‘I know that in Australia whenever I had to leave the field, I was glad when I was able to leave Sobers in charge.’ The timing, the style of the remark was so pointed that I felt I could push the unlocked door right open.
‘He knows everything?’ I asked.
‘Everything,’ Worrell replied. For me that settled one aspect of the question. The other I would be able to see only on the field. I saw it at Sabina Park at the first Test against Australia in 1965. Sobers was completely master of the situation from the moment he stepped on to the field, most probably before. He was aware of everything and at no time aware of himself. He was more in command of his situation than the far more experienced Simpson, though he did not have to face the onslaught that Simpson had to face, a problem not only collective but personal, Hall at one end and Griffith on the other. To see in the course of one day Sobers dispatch the ball to all parts of the field with his bat, then open the bowling, fielding at slip to Hall or Griffith, change to Gibbs and place himself at short leg, then go on to bowl slows, meanwhile placing his men and changing them with certainty and ease, this is one of the sights of the modern cricket field. I cannot visualize anything in the past that corresponds to it.
It was jealousy, nay, political hatred, which prompted Cassius to say to Caesar:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about,
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Certainly in the press box watching Sobers a mere scribe is aware of Hazlitt’s ‘Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must show it to all the world in a manner that cannot be hid or gainsaid.’ Of a famous racket-player: ‘He did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball seemed to follow him.’ Hazlitt would not have minded the appropriation of this acute simplicity for Sobers at short leg to Gibbs.
At the end of 1966 Sobers had scored over 5,000 runs in Tests and taken well over 100 wickets. Prodigious! Is Sobers the greatest all-rounder ever? The question is not only unrhetorical. It is unhistorical. Is he? I do not know. And nobody knows. I go further. Alert I always am to the reputation of West Indian cricketers; about this I do not even care. Sobers exceeds all I have seen or read of. That for me is enough, but I keep that well within bounds. There are pedants who will claim that he does not face bowling or batting of the temper and skill of previous generations. The argument errs on the side opposite to that which bravely asserts ‘the greatest ever’. Sobers has so far met and conquered all opposition in sight. How can anyone say that if he had met this bowling quartet or that batting trio he could not have conquered them too? My presumption is that he would have dealt adequately with whatever problems he faced. Sir Donald Bradman is reported to have contested strongly Sir Stanley Jackson’s dictum that George Lohmann was the greatest of medium-pace bowlers. Sir Donald gave first place to O’Reilly, because O’Reilly bowled the googly and Lohmann did not. Despite the eminence of these two gentlemen I beg to disagree with both. Lohmann had no need to bowl the googly. He had enough in his fingers to dismiss the men whom he bowled at. He needed nothing else. To compare him with other bowlers who had other problems and solved them can lead to missing what really matters and what cries for comparison. And what really matters is this: I believe Garfield Sobers has it in him, has already done enough to become the most famous, the most widely known cricketer of the century and of any century barring of course the Telstar of all cricket, W. G. This is not so much a quality of Sobers himself. It is rather the age we live in, its material characteristics and its social temper.
Let us go back to the weekend, more precisely the Sunday, following the first three days of the Oval Test in 1966. West Indies, in their second innings, had lost wickets and still had to make runs to avoid an innings defeat.
On that Sunday over half the world, was that a topic of discussion? Not at all.
The topic was: would Sobers make 200, vitalize his side and so enable West Indies to win? That he could no one doubted, a situation that only one word can express – the word formidable as the Frenchman uses it, vocally and manually.
I borrow here a thought from Sir Neville Cardus. Visualize please. Not only in the crowded towns and hamlets of the United Kingdom, not only in the scattered villages of the British Caribbean, people were discussing whether Sobers would make the 200 or not. In the green hills and on the veldt of Africa, on the remote sheep farms of Australia, on the plains of Southern and the mountains of Northern India, on vessels clearing the Indian Ocean, on planes making geometrical figures in the air above the terrestrial globe. In English clubs in Washington and in New York, there that weekend at some time or other they were all discussing whether Sobers would make the 200 required from him for the West Indies to win the match.
