Cricket and Politics Collide at Lord’s: Imran Khan's Family Speaks Out

At Lord’s, where cricket usually drowns out the noise of politics, the game suddenly found itself dragged to the centre of a storm.

The sons of former Pakistan captain and ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan have launched a fierce attack on Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Mohsin Naqvi, after reports claimed the PCB threatened to pull Pakistan’s players off the field during the second Test against England if a television interview about their father was not removed from the broadcast.

Flashpoint at Lord’s

The controversy erupted when Sky Sports aired an interview conducted by former England captain Michael Atherton with Khan’s sons, Sulaiman and Kasim, during the Lord’s Test. Speaking calmly but with clear alarm, they described their father’s health and the conditions of his imprisonment in Pakistan.

What followed shifted the story from a human-rights concern into a full-blown cricket row. Reports later emerged that the PCB had threatened not to send the Pakistan team out for the post-lunch session on day one unless the interview was taken off air.

For a board already under scrutiny, it was a damaging look. For the players in the middle of a Test at the sport’s most storied venue, it was a moment of unwanted chaos.

‘They’re clearly hoping to kill him in there’

Away from the field, the language from Khan’s family has become increasingly stark.

With Mohsin Naqvi facing mounting questions, Kasim Khan painted a grim picture of his father’s situation in solitary confinement and went as far as to allege that Imran Khan’s life is in danger.

“They're clearly hoping to kill him in there. They want to silence him as secretly as possible and just slowly make him fade into nothing,” Kasim said, outlining what he believes to be a deliberate attempt to erase Pakistan’s former World Cup-winning captain from public life.

“That’s a very difficult thing to do with the most popular person in Pakistan right now. Their strategy, whenever we speak, is to let everything fizzle out and then impose more brutal restrictions that make it even harder for him to survive.”

These are not the usual accusations thrown around the edges of a cricket match. They cut to the heart of Pakistan’s political crisis, voiced from the pavilion of Lord’s.

‘They made absolute fools of themselves’

If the PCB hoped to keep the focus on the field, its reported reaction to the Atherton interview did the opposite.

“They made absolute fools of themselves,” Kasim told The Telegraph, accusing the board of embarrassing overreach and dragging Pakistan cricket into a dispute that, in his view, should never have involved the team or its administrators.

Sulaiman echoed that disbelief. He said he expected some kind of backlash once he and his brother spoke publicly, but not the threat of a walk-off in the middle of a Test.

“I was expecting some sort of response. But I didn't think they would be so tactless as to threaten not to take to the field,” he said.

For him, the PCB had crossed a line that goes beyond the usual tussle over messaging and media control.

“It shouldn't be in the remit of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) to ask for an interview about an ex-Pakistan player, somebody who lived in England for 22 years, to be taken down. This wasn't about politics, but about the humanitarian situation and his health.”

In a single afternoon, Lord’s became the stage for a collision between a board’s image, a family’s fears and a nation’s unresolved tensions with its most famous cricketer.

Authorities push back, family not convinced

Pakistani authorities have consistently rejected claims that Imran Khan is being mistreated, insisting he is receiving proper medical care in custody.

Inside the family, those assurances ring hollow.

Sulaiman said they have been starved of concrete information about their father’s condition and suggested that official briefings on his health are part of a darker pattern.

“The worrying theory we're hearing is that they're drip-feeding these reports of his ailing health and pretending that they're trying to help him, just to lay the ground for something worse to happen. Then they can wash their hands and say: 'He's just an old man who died, and we had nothing to do with it.’”

He accused the authorities of hiding behind vague statements and blocking any meaningful oversight.

“They haven't given us proof of any of this. It's all just hearsay from government sources – there's no transparency, they don't want to give anyone access, so how are we supposed to believe any of it?”

The last clear, first-hand account they trust, Sulaiman said, came from Imran Khan himself half a year ago, when he described problems with his eye and alleged that his treatment had been neglected.

Cricket caught in the crossfire

The PCB has long operated in a country where sport and politics rarely sit far apart. Imran Khan’s unique status – World Cup-winning captain turned Prime Minister, now jailed opposition figure – makes that divide almost impossible to maintain.

At Lord’s, that tension finally spilled over the boundary rope.

An interview about a former Pakistan great’s health, aired by a former England captain, during a Test match between the two countries, should have been a poignant footnote to the cricket. Instead, the reported threat to halt play turned it into the story.

For Naqvi and the PCB, the fallout is clear: questions about who gave the order, why the board stepped into a humanitarian debate, and whether Pakistan’s players were ever comfortable being used as leverage in such a dispute.

For Sulaiman and Kasim, the battle is more basic and far more personal: to keep their father’s name, health and fate in the public eye, even when the cost is a crisis at the home of cricket.

The Test will fade into the archives. The argument over what really happened to Imran Khan, and who tried to stop people hearing about it, will not.