pavilion and walked past the likeness of the man who is the greatest sportsperson in their country’s history.

However, he hasn’t been asked because they can’t talk about him. Imran’s portrait may be prominent in a room that is a bastion of the English establishment, but in Pakistan the establishment is doing everything it can to make him a non-person. In Pakistan, television stations do not dare mention his name for fear of sanctions and reprisals.

For the past three years since Imran was arrested on corruption charges, sentenced to consecutive terms of 14 and 17 years and transferred to Rawalpindi’s infamous Adiala prison, he has been confined to a 6-by-8-foot ‘death cell’, increasingly out of touch with his family and the outside world.

His isolation reached a point in the past eight months when rumors emerged that the captain of Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup-winning team, the man who served as his country’s prime minister between 2018 and 2022, had died in captivity. Those rumors were untrue, but his mental and physical health is deteriorating. Serious concerns about his well-being remain.

“The state doesn’t want him to be seen or heard,” says esteemed Pakistani journalist Osman Samiuddin, editor-in-chief at Cricinfo and author of The restlessa history of cricket in Pakistan, wrote in an essay last year. “They have banned TV channels from saying his name on air and prevented newspapers from publishing his photo; they even deleted him from the images of his greatest sporting triumph.’

He is now known to many in the country by the prisoner number assigned to him in Adiala: 804. Mentioning the number has become a code of support for him. It appeared on car license plates and was sung at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore during major cricket matches: ‘Tera yaar, mera yaar, Qaidi no. 804!’ (‘Your friend, my friend, prisoner no. 804’).

A sandal maker from Peshawari put the number on one of his designs and it became his bestseller. In Leicester and Jeddah you can dine in restaurants called 804. At a takeaway restaurant in Birmingham you could order the Special 804 Biryani. “The hallmark of his captivity,” Samiuddin wrote, “became his own kind of freedom.”

But as the Pakistani state tries to make its most famous citizen disappear, Imran’s shadow looms large over this Test match, which coincided with the third anniversary of his incarceration. The unrest about his treatment grows and grows and the sport he adorned for so long refuses to let him disappear.

Last week, a group of 21 former cricket captains, including Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar, Sir Alastair Cook, Steve Waugh and Michael Atherton, called on Pakistan to ensure Imran receives proper care while in custody.

In a letter to Pakistan’s current leader, Shehbaz Sharif, they protested that 73-year-old Khan was only allowed to stay in a hospital for a few hours earlier this month. They asked that he be assessed by a medical board headed by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, particularly for the reported loss of vision in his right eye, and that weekly visits from his family be restored.

On Thursday, Atherton took another step forward by conducting an interview with Khan’s sons from his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, Kasim and Sulaiman, which aired on Sky Sports during the delayed lunch break at Lord’s.

Atherton insisted on Friday that his opposition to Khan’s treatment was based on humanitarian concerns, but the Pakistan Cricket Board threatened that his team would not return to the field after lunch if Sky aired the interview.

To its credit, Sky did conduct the interview. Cricinfo reported that the PCB wanted to make a formal complaint against Sky to the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, but play simply resumed.

“They don’t even have a strategy anymore,” Kasim told Atherton about his father’s captors. ‘It’s not very clear what they’re doing, they’re just blatantly trying to kill him. Keep him inside as long as possible and silence him.

“The last time he was able to talk to our aunts and anyone else, he said that conditions have seriously deteriorated recently. He has linked this to other political prisoners who have been murdered or died in prison. At the moment it is worse than ever, causing him to be completely isolated in a cell for more than 23 hours a day.’

Some hope there is still time for a deal between Imran and the state. “There is speculation that the military could use the idea of ​​freeing him as a threat to the civilian government to keep it in line,” Samiuddin said on Friday. ‘There is always talk that a deal could be made with Imran and the army and he could come and live in Britain.

“But the problem with the idea that he would make a deal is that he always ridiculed Benazir Bhutto and other politicians who were opponents of the regime and led their opposition into exile. He said he would never do that. It would be used against him if he changed his approach.”

And so Imran sits in his death cell, a principled man in a living hell. And the cricket continues at Lord’s. And the cricketers walk past his portrait in the Long Hall and avert their eyes.