Would he? No one knew. But everyone knew that he could. And this was no remote possibility. It was not even 50–50. It was nearer 60–40. I have never known or heard anything like it, though I suspect that in 1895 when W. G. approached the hundredth century the whole cricket world stood on its toes and held its breath. But the means of communication in 1895 were not what they were in 1966. A man must fit into the expanded technicalities of his age. Garfield Sobers does. We are the second half of the twentieth century, heading for the twenty-first, and the word global has shrunk to a modest measure.
In 1967 I saw Garfield Sobers captaining a World XI at Lord’s. He not only had been appointed. He fitted the position. No one would challenge either his competence or his moral right to the distinguished position. I confess I was profoundly moved as he led his team on to the ground and fixed his field.
I thought of cricket and the history of the West Indies. I cannot think seriously of Garfield Sobers without thinking of Clifford Goodman, Percy Goodman. H. B. G. Austin (always H. B. G. Austin), Bertie Harragin and others ‘too numerous to mention’ (though not very numerous). They systematically built up the game, played inter-island matches, invited English teams to the West Indies year after year, went to England twice before World War I. I remember too the populace of Trinidad & Tobago subscribing a fund on the spot so that ‘Old Cons’ would not miss the trip to England: and that prodigious St Vincent family of the Ollivierres. The mercantile planter class led this unmercantile social activity and very rapidly they themselves produced the originator of West Indian batting, George Challenor. In 1906 he was a boy of eighteen and made the trip to England. He saw and played with the greatest cricketers England has ever known, the men of the Golden Age. Challenor returned to set a standard and pattern for West Indian batting from which at times it may have deviated, but which it has never lost. That history is a history of its own, going deep, too deep for the present area of discourse.
The local masses of the population, Sobers’s ancestors and mine, at first looked on; they knew nothing about the game. Then they began to bowl at the nets, producing at that stage fine fast bowlers. Here more than anywhere else all the different classes of the population learned to have an interest in common.
The result of that consummation is Garfield Sobers. There is embodied in him the whole history of the British West Indies. Barbados has established a tradition that today is the strength, not only of Barbados, but of the West Indian people. But if there is the national strength there is also the national weakness. Sobers, like the other great cricketers of the present-day West Indies, could develop his various gifts and bring them to maturity only because the leagues in England offered them the opportunity to master English conditions, the most varied and exacting in the world. Without that financial backing, and the opportunity systematically to consolidate potential, to iron out creases, and to venture forth on the sea of experiment, there would be another fine West Indian cricketer but not Garfield the ubiquitous. When Sobers was appointed captain of the West Indies he was the first genuine native son to hold that position, born in the West Indies, educated in the West Indies, learn
ing the foundations of his cricket there without benefit of secondary school, or British university. And there he was, just over thirty, with no serious challenge as the greatest cricketer of his generation . . .
In writing about cricket you have to keep an eye on the game, your own eye on the game that is before you, not on any other. Sometimes it is, it has to be, play and players reconstructed in the imagination. Garfield Sobers as a small boy most certainly played cricket barefooted in the streets with a sour orange for a ball and a piece of box or a coconut branch hacked into an approximation of a bat. All of us in the West Indies did that. I have owned a bat since I was four years of age and I do not remember ever being in a situation where I did not own a pair of shoes. But in the early years of this century there were not many, if any, motor cars about, cork balls were easily lost and could be bought only at the nearest small town; and to this day, far less than thirty years ago when Sobers was a boy, from convenience or necessity, future players at Lord’s may be seen playing barefooted with a piece of wood and a sour orange in some village or the back street of a small town in the Caribbean. In the larger islands, once you show unusual capacity, people begin to watch you and talk about you. Sobers stood out easily and people have told me that even as a lad he conferred distinction on his club and people were on the lookout to help in any way he needed. In the West Indies the sea divides us and, in any case, when Sobers at the age of sixteen played for Barbados, I could not possibly see him because I was far away in England. Though as a personality he could mean little to me, I read the accounts, as I always did (and always will if I live in Tierra del Fuego). I couldn’t help noting that he was only sixteen years old and that he had taken 7 wickets. The scores showed that all were bowled or lbw. Very interesting but no more.
