Ijaz Butt died on August 3, 2023, aged 85. He had five dismissals and 279 runs from eight Test matches, and was remembered in the 2024 Wisden Almanack.
IJAZ BUTT, MOHAMMED, who died on August 3, aged 85, was a wicketkeeper-batsman who played eight Tests for Pakistan, making 58 against Australia at Karachi in December 1959. His exercise in self-restraint occupied more than six hours, although the writer Qamaruddin Butt thought he “warmed up a little when he heard the cutlery jingling in the dining-room” before lunch on the second day. Ijaz was in the frame to replace the long-serving Imtiaz Ahmed behind the stumps, but three low-key Tests in England in 1962 proved his last. He played little first-class cricket after that tour, on which he scored 1,016 runs at 28, with centuries against Surrey and Kent; his highest score remained 161 for Pakistan Eaglets against India Starlets (a forerunner of today’s A-Team internationals) at Lahore in May 1960.
As his playing days wound down, Ijaz embarked on a long administrative career, which included seven spells as a Test selector. He had an uncanny ability to be in the wings whenever controversy stalked Pakistan cricket. When Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad almost came to blows in a Test in Australia in 1981/82, Ijaz was the tour manager. Richie Benaud observed drily: “Mr Butt was having plenty to say about the possibility of taking his team home – in fact Mr Butt had plenty to say throughout the tour on almost every subject known to the cricket-playing world.” And when Mike Gatting crossed swords with umpire Shakoor Rana at Faisalabad in 1987/88, Ijaz was the Pakistan board’s secretary, his strings being pulled by Haseeb Ahsan, ostensibly the team manager. England’s manager Peter Lush made a three-hour drive to Lahore to try to resolve the situation with Ijaz and board president Lt-Gen. Safdar Butt, only to find, in the words of Scyld Berry, the “situation was full of ‘ifs’ and no Butts; the General was not available, nor Ijaz of that ilk”.
Eventually Ijaz, whose brother-in-law was Pakistan’s defence minister, became chairman of the board. His tenure lasted from 2008 to 2011, during which time the Sri Lankan team bus was attacked by terrorists in Lahore, and the Test team engulfed in a spot-fixing controversy during a Test at Lord’s. Ijaz did himself no favours after a tabloid sting exposed three players implicated in the deliberate bowling of no-balls: “These are just allegations. Anyone can stand up and say things about you – it doesn’t make them true.” Ignoring the evidence, he refused to suspend them from the upcoming one-day series, raising the possibility that England would refuse to play, before tour manager Yawar Saeed diplomatically announced they had “voluntarily withdrawn”.
The writer Peter Oborne tried to speak to Ijaz for Wounded Tiger, his acclaimed history of Pakistan cricket, but found him elusive. “I asked to interview him, he declined,” he wrote. “But in dozens of other interviews, I could not find anyone who had a good word to say about him, with the exception of Yawar Saeed – whom he appointed as national team manager.”
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