Why's Imran not in the all-time XI?

What a nihilistic, fearful and ultimately sexless world we live in, despite the clamour to the contrary. Do a Google image search for "Imran Khan" and what do you get: a few visuals of the great ex-cricketer but mostly pictures of some puff-faced, shiny-shoed, doe-eyed Bollywood mother-charmer who looks as threatening as a castrated Bambi and as interesting as old footage of Geoffrey Boycott at the height of his watchfulness. Thankfully there is no such thing as Google audio search because then my vexation would be amplified.

The Great Khan's being elbowed-out from ESPNcricinfo's all-time World XI seems easier to bear. I understand the argument. Sobers has to play, and none of the middle order are touchable. Replace Marshall, Lillee or Akram? It's a close call, but on bowling alone one sides with the jury. So the judgement is tolerated and one accepts the blasphemy of Imran Khan playing in a Second XI as a necessary evil in the world. As the ancients told us, the existence of good necessitates the existence of bad. Sounds like philosophical hogwash, but this is all I can think of to explain Glenn Beck to my children.

Thus we rationalise. The question "How can Imran not be in the team?" is followed by a more detailed perusal of the XI and the subsequent "How can Imran be in the team?' He can't. Rationally speaking, he can't. There's no room. Any rational human being can see it.

Except we are not rational human beings. We are human beings.

And half of human beings are women. And we judge a guy by his game - not his economy figures, century tally and strike rate.

Statistics don't really count, even the one that tells you Imran averaged 19 with the ball and 50 with the bat in his final 10 years as a Test cricketer. Even that he captained a side of freaks and factions to the brink (one dodgy lbw descision in the Caribbean) of being the No. 1 team on the planet. Spare me your facts and your history and just look at the guy.

He was the wild man from Pakistan's NWFP, with a degree from Oxford. He was the Lahore aristocrat who bowled with the violence of a savage beast. He was the ultimate Mills and Boon hero made flesh and blood, and all dressed in white to boot.

You don't use calculations for Imran Khan. You allow the epic and the romantic (which, sadly, too often lie dormant) to bubble over and carry you along on its hot, violent, unruly lava. If so-and-so is undroppable and you need two genuine openers and the middle order is a holy trinity and the bowlers rank higher and... please, spare me your well-argued points, I'm not listening. I'm watching replays of Imran's run-up. And in doing so I realise now that the preceding paragraph is redundant. "Imran Khan had a great bum" would have sufficed.

You guys at ESPNcricinfo are very complex in your anaylses, but let me for a moment cut through your self-important male waffle with simple words: It's Imran Khan and you have to have him. So if you're not sure exactly how to include him in the team, take someone out at random.

It's Imran Khan and you have to have him.

Just as if you needed a man from all of cricket history to save your life in a single-wicket competition, you pick Imran Khan. Just as if you had to make a movie of the ultimate cricket superstar, you cast Imran Khan. Just as if you're married but one night Imran offers, you apologise to your husband and your God and you go for it anyway. It's Imran Khan and you have to have him.

Because sport, as you men may or may not know, carries the erotic. It is the erotic speaking another language. The pursuit of eros is sport's bloodstream, its unspoken raison d'etre. All our controls and rules are ways of harnessing this primal power into whistles and points.

And so we make metaphors: in basketball, taking another man's possessions; in tennis, having another man submit to your will; in rugby, conquering another man's land. Cricket is the greatest game because its metaphor is the greatest: life and death. Imran Khan is its greatest player because he not only took life (bowling), and saved life (batting), and played God with other lives (captaincy), but he did it all while winning the most hearts and turning the most heads. He will always be cricket's rockstar, heart-throb, infatuation. He will always be cricket's true love.

And judging by recent pictures, he will always have a nice bum.