Later, however, I saw what I did not see at the time. In the second innings he bowled 67 overs with 35 maidens for 92 runs and 3 wickets, this when India scored 445 for 9. This was a boy of sixteen, obviously someone that would attract special notice. But in those days Valentine filled the bill for slow left-arm bowling. He took 28 wickets in the series so that one could not take Sobers very seriously as a slow left-arm bowler.
Followed the visit of MCC to the West Indies. Sobers did little for Barbados with the ball, but this youth, it seemed, could bat. His 46 in the first innings was the second highest score and he made 27 in the second. After the third Test, Valentine did not play and Sobers came into the fifth Test, taking 4 wickets in one innings and scoring 14 and 26 not out. So far, very useful but nothing to strike the eye of anyone far away. He goes into the list of youngest Test players. When he played at Kingston he was only 17 years and 245 days.
So far there was to the reading eye only promise, but now against the Australians in the West Indies there could be no failure to see that a new man had arrived. Sobers took only 6 wickets in 93.5 overs. But Valentine in 140 had taken only 5. Ramadhin in 139 had taken the same paltry number. Sobers was second in the bowling averages and in batting, in eight innings, had scored 38.50 runs per innings. One began to hear details about his style as a batsman and as a super slip more than as a bowler. In the last Test in Jamaica he made 35 not out and 64. I was informed that from all appearances he would have gone on to the century in a partnership with Walcott which added 79 runs. Sobers was completely master of the bowling but not of himself. Lindwall with a new ball bumped one short at him. Sobers could not resist the hook and found deep square leg waiting for the catch.
Then came a setback that startled. Sobers went to New Zealand as one of the bright stars of the junior Test players. In four Tests his average was 16 runs and with Valentine doing all that was needed from a left-hander he took only 2 wickets. In first-class matches his batting average was below 30 and in all first-class matches he took 4 wickets: far below the boy who had done so well against the full strength of Australia before he was twenty. But for a West Indies team in Port of Spain against E. W. Swanton’s team, Sobers had 3 for 85 and 3 for 49, and made 71, second only to Weekes with 89. New Zealand was a distant dot on the Sobers landscape.
West Indies came to England in 1957 and obviously Sobers was someone I had to see as soon as possible. I went down to Lord’s to see the team at the nets but this was my first glimpse of the three Ws and I don’t remember noticing Sobers, except for his fine physique. I missed the Worcester match but found myself at Northampton to see the second game. Curiously enough, as he did often that year, he played second fiddle to Worrell, in a stand of over a century of which his share was only 36. But great batsman was written all over him, and I think it was Ian Peebles who referred to him in terms of Woolley. I remember noting the stroke off the back foot that sent the length ball of the pace bowler past cover’s right hand. There was another stroke, behind point off a pitched-up fast ball. The ball was taken on the rise and placed behind point to beat the covers, now packed. Here obviously was that rare phenomenon, in cricket or any other form of artistic endeavour, someone new, who was himself and like no one else. There are vignettes in 1957 that are a permanent part of my cricket library. There was an innings against MCC at Lord’s in which Sobers came as near as it was possible for him to look like Constantine in that with monotonous regularity the ball flew from his bat to all parts of the field. In the first Test at Birmingham, he made over 50 in little more than an hour and I remember in particular my being startled at the assured manner in which he glanced – I think it was Bailey – from the middle stump to square leg and so beat the man at long leg. The same determination to thumb his fingers at the covers lifted Lock or Laker overhead to drop in front of the pavilion for four; batsmen didn’t do these things in 1957.
In the last Test at the Oval West Indies collapsed before Lock and Laker and there came fully to the surface the element of stubbornness which Sobers had shown in the last innings at Kingston in 1955 in his partnership with Walcott, and which I had glimpsed at his batting with Worrell at Northampton. Out of a total of 89 he made 39 and in the second innings out of 86, 42. I believe I saw how famous men of old made runs on impossible wickets. To Laker in particular Sobers played back, always back. When Laker had him playing back often enough, he would drop a ball just outside the off stump going away from Sobers to cut: there was a long list of West Indian casualties to this particular disease which appeared most often in the records as ‘Walcott c. Evans b. Laker’. Sobers, however, it would appear was waiting for Laker. Time and again he could get across and cut the ball down past third man.
