Lloyd lowered Australian heads with a series of mighty blows
If you glance back past the elephant-headed god of good fortune you’ll see that our fifty-ninth object was a packet of Rothmans. Four years on from that historic one-day international, the ICC launched the inaugural cricket World Cup.
Sponsored by Prudential and featuring eight countries (the six Test-playing countries of England, Australia, India, Pakistan, New Zealand and the West Indies plus Sri Lanka and East Africa), there were no fancy gimmicks. Players wore white, the ball was red and play began at eleven sharp.
No one knew who the favourites were because in the four years of international one-day cricket only eighteen matches had been played. But from the outset it was clear there were only four teams in with a realistic chance of lifting the cup: the West Indies, England, Australia and New Zealand. England’s first match was against India, and the hosts crushed their visitors with ruthless disdain. Dennis Amiss scored 137 from 147 balls as England racked up 337 from their sixty overs. India had no idea how to respond, so Sunil Gavaskar played in the only style he knew, accumulating 36 runs from 174 balls as if he were batting for a draw in a Test match. It was, as former England captain turned broadcaster Tony Lewis later described it, ‘a perverse moment of self-inflicted shame’. The knock remains the slowest strike rate for any ODI innings over 20 ever.
India finished their innings on 132 for two from sixty overs, and they were soon on their way home. So too Pakistan, though they pushed both Australia and the West Indies to the wire in their pool matches. In the semifinals the English were routed by Gary Gilmour, the Australian paceman taking six for 14 in a devastating spell of bowling. All out for 93, the English fought back and reduced the Aussies to 39 for six. Then Gilmour did with the bat what he’d done with the ball, dashing English hopes as he plundered 28 from twenty-eight balls.
That set up a final against the West Indies, who’d had no trouble brushing past New Zealand in their semifinal. The stage was set, but would that fickle mistress of English cricket behave on the day? Yes. ‘A capacity crowd and another hot shirt-sleeved day, completing the meteorological miracle which has blessed every single moment of this competition with blues skies and sunshine,’ wrote Tony Lewis in Summer of Cricket.
The West Indies batted first, roared on by the hundreds of Caribbean supporters crowded at the foot of the Tavern Stand, blowing whistles, banging cans and dancing in delight as Clive Lloyd rescued his side. The giant West Indian captain loped to the wicket with his side in trouble at 50 for three. ‘How often has he contradicted his studious appearance with thoughts of violence,’ mused Lewis, who sat back and watched as Lloyd lowered Australian heads with a series of mighty blows. A century in just 82 balls, ‘and if figures do not persuade the world that something very special was happening, the inhabitants of London NW8 will tell how the mere sound of his bat, hammering out the music sweet to West Indian ears, destroyed their afternoon sleep!’
Lloyd’s ton, and a half-century from Rohan Kanhai, took the West Indies to a vertiginous 291. Australia were game in their chase but not good enough, and they had no one to desecrate the West Indian bowling attack as Lloyd had done their own. But there was no shame in falling 17 runs short of a total inspired by a wondrous exhibition of batting. Lloyd took the Man of the Match award, and from the hands of HRH Prince Philip, President of the MCC, the Prudential Trophy, a prize he would lift four years later when this time Viv Richards unfurled his genius at Lord’s against England.
‘As a final it was all one could ever have hoped for a brave new venture in sponsorship,’ wrote Lewis in the book he published at the end of 1975. ‘A game which begins at 11am and ends at 8.42pm inevitably kills and rekindles hopes by the minute and by the hour; it chars the nerve-ends, bringing, eventually, the delirium of victory for one and that unwelcome stoicism to the other.’