On 30 June 1986 the Yorkshire Post printed an invitation to a pre-match reception at the Majestic hotel. “Meet cricket club celebrities,” the invite read. “Auction, £10 (including buffet).” But these were not just any old cricket celebrities, this was India and Pakistan, led by Kapil Dev and Imran Khan, due to meet for only the second time on British soil at the genteel English town of Harrogate.
This unlikely match, a 40-over bish-bash fundraiser for Help the Aged, had been encouraged by the cricketing bigwigs of both nations. India were already in situ on an England tour, while the Pakistan ambassador, Ali Arshad, was in charge of pulling together a team, flying five players over specially.
It was a breathtaking lineup – Khan, Abdul Qadir, Wasim Akram, Ramiz Raja, Dev, Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar, Dileep Vengsarkar, Mohammad Azharuddin – plus a few lesser-known players to fill in the gaps. Interest in the game was huge – far beyond anything anyone in Yorkshire had contemplated – and an estimated 15,000 spectators landed on Harrogate that overcast morning of 15 July 1986.
Kamran Abbasi, then 17, went along with his uncle Ishtiaq, and later wrote about it for Wisden Asia Cricket, an English-language cricket magazine produced in India. Even now, 40 years on, the memories are vivid. “There was no chance then of seeing these guys play, there was no Sky, you had to be there. I remember the road to Harrogate was a single lane country road and it was crawling almost from Leeds.
“It was absolutely crazy. They had to bring the boundary in as there were so many people there, the ticketing system evaporated and it was utter mayhem. It was played like a World Cup final – at least in the crowd’s eyes – everyone was so emotional, people were roaring, waving flags. People were so passionate about their teams, at that time almost no immigrants would have supported England.
“People behaved badly, it was really embarrassing, tribal, my uncle hated it but I loved it. There were pitch invasions after every wicket, or even when there wasn’t a wicket.
“Over the Tannoy they kept telling people to stay off the playing area, well, we were already on the playing area. It definitely would not pass a risk assessment today.”
Robert Whiteley was in charge of the catering for the day. “When I arrived on the ground at about 4am, to prepare the tavern for the day’s excitement, there were already people climbing over walls and rushing to bag the best seats. The Leeds Road end of town was bought to a halt as cars were abandoned on the approaches to town all the way down to Spacey Houses, and the ground was at capacity long before the start of the game.”
He picked up “halal chickens the size of pigeons” from the Shabab restaurant for the players but “on the day, they were unwilling to leave their changing rooms and ate food taken to them by the various vendors who popped up all over the place”.
Drink was another stab in the dark. “Not knowing in advance what the beer sales would be like we tried to get a sale-or-return deal from Tetley’s brewery. They were reluctant to provide draught beer on that basis but instead provided 250 cases of cans of bitter and 250 cases of cans of lager. I well remember the joy on the faces of the draymen who were being paid a piece rate as they picked up 249 cases of bitter and 249 cases of lager. The crowd that day were either teetotal, came prepared with their own refreshments or bought from the dozens of illicit street vendors.”
Whitely remembers ticket applications coming from the United States, the Gulf, India and Pakistan as well as from all over the UK. Incredibly: “The prime minster, Margaret Thatcher, also sent a letter of support.”
David Hopps, later of the Guardian but then of the Yorkshire Post, was sent to cover it, much to his annoyance, as he was due a long-booked and rare day off for a family party. A colleague remembers him complaining that only “one man and a dog” would turn up. But a day later he was a man transformed, reporting that Harrogate “would never be quite the same again after hosting an exhilarating one-day international” at a ground ready to “burst at the seams with excitement”.
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“For me, it was the first proof of the Yorkshire immigrant community’s love of cricket,” he says. “Yorkshire had done very little to encourage interest and the community had not been seen at matches in the county. The Quaid e Azam League, the first Asian cricket league in Yorkshire, had only been founded a few years before in Bradford. But the match proved the huge amount of untapped, ignored, interest. That was certainly the message that came home to me that day as a young guy who had been brought up in a well-to-do, almost exclusively non-immigrant area.”
Hopps’ report the next day records Khan whacking four sixes off Pakistan’s final over, bowled by Dev “labouring with a back injury to sickly medium pace” to take Pakistan to a respectable 196. Then, “a wholly out of character Gavaskar thrashed five fours by the third over” before edging Khan behind.
India marched onwards, before Akram picked apart the middle order, eventually limping to a one-wicket victory with five balls to spare “to a cacophony of chatter, chanting and endless whistles”, whereupon a police escort whisked the players from the pitch.
Abbasi can still see Raja dropping a sitter at midwicket at the death, “cursed by Pakistan fans, lampooned by Indian fans”, as he wrote in Wisden Asia Cricket. “We fail the Tebbit Test with a passion. Cricket to us only means India or Pakistan, the lands of our beloved relatives, not England the land of our former oppressors. We arrived like zealots, brayed like donkeys and left without shame.”
Meanwhile, Harrogate CC were able to get new covers and carry out lots of repairs around the ground thanks to the organiser’s insurance. Something for everyone.