MARTIN ADRIEN WAS at school in the summer of 1976. He had been in England for five and a half years. He first saw London through the window of an aircraft three days before Christmas in 1970. He was 11 and had left the Caribbean island of Dominica in a short-sleeved shirt. Somewhere down there, at a place called Gatwick Airport, his dad was waiting for him. Martin had come to England to get an education. His dad, who in Dominica had been a farmer growing bananas, yams and sweet potatoes, had been living in east London since 1959. Now he had sent for Martin and his sister.
‘He was looking for better-paid work and so he retrained as a welder,’ says Martin. ‘There was an open invitation to come over, a shortage of manpower. He was wanted and now we were joining him. I’d read about this great country, and yes, I was very excited.’
Martin bowled fast and he could bat. He had played his last game of cricket in Dominica the day before he got on the plane.
Any village of any size would have a cricket ground. My village was Dublanc. Only about 400 people lived there but we had a pitch that was used every Saturday and Sunday. We had a bag of shared kit. You were very fortunate if somebody you knew from England sent over a bat, gloves or some pads. We would usually make bats from coconut-tree branches and would burn plastic and melt it into the shape of a ball. So being hit by a cricket ball meant nothing. A plastic one was far more painful.
In east London Martin went to a school in Canning Town, which took a bit of getting used to. In his father’s house there was discipline. Strict rules. No TV, no playing until homework was done, but at school he was surprised at how the pupils spoke back to the teachers. When spring came, he played cricket for the school and bowled well but was taken off if he picked up too many wickets. That wouldn’t happen in Dominica. In the playgound he was told by other kids that his colour was a problem. He hadn’t been prepared for that.
‘At home the white people were just other Dominicans. I’d just assumed everybody was the same. Now there were other black kids in my school but a pretty strong element of racism too. It took me two years to find what I would call a “white friend” because of my first experience of white boys and girls.’
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Vivian Richards had also been sent to England to further his education. The school he went to in 1972 was the Alf Gover cricket school in Wandsworth in south London. Richards was 20 then, and Andy Roberts, who was a year older, went with him. It was the first time that two young sportsmen from the island of Antigua had been given such a chance. Their fares and fees had been paid for by the local voluntary coaching committee, the money raised by holding jumble sales, dances and barbecues.
Richards and Roberts hated England in November. They lived in a freezing guest house in Putney, and Richards soon lost all his money. It had been folded carefully into the back pocket of his trousers. Had it been stolen?
‘Well, that was my excuse,’ says Richards.
I had no wallet, and my fingers were so cold that perhaps I pulled the roll of cash from my pocket and had no feeling of it going missing. It was a rude awakening. What is this place? How can we play cricket in these temperatures? It seemed to be dark all day, midday looked more like midnight. Ah man, that guest house was crazy stuff. Every night before we went to bed we had to make sure that we had enough ten-pence pieces to stick into the machine to give us the necessary juice – the electric and the heat. We would go to the pub. Andy didn’t drink, but if I had a few pints, and then we’d get home and realise ‘Oh wow – no ten-pence pieces!’ so sometimes we had to man it out, you know?
During the six weeks they stayed the highlights were a visit to Highbury to watch Arsenal beat Leeds United two–one in the football first division and moving to Hackney, where Roberts’s sister rented a flat. It was warmer there and they ate food that they were used to. During the day Richards was told by Alf Gover to close his batting stance to make his defence stronger and Roberts was made to run between a pair of wooden stools lined up at the bowling crease to stop him from falling away as he released the ball.
‘Before I went to Alf Gover I was a brash cricketer,’ reflects Richards now. ‘It was all about going after any-and everything, but with Alf it was about judging the conditions you were playing in, making the necessary adjustments. Aggressive stroke play, but technique too. Tight when playing forward, nice bat and pad.’
