The West Indian cricket recession seems permanent. Watching a worn out Pakistani squad, laden with a few forty year olds and resisting a hardly ominous Caribbean side in the first test, was not the kind of cricket we traditionally expected from these two hugely talented cricket seminaries. Both sides looked jaded, out of their depth and a complete antithesis of the once surreal display of superlative cricket they produced. West Indians in particular have completely lost their cricket wizardry; their charismatic appeal that once produced a string of supremely gifted players. The forty years between 1950 and 1990 undeniably belong to the West Indians. Where did all that sizzling talent, a balm for the sore eyes, came from, is anybody’s guess. None of the present Windies batsmen manage to flutter my eyelashes. Hardly any breath squeezing stroke play ever comes into view. No one even comes within five percent range of Brian Lara’s blistering cover drives and his deft glances off the hips. No one glides in like Malcom Marshal. No one clubbers a cricket ball like Sir Vivian Richards. And certainly, no one is, and can ever will be, as complete a cricketer as Sir Garfield St Aubrun Sobers. The more I think of present West Indian batsmen, begging for runs, the more I dedicate my thoughts to Garry Sobers.
Sobers was an act of god. He was by far the best thing to have happened to cricket in an age, better known for Britain’s decolonization campaign. Sobers was born with a spare finger in each hand. One, as Simon Hughes claims, came off when Sobers was nine, while the other one was gleefully sliced off by Sobers himself when he was fifteen. In his pre-teens, he was often spotted playing cricket with any round object that remotely resembled a cricket ball. With a piece of frail timber, he would conveniently negotiate the awkward bounce a tennis ball is credited to generate. Soon, his incessant hunting of street bowlers, twice his age, began to turn heads, and he was invited to trial for Barbados. In his maiden first class game in 1953, against the touring Indians, Sobers impressed chiefly as a bowler, bagging 7 wickets in the game. His bat was yet to reveal all the wonderful things it was capable of. A year later, aged 17, Sobers played against the touring English side, once again impressing with the ball and showing glimpses of his batting prowess down at number 9. The same year, merely on the strength of two passable first class outings, Sobers earned a test cap, playing against England in the fifth test at Jamaica. In subsequent years, Sobers bat began to shed its conservativeness, as he would beat the tar out of the best of bowlers, world cricket had to offer. His batting style was unconventional and unconstrained. His bat moved like a scalded cat; his stance was as sober as a judge; the back lift soared high into the heavens, coming down like a hammer, dispatching the ball into zones, no bowler on earth could preempt. Once in the groove, a 50 mile per hour lollipop was as simple to negotiate as a 90 mile per hour thunderbolt.
Sobers was already at the top of the heap, but his first major news breaking performance came against Pakistan in 1958. In the third test in Jamaica, Sobers went in to bat close to the end of second day’s play, as Windies were safely positioned at 87 for 1. On day four, he was still there at 300 not out. His partner Clyde Walcott, had informed him that he required 65 runs to surpass Len Hutton’s then record of 364 runs in a test match. ‘I girded up my loins,’ recalls Sobers in his autobiography. As Sobers stole runs through improvised leg glances and squint eyed late cuts, he reached 364 runs, and within striking distance of a world record. Hanif Muhammad, Pakistan’s relentless run accumulator came onto bowl, asking Sobers if he could bowl left handed. ‘You may bowl two handed,’ came the reply as Sobers pushed through the covers and scampered for a single, and so, rewriting the record books. All roads in Jamaica that evening led to Sobers. The rest is history. Year after year, Sobers reeled off centuries wherever he went. His pounding of Frank Tyson and the more ravaging Dennis Lillie are telling tales.
Interestingly, Sobers was not only at the mercy of his batting performance, as he was skilled enough to make any playing eleven in the world as a left arm bowler. And, if he failed to impress with both bat and ball, he would still grab the headlines through some dazzling, eye popping slip catching. Clearly, the most complete cricketer ever to have walked on this planet. Sadly, the West Indians have been on the downgrade for a while, struggling to discover another Sobers style DNA. And bugger me, it’s a struggle that may linger on. They may still produce better cricketers, but Sir Garfield was perhaps the only pebble on the beach.
The writer is an alumnus of University of Cambridge and an economist. He previously worked as a journalist in London and has also played for Pakistan’s junior cricket team. He can be reached at [email protected]