There is a portrait on the back wall of the Long Room at Lord’s, a few frames down from the new study of Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad that was unveiled earlier this week. It is a water colour of Imran Khan, his head bowed, his face stern and set in concentration, a pen in his hand. It is a beautiful, poignant painting.The Pakistan players walked past that portrait of Imran on each of the first two days of the second Test against England when they descended from their changing room on the first floor of the pavilion and strode past the likeness of the man who is the greatest sportsperson in the history of their country.They have not been asked about him, though, because they cannot talk about him. Imran’s portrait may be prominent in a room that is a bastion of the English establishment but in Pakistan, the establishment is doing all it can to turn him into a non-person. In Pakistan, the television stations dare not mention his name for fear of sanction and reprisal.For the last three years since Imran was arrested on corruption charges, sentenced to consecutive sentences of 14 and 17 years and taken to Rawalpindi’s notorious Adiala Jail, he has been confined to a 6ft by 8ft ‘death cell’, increasingly starved of contact with his family and the outside world.His isolation reached a point in the last eight months where rumours started to spread that the captain of the Pakistan team that won the World Cup in 1992, the man who had served as Prime Minister of his country between 2018 and 2022, had died in captivity. Those rumours were untrue but his mental and physical health are deteriorating. Grave concerns about his well-being persist.‘The state doesn’t want him seen or heard,’ the esteemed Pakistani journalist, Osman Samiuddin, a senior editor at Cricinfo and the author of The Unquiet Ones, a history of cricket in Pakistan, wrote in an essay last year. ‘They’ve barred TV channels from saying his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture; they’ve even scrubbed him from the footage of his greatest sporting triumph.’ Imran Khan, the greatest sportsperson in the history of Pakistan, has been sentenced to consecutive sentences of 14 and 17 years for corruption Imran’s sons Kasim and Sulaiman study the portrait of their father that hangs in the Lord’s Long Room The brothers spoke to Michael Atherton about the plight of their father but the Pakistan Cricket Board threatened that its team would not play on if Sky aired the interview He is known by many in the country now by the prisoner number he has been assigned in Adiala: 804. Mentioning the number has become a code of support for him. It appeared on car registration plates and it was chanted at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium during big cricket games: ‘Tera yaar, mera yaar, Qaidi no. 804!’ (‘Your friend, my friend, prisoner no. 804′).A Peshawari sandal-maker put the number on one of his designs and it became his best-seller. In Leicester and Jeddah, you could dine at 804-named restaurants. At a takeaway in Birmingham, you could order the Special 804 Biryani. ‘The very marker of his captivity,’ Samiuddin wrote, ‘became its own kind of freedom.’But if the Pakistani state is attempting to vanish their most famous citizen, Imran’s shadow has loomed large over this Test match, which has coincided with the third anniversary of his incarceration. Disquiet about his treatment is growing and growing and the sport which he graced for so long is refusing to let him disappear.Last week, a group of 21 former cricket captains, including Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar, Sir Alastair Cook, Steve Waugh and Michael Atherton, called on Pakistan to ensure Imran be given proper care while in custody.In a letter to Pakistan’s current leader Shehbaz Sharif, they protested about the fact that Khan, 73, was allowed only a few hours at a hospital earlier this month. They asked that he be assessed by a medical board directed by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, particularly on the reported loss of vision in his right eye, and that weekly visits by his family be restored.On Thursday, Atherton took another step forward by conducting an interview with Khan’s sons from his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, Kasim and Sulaiman, that aired on Sky Sports during the delayed lunch interval at Lord’s.Atherton stressed on Friday that his opposition to Khan’s treatment was based on humanitarian concerns but the Pakistan Cricket Board threatened that its team would not return to the pitch after lunch if Sky aired the interview.To its credit, Sky ran the interview anyway. Cricinfo reported the PCB wanted to make a formal complaint against Sky to the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office but play did resume as normal.‘They are not even acting with any kind of strategy anymore,’ Kasim told Atherton of his father’s captors. ‘It is not very clear what they are doing, just blatantly trying to kill him in there. Keep him in as long as possible, and silence him. Imran led his team to World Cup victory in 1992 – but in Pakistan, television stations dare not mention his name for fear of sanction and reprisal Supporters of Imran, the country’s former Prime Minister, demand his release from jail’The last time he was able to speak to our aunties and anyone else, he said the conditions have severely worsened recently. He has been relating it to other political prisoners who have been killed or who have died in prison. Right now, it is worse than ever, completely isolating him more than 23 hours a day in a cell.’Some hope there is still time for a deal to be struck between Imran and the state. ‘There is speculation that the army could use the idea of freeing him as a threat towards the civilian government to keep them in line,’ Samiuddin said on Friday. ‘There is always talk that a deal could be done with Imran and the army and that he could come to live in the UK.‘But the problem with the idea of him taking a deal is that he always used to ridicule Benazir Bhutto and other politicians who were opponents of the regime and conducted their opposition in exile. He said he would never do that. It would be used against him if he changed his approach.’And so Imran sits in his death cell, a principled man in a living hell. And the cricket proceeds at Lord’s. And the cricketers walk past his portrait in the Long Room and avert their eyes.