The people of Antigua had saved up to send these young cricketers to England because they thought they had great promise. No one from the island had played Test cricket for the West Indies. Many hoped that Roberts or Richards would be the first. Such was the expectation that three years previously Richards had caused a crowd invasion during his first game for Antigua. It was against St Kitts in the Leeward Islands tournament. Batting at the Antigua Recreation Ground in St John’s, he was given out first ball, caught off his glove. Richards’s recollection is that the umpire from Montserrat almost joined in with the bowler’s appeal. The Antigua Star reported that he ‘immediately demonstrated where the ball struck him (on his thigh), showed some disgust at the decision and left the field.’
The batsman’s indignation had an immediate effect on parts of the crowd of several thousand, who had been there since the morning but had not seen any play until after lunch because of a damp pitch. ‘Simultaneously, spectators from the ringside swarmed onto the field, brushed aside policemen and began to shout in protest. St Kitts players, apparently alarmed at seeing the hundreds of men converging onto the field, ran to the haven of the Players’ Pavilion.’
‘Indeed, I saw it all happen,’ says Tapley Lewis. He is pointing to the stadium behind him as he sits waiting for a fare in his taxi in St John’s. ‘I guess Vivi was still a kid, something like that. I was 19 years old, a mechanic in those days, and we wanted to see some cricket. Vivi, you see, we knew was a good player. We knew he was capable of good play and we wanted to see good play. He was like a little king to us, but that day he was gone for nothing. That’s why there was a rush on the ground.’
According to the Star newspaper, the officials weren’t as sprightly as the fielders. ‘Both umpires were slower in leaving the field, and despite police protection the crowd closed in around George Edwards and cuffed him several times while threatening him.’ There was a 50-minute delay and placards with NO VIVI, NO MATCH were held high outside the pavilion. ‘In other parts of the field several crowds gathered and heatedly discussed the whole matter.’ Telephone calls were placed to St Kitts by Antiguan officials, who ruled between them that, if the St Kitts captain had no objection, Richards should be allowed to bat again.
The cuffed umpire, George Edwards, was replaced by the former Test bowler Bunny Butler. In the dressing room Richards’s main fear after naively agreeing to go back out and bat to calm the crowd down, was that his father – a senior warder in the prison next to the ground – would realise that his own son was the cause of the commotion. Malcolm Richards had been a talented cricketer himself but was determined that his son would not take up the sport for a living. He had beaten Vivian and his brother when they were younger for pretending to be ill so that they could take part in a game rather than attend church on Sunday. ‘By the mercy of God,’ Malcolm would later recall, ‘I forgot my hymn book and I returned. When I came home, I met them properly dressed, playing cricket. I was a disciplinarian who brought the discipline of the jail home.’
The riot set off by Richards wasn’t the last of the trouble. The following week the final of the tournament between Antigua and Nevis was abandoned after a Nevis batsman refused to walk. The team was chased back to their hotel. Their manager gave a live description on Radio ZIZ of what happened next. ‘Bus loads and car loads of people besieged the hotel threatening to shoot some members of the team. Some of them broke bottles,’ he said. The locals were apparently hunting for the competition trophy, which Nevis were claiming to have retained. The team had to be driven under police escort to the airport and immediately caught a specially chartered aircraft home, where according to the Workers’ Voice newspaper up to 4,000 delighted people were there to greet them when they touched down.
The two disturbances are fine illustrations of how seriously cricket was viewed in the Caribbean. It could quickly provoke discontent. Bitterness could erupt between the territories. Cricket in the West Indies had never been a game without consequence played by smiling, carefree islanders.
On top of whatever punishment Vivian Richards received from his father, he was banned from playing for Antigua for two years for causing the upheaval at the game. And those Antiguans who thought Richards had let them down by getting banned and therefore weakening their side shouted abuse as they passed his house. He was ostracised by some, but still supported by many. One ally was a local businessman who believed Richards deserved rehabilitation. He didn’t mention the riot when he wrote on Richards’s behalf to Church and Oswaldtwistle Cricket Club – who played in the English Lancashire League – in March 1973.
