Michael Holding's Grief for Imran Khan's Plight
Michael Holding’s voice slows when it reaches Imran Khan’s name. The cricket leaves the room. What remains is anger, and a kind of grief.
The West Indies great has watched one of the game’s most influential figures spend more than a year in a Pakistani prison, fighting a stack of legal cases, and, according to his family, being denied even basic comforts such as books and proper medical care. For Holding, who knew Imran not just as an opponent but as a man on a mission, the situation cuts deep.
“I'll mention one name, Imran Khan, but you probably don't want to go down the political route, and I don't want to either, but that's a sad story,” he told Sports Now, his words trailing into the weight of what has happened since the former Pakistan captain became the country’s Prime Minister and then its most high-profile prisoner.
This is not a detached observation from a distant era. Holding has seen the recent fallout too. During the Lord’s Test between England and Pakistan, Michael Atherton interviewed Imran’s sons, Sulaiman and Kasim, on the boundary’s edge. They spoke of “unfair treatment”, of a father they say is being denied proper medical facilities. The Pakistan Cricket Board reacted furiously, even threatening to pull out of the fixture. Sky Sports aired the 18‑minute interview anyway.
For Holding, that backdrop only sharpens the picture.
He goes back to the 1990s, to a very different Imran Khan. Not the politician, not the prisoner, but the former all-rounder walking the streets of London with a folder under his arm, asking for help to build a cancer hospital in Lahore.
“When Imran was going around London looking to garner funds for that cancer hospital, I went around with him, I tried to support him as best as I possibly could, where that was concerned,” Holding recalled. “So I know the man, and I know exactly what type of person that he is. And it's extremely sad to see the situation now and what is going on with Imran Khan.”
Those days of fundraising, of quiet conversations away from the cameras, have become part of how Holding measures the present. He did not share a dressing room with Imran for long – “I played some one-day games with him. I played county cricket, a few games against Imran” – but their time off the field left a mark. The hospital, which became one of Imran’s defining legacies, now stands in stark contrast to the conditions his family say he faces behind bars.
That dissonance fuels Holding’s anger.
“I am in total support of the captains who wrote that letter,” he said, referring to the group of former Pakistan captains who have publicly appealed for humane treatment for Imran. “I don't know what effect it will have, but I am in total support of trying to get the man to be treated just like another human being. You don't treat human beings that way. People who have committed murder aren't treated that way. So I don't see the reason why this man should be treated that way.”
The language is blunt. There is no attempt to soften the edges. For a man who has long chosen his words carefully on issues of race and justice, that in itself is telling.
Holding also wonders about motive. Imran remains, even from a cell, Pakistan’s most recognisable face to the outside world. That status, he suggests, may not be helping him now.
“I don't know if there's jealousy involved in this, because Imran Khan. I don't think there's a Pakistani that is more well known around the world than Imran Khan,” Holding said. “That is ridiculous, the way the man is being treated.”
The cricket fraternity has grown used to political crosswinds in Pakistan, but this is different. This is one of their own – a World Cup-winning captain, a global icon, the man who built a cancer hospital in his mother’s name – now at the centre of a battle over basic human dignity.
Holding has seen Imran the cricketer, the fundraiser, the leader. What he cannot accept is Imran the forgotten prisoner.