In a review of the season Skelding, former county fast bowler and now umpire, was reported in one of the annuals as saying that the Sobers he saw in 1957 would be one of the greatest batsmen who ever lived. I could not go quite so far but I have it down in writing of 1958 that if Sobers developed as he promised in 1957, he would be the greatest of living batsmen. So that the 365 which exceeded Hutton’s 364 and the tremendous scoring which followed filled out a portrait whose outlines had been firmly drawn. No need to go through 1963. I saw and felt what I expected to see and feel. However, there was one piece of play in the field which I have seen mentioned only in Wisden and not commented upon elsewhere. That was his bowling in the Oval Test. The famous feat of fast bowling in 1963 was Wesley Hall at Lord’s in the second innings when his figures read 40 overs, 9 maidens, 4 wickets for 93 runs. He bowled during the 3 hours and 20 minutes for which play was in progress on the last day. I believe that on that last day he bowled 35 overs.
Now in the Oval Test Sobers bowled in the first innings 21 overs, 4 maidens, for 2 wickets, 44 runs. I remember these two wickets. He had Bolus caught by keeper Murray (33) and Edrich caught Murray for 25. Hall and Griffith had tried in vain to break that partnership and Sobers, struggling mightily, dismissed both of them well set. In the second innings he did even better; again he dismissed Bolus at 15, again well set, and Dexter when at 27 he seemed poised for one of his great innings. Sobers bowled 33 overs and took 3 wickets for 77 runs. At the time and to this day I measure that performance and Sobers as a
fast bowler by his approximation at the Oval to Hall’s far more famous feat in the Test at Lord’s.
There is one episode on the field which for some reason or other sticks in my mind as representative of Sobers. He came out to bat at the Oval against Surrey early in 1963. He came to the wicket and some Surrey bowler bowled him a short ball. It went to the square-leg boundary. A dead metaphor can sometimes be made to live again: that ball went like a flash. As far as I remember the same over saw another ball, short, but this time outside the off stump and rising higher than usual. That ball streaked to the off boundary. Sobers had not scored any runs in the south and everybody including myself believed that here was the beginning of one of the great innings. It was not to be. Two or three balls later he was out to the almost audible lamentation of the crowd, which had been keyed up to a pitch in the belief that we were going to see what we had come forth to see.
Sobers today is a captain and I believe it would be worthwhile to give some hint of what I have been able to detect of the personality behind that play. I do not know Sobers as well as I knew Constantine, George John and Headley and the men I have played with. But there are certain things that one can divine. I saw Sobers in 1957 make 27 at Leeds and then get run out not through anybody’s fault but by some superb fielding by Tony Lock. Finer batting it is impossible to imagine and that day nothing was more certain than a century before lunch in a Test. But this is not why I remember that day. What remains in my mind is the fury, the rage of Sobers at having been dismissed when he obviously felt that history was in his hands for the making. His walk back to the pavilion made me think of those hurricanes that periodically sweep the Caribbean. I caught a glimpse, by transference so to speak, of the aggressive drive which expresses itself in his batting and fast bowling. I have already referred to the demonic hits with which he greeted Hall’s attempt to bowl him out in a practice game. In the Test which followed that practice game Sobers drove too early at a wide half-volley and was caught for 0. Again on his way back to the pavilion I saw the gleam of the damped-down furnace that raced inside of him. Therefore when I read his detailed protests against what he considers the unfairness of British reporters and commentators in their diatribes against his team of 1966 in general and Griffith in particular, I take it much more seriously than most. The protest is not a formality, or something that ought to be put on record, parliamentary fashion. He feels it personally, as a man feels a wound. I suspect that that is the personality which expresses itself as ubiquitously as it does on the field because it needs room. A man of genius is what he is, he cannot be something else and remain a man of genius.
The Picador Book of Cricket Page 20