‘I would like to draw to your attention’, he began, ‘a young cricketer by the name of Vivian Richards who would like to play for your cricket club in the league as a professional … Vivian Richards is the type of batsman that crowds will walk miles to see,’ read the typed airmail letter. ‘He is sound and polished and full of strokes and he hits the ball very hard. He is a good off-spinner and a very good fields man. He is rated in the same class with Clive Lloyd in the covers (world class).’ The sponsor was even willing to pay the young man’s airfare, adding that he was a very quiet lad who loved his cricket very much. ‘Richards is all set to come now,’ the letter concluded.
Church and Oswaldtwistle didn’t reply. That season they signed Ken Arthur, a Barbadian who would go on to play one 2nd XI championship game for Glamorgan. Vivian Richards had missed out on the Lancashire League, but six months after his winter in Wandsworth his skills were recognised elsewhere in England. Richards agreed to play for a small club called Lansdown in Somerset. For the 1973 season he was paid one pound a day as assistant groundsman, to push the roller and score as many runs as he could while he qualified to play for Somerset.
‘He held his bat like a Stradivarius fiddle,’ said Len Creed. ‘He was superb. His right hand could have been tied behind his back.’ Creed was a West Country farmer and betting-shop owner who had connections with Lansdown and Somerset. He had flown to Antigua on holiday with a touring team called the Mendip Acorns, had heard of Richards and, keen for a young overseas player to come to Somerset, persuaded him to fly to England.
When Richards scored 81 not out in his first game for Somerset at the start of the 1974 season Len Creed wept as his discovery was clapped off the field. The county captain, Brian Close, led the applause. It was a fine start. A week later Richards had to face Mike Procter, a fearsome South African all-rounder who would be bowling fast for Somerset’s great rivals Gloucestershire. Would Richards cope? In Procter’s first over Richards hit him for two fours and a clanging six, sending the ball straight into the old organ works on the east side of Somerset’s ground in Taunton.
‘You could hear it rattling round the machinery in there, never to be seen again,’ said the Somerset coach Tom Cartwright. ‘It was a magical few minutes … one of the most electrifying moments in cricket that I’ve ever witnessed.’
By the beginning of the English summer of 1976 Vivian Richards had scored centuries for Somerset and for the West Indies. He was sending newspaper clippings of his success home to his father. Just as the 1973 airmail letter to Church and Oswaldtwistle had predicted, Richards was all set.
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Being from Guyana, Clive Lloyd was used to rain. Storms could last for several days, and in Georgetown, a coastal city built below the level of the high tide, flooding was not unusual. When that happened parts of the outfield at Georgetown Cricket Club, the Bourda, would be underwater. Such a flood occurred during a storm at the beginning of April 1976 when the West Indies were in the middle of a Test series against India. It was a downpour that helped to shape how the West Indies would play their cricket for the next 20 years.
They were to play 12 Test matches in 1976. Five of them would come during the summer series in England. Three had already been lost to Australia. The four Test matches against India at home mattered greatly for Clive Lloyd’s future and that of the side.
The West Indies won the first Test in Barbados and were fortunate to draw the second in Trinidad. Two fast bowlers, two spinners and a seam bowler were chosen for both matches. Then it rained in Guyana, and the third Test couldn’t be played at the Bourda, so it was decided to use the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain again. There was a popular view (which Lloyd would later say was ‘mythical thinking’) that the Trinidad pitch was good for spinners. The West Indies included three: Imtiaz Ali, Albert Padmore and Raphick Jumadeen. Between them they bowled leg breaks, off spin and slow left arm.
When the West Indies declared their second innings on the fourth day they were well in front. India would have to bat last and needed 403 runs to win. Only one team in the history of Test cricket – Australia against England in 1948 – had scored that many in a fourth innings to win a game. That evening India still needed nearly 300 runs and the match seemed safe. It was a suitable time for Lloyd to be told by the West Indies Cricket Board of Control that he would continue as captain for the tour of England.
On the final morning, Trinidadians who supported India had been to temples and offered prayers for a win. (By the 1970s, nearly 40 per cent of people on the island were of Indian descent. They had been settling in Trinidad since the late 1830s, when workers were brought in to replace freed black slaves on the sugar plantations.) They brought sweets blessed by the priests to the ground. They sang a calypso about their batsman Sunil Gavaskar and in return he scored a hopeful hundred. By the afternoon, with India still batting comfortably, the target had shrunk further and portions of the crowd began to intone Hindu devotional songs. It did the trick. The West Indian spin bowling was now feeble. With seven overs of the day’s play to spare, India won.
