Imran Khan: The road from cricket to politics

Like many social phenomena, sport is both suffused with concepts greater than itself (aesthetics, ethics, economics, class, sense the national and the global, community, ethnicity, race, leadership, colonialism, gender, politics - to mention only the most obvious deploys these concepts in particular ways, reshaping in its turn what we might understand by them. Indeed, sport is one way through which we learn what such notions actually mean in specific contexts. This conceptual apprenticeship offers both follower and participant possibility of making the imaginative leap to further involvement with these ideas in a non-sport setting, and in this chapter we the Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan has done this. First, however, let us consider the game of cricket more generally.