The West Indies had somehow lost a match in which their spinners had bowled 107 overs in the fourth innings. Just three wickets fell on the last day, and two of those were run-outs. In almost a hundred years of international cricket only five other Test captains had declared their second innings and seen the total passed. This was a West Indian humiliation. From New Delhi, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent a telegram to her side congratulating them on their ‘exciting and well-earned victory’. In the West Indies dressing room the captain asked his bowlers to estimate how many runs they thought they could have defended.
Wayne Daniel was listening. He was a 20-year-old fast bowler from St Philip parish in Barbados. He had been selected in the squad, but not the final XI. ‘It was a very sombre, solemn dressing room. Lloydy wasn’t very happy at all. He was fuming. He felt that the bowlers had let him down. And rightly so. It wasn’t his style to pick on people but he was cross.’
‘I wasn’t put off spinners for life by the experience,’ says Clive Lloyd. ‘It’s just that the ones we had weren’t winning games for us. It was a low moment.’ What the embarrassment clarified in his mind – combined with the team’s experience in Australia – was that he needed bowlers who could be relied upon, match after match, to take 20 opposition wickets. ‘I didn’t simply crave a pace attack. What I wanted was a formidable attack.’ But Lloyd and those who advised him now knew that attack would have to be based on pace. Lance Gibbs no longer played, and if the best West Indian slow bowlers couldn’t do it on a Trinidad turner, they wouldn’t do it anywhere.
Without the rain in Georgetown, the West Indians’ spin humiliation at the Queen’s Park Oval would not have happened and the need for a new bowling strategy would have seemed less urgent. Weather had influenced cricket history. In July 1788 a violent hailstorm, with huge stones that were said to have killed hares and partridges, had accelerated the French Revolution by ruining crops, increasing food shortages and further upsetting the urban poor. The Georgetown storm of 1976 brought forward a revolution in West Indian cricket.
‘We used to select our teams in the standard way,’ explains Deryck Murray.
Two opening batsmen, three middle order, an all-rounder, a wicket-keeper, two fast bowlers, two spin bowlers. That’s a balanced team, but we needed to think now in terms of what our strengths were. If, like the Australians, we had four or six fast bowlers, then so be it. We pick four and we put the opposition batsmen under the same sort of pressure that we had known. After the two quicks, who are our next two best bowlers? Ali or Jumadeen may be good spin bowlers but they were not as likely to win a Test match for us as fast bowlers. This was a major change in the thinking of West Indies cricketers. We felt that we could withstand any given situation and we could adapt to it.
After Queen’s Park, India and the West Indies had won a Test each and there was one left to play. Only one spin bowler was chosen for the final Test at Sabina Park in Jamaica, and Wayne Daniel was added to the team. If the West Indies were going to win the match and the series, they would do it with speed on a hard shiny pitch.
‘Man, it was quick,’ says Michael Holding. ‘The sun got into it, and that old Sabina gloss showed up.’
India batted first and did well, if slowly, on the first day. The problems came before lunch on the second. The pitch had recently been relaid, and a ridge appeared at the northern end, possibly created by an underground drainage channel. Holding began bowling from around the wicket, which made it much harder for the Indian batsmen – who had scored nearly 200 and lost only one wicket – to avoid the trajectory of the short ball. It was also an act of aggression. The Guardian reported that ‘the innings was wrecked by a fiery spell from Holding on a pitch which suddenly came to life. Gaekwad caught a vicious bouncer on the left ear and was taken to hospital. Gundappa Vishwanath was caught off his gloves from another bouncer which dislocated and broke the middle finger of his right hand and Brijesh Patel joined the casualty list when Holder found the ridge and sent him to hospital for stitches to a gashed face.’
‘It was rearing, rising and flying. I don’t think I have ever seen a wicket-keeper stand as far back as Deryck Murray did in that game,’ says Wayne Daniel. ‘There were times when he would leap into the air, right hand, left hand, and the ball would go over him and bounce into the sight screen. He was a long way back. And yes, even Vanburn Holder bowled a couple of fast deliveries. Show me a bowler who wouldn’t exploit the pitch he had been given to bowl on.’
The India captain, Bishan Bedi, declared ‘in disgust’ at 306 for 6 with two men retired hurt. Later he said it was for ‘self-preservation. Suppose we had got hit on the head.’ He was referring to himself and his fellow non-batting spinner, Bhagwath Chandrasekhar. ‘Who would have done the bowling?’ The manager of the India side told reporters that what had happened was not in the spirit of the sport. ‘It was almost like war,’ said Polly Umrigar, ‘and the whole charm of the game is being lost.’
Nearly 40 years later, Michael Holding now admits that he was not comfortable with the way he was asked to bowl. There may or may not have been a ridge at one end, he says, but ‘in truth we bowled an awful lot of short balls’. The tactics were born out of ‘sheer desperation’ to succeed caused by the pressure of defeat in Australia and the need to go to England as winners, not losers. A more experienced team, reckons Holding, with a more experienced captain would have had the self-confidence to win the game another way.
Bedi’s extraordinary declaration changed the direction of the Test. When the West Indies batted, they scored 85 more runs than India, who had several men absent hurt. All 17 members of the India squad fielded at some point, and there was a further hospital visit for one who needed an emergency operation for appendicitis. Because of all the injuries, when it came to the Indians’ turn to bat again Bedi closed the second innings after five wickets had fallen and the lead over the West Indies was just 12 runs. He had given the game away. The Indians insisted they had no more fit batsmen. The end came quickly. The Indian seamer Madan Lal pointedly bowled five bouncers in a row in the first over of the West Indies’ innings. The West Indians needed less than another over to win.
The victory meant that the West Indies had taken the series by two Tests to one, but the debate over the manner of the win stretched from Kingston to London. On Jamaican television the West Indian journalist Tony Cozier told viewers that when India were in the field ‘we had cricket for the connoisseur’, but that when the West Indies bowled they had seen ‘cricket for the sadist’.
Would the West Indies soon be doing this sort of thing in England? From his office at the House of Lords in Westminster, Lord Brockway – who by coincidence had spent his adult life campaigning against organised violence – wrote to the British press asking if ‘the Caribbeans’, as he called Clive Lloyd’s team, had besmirched cricket, a sport which was ‘the symbol of good conduct’? To save the game, he decided, there must be a rule ‘outlawing a leg ball which would hit a man above waist level. Is it cricket to aim at a man’s head rather than the wicket?’
The fury of Sunil Gavaskar lasted for at least several years. ‘That was not great captaincy,’ he later wrote of the West Indian tactics, ‘it was barbarism.’ The local crowd, he said, should be called a mob. ‘The way they shrieked and howled every time Holding bowled was positively horrible. They encouraged him with shouts of “Kill him, maaan!” “Hit him, maan!” “Knock his head off, Mike!” All this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these people still belong to the jungles and forests instead of a civilised country.’
Wayne Daniel fielded in front of that crowd. He has a different memory.
Now you see I don’t remember them shouting, ‘Kill him!’ It wasn’t like that. In those days the crowd were excited and they liked the fact that you were able to make the batsman flinch or run. It was the same in Barbados. It was a thrill to see the fear of God put into the batsman. The crowds went to Kensington or Sabina to see fast bowling. They went to see the ball fly, they went to see bouncers. They wanted to see aggressive fast bowling. And that is what fast bowling is all about. Just like the crowd in Australia were excited by and enjoyed Lillee and Thomson.
Clive Lloyd wasn’t greatly upset by the Indians’ reaction. His view was that those who couldn’t play pace shouldn’t play international cricket. ‘We had quick bowlers and their batsmen simply couldn’t cope.’ He was annoyed by the way the game ended. ‘The Indian tactics were not exactly a show of guts. If you’re brave enough, you’ll make runs.’ Bishan Bedi’s main complaint seemed to be the very particular suffering of modern international captains whose bowlers didn’t go above 75 miles per hour: ‘it’s plain and simple. The West Indies knew we couldn’t retaliate.’
The Indians left the Caribbean. Some still wore their bandages as they walked to the aeroplane which would fly them home via England. The 12 players who went on to Bombay were grateful to be shunned by most local cricket lovers. ‘They apparently feared that, as on a previous occasion, they might be beaten up by fans disappointed by their play,’ wrote one correspondent. ‘Bishan Singh Bedi wisely decided to stay on in London.’
The West Indians were soon following Bedi there.
‘We’d won the series and we were going off to England,’ says Daniel. ‘Especially for the guys who had come back from Australia, it was a great moment. Vanburn Holder had told me of the gloom, the heavy silences in the dressing room in Australia. Guys weren’t speaking to one another, the blame game was on – “You did this, you should have done that” – all that sort of thing. There was no camaraderie. So this win brought the smiles back. And you know West Indians like to be bouncy and upbeat.’
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The England captain Tony Greig had something wrong with his mouth. His county side were playing the West Indies at Hove at the end of May 1976, but Greig had to leave the ground to go and see his dentist. He had gum trouble and instead of joining his Sussex teammates when he returned, he climbed up to the pavilion roof for a television interview with the BBC. The first Test was in two days’ time.
Greig soon became impatient. He thought the reporter was writing his side off before the series had begun. He had been in Australia to see the West Indies lose and reckoned they lacked discipline and staying power.
I’m not really quite sure they’re as good as everyone thinks they are. I think people tend to forget that it wasn’t long ago that they were beaten five–one by the Australians; they struggled very much to handle them and they only just managed to keep their heads above water against the Indians just a short while ago as well. Sure, they’ve got a couple of fast bowlers, but really I don’t think we’re going to run into anything any more sensational than Thomson and Lillee and so really I’m not all that worried about them.
Greig was then asked about how he had picked his team. England were short of experienced batsmen, but was the selection of the Somerset captain Brian Close – who was 45 – ‘a panic measure’?
‘One of the things which obviously must be done,’ replied Greig ‘is that we’ve got to handle these fast bowlers. It’s been the one thing that we’ve fallen down on in the past and we’re trying to protect against that. Brian Close is a very strong man, a very brave man, and we think he’s the best man for the job right now. I’ve got someone who can stand up and let them hit him all day and he won’t worry about it.’
The England captain then came out with the two sentences that would transform the cricketing summer.
‘I think you must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top, they are magnificent cricketers, but if they’re down, they grovel. And I intend, with the help of Closey and a few others, to make them grovel.’
To grovel: ‘to lie or crawl abjectly on the ground with one’s face downwards’ or ‘to act obsequiously in order to obtain forgiveness or favour’.
‘My dad didn’t even like cricket, and he got excited about it,’ recalls Martin Adrien. ‘On Sunday there was no TV at home, but we were allowed to read the newspapers, and I remember him leading a passionate discussion about the word grovel. He kept saying, “This is about more than cricket.” I hadn’t been overtly Afro-centric at that time, but something about it hit home with me and my friends. It became a big talking point.’
Greig’s comments, which were broadcast on the Sportsnight programme along with speedway highlights and a British light-welterweight championship fight at the Royal Albert Hall, also became a talking point within the West Indies team. It was a Wednesday evening and they were at their hotel in Nottingham preparing for the first Test. They reacted in different ways.
Gordon Greenidge remembers it as a ‘serious moment’ which
triggered off a feeling of contempt around the team. It felt as if it was a deliberate comment to degrade us. I think the whole team felt very hurt. It was now combat, it was now a battle where there was no way England could have won. That comment alone was sufficient to set the tone for the whole series. No one let up in any way at all because it hurt. Whether he meant it to or not, it hurt, and of course that drove the guys to perform even better, greater than perhaps they thought they could.
Deryck Murray’s description is of a ‘motivational speech with racial overtones’. What irritated him and several other players was the context of the remarks, given Greig’s background. Even though he was playing for England, Greig had been born and brought up in white South Africa, where profound discrimination against black people was an official policy of the apartheid government.
Michael Holding’s recollection is that those West Indian players who had lived in England and had played county cricket were more disturbed by ‘grovel’ than he was. ‘It wasn’t as if we were all sitting in a room and watched it together. When I heard the word I didn’t know exactly what “grovel” meant. I knew to a fair degree what he was talking about but I didn’t know of any ulterior motives or connotations behind the word. Eventually you hear people start to say that word is used in South Africa.’
‘We were supposed to have gone to a team meeting,’ says Vivian Richards, ‘and all of sudden there’s this clip. The television was on, and we saw Tony Greig saying his stuff. The appetite was there immediately. I remember Clive Lloyd said, “Guys, we don’t need to say much – the man on the television has just said it all for us.” We knew what we had to do … We took that seriously. Very, very seriously.’
Wayne Daniel heard about it later. ‘We had the team meeting early that evening. I don’t remember anything being discussed there. It was the next day in the dressing room that we talked about it. Deryck and Andy Roberts were saying, “What? He’s going to make us grovel?”’
Clyde Walcott was the manager of the West Indies side for the tour. The next day he said that the England captain’s interview had been ‘just another of those psychological moves … that are made before a big match’. Later he would add, ‘To say that about West Indians, some of whose countries had only recently become independent of Britain, whose ancestors were slaves taken to the Caribbean from Africa, was an incredible gaffe.’
‘It was a slight against all black people, not just black cricketers,’ says Martin Adrien. ‘“Grovel” made people think about the colonial past and slavery. And from a South African cricketer, with all that was going on at the time, it made it worse. It is a very disturbing term coming from that man about a black team. He was saying, “I am up here, you are down there; I have my foot on your throat and I’m going to squeeze.” Yeah. It drew an instinctive reaction from me.’
Tony Greig hadn’t used the word as a calculated racial taunt, but it was an almighty blunder. In the days that followed he sought to explain himself on local black radio shows. He had been thoughtless and crass, and was not helped by his intense competitiveness. ‘On the cricket field’, wrote his England teammate Mike Brearley, ‘he bears all the marks of one who would compete with his grandmother for the last nut on Christmas Day.’
‘Let me see if I can say something on behalf of the sinner!’ suggests Ronald Austin. Ronald is from Georgetown in Guyana, a man who has followed the West Indies cricket team closely since he was a boy. In 1976 he was visiting London.
Greig had been in the West Indies in 1974, bowling off spin against a team that included Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Kallicharran and Lloyd. He succeeded in putting pressure on them. He was adept at containing these batsmen and then purchasing wickets. He scored runs himself and, as I recall, was brilliant in the field. Any charitable human being would be forgiven for thinking that in the circumstances the England captain would again fancy his chances against these Caribbean opponents. Yet overconfidence and carelessness impaired his judgement. Using the word ‘grovel’ was bad enough. His greater error was to underestimate the improvement in West Indian batting and bowling.
Greig had sharpened the desire of the West Indies to beat England. His ineptitude helped to unify the West Indian team and gave them a specific sense of purpose and a focus for their enmity. ‘Tony Greig was the inspiration,’ says Andy Roberts. ‘Not because of his colour, not because he was from South Africa but because of the word ‘grovel’. That is what motivated us. It had nothing to do with anything else.’
The players on the 1976 tour had a simple plan which they repeated to each other often: to do everything as well as they could. Do everything you can to win. Play your best cricket at all times. Never be complacent. ‘Because we felt all of those things,’ says Wayne Daniel,
we thought we would get our game right. So we didn’t let that comment make it personal. We stayed calm. Then, if at the end of the series we had won, had torn England apart, then we could say, ‘Who’s grovelling now?’ So the senior players told us, ‘He said what he said, so let’s catch well, let’s bowl fast, let’s get in and stay in. Play your best cricket and we will prevail.’ That is what Greig’s comment inspired us to do – that was our thought – much more so than, ‘Hey, here’s a white fellow talking crap and we’re going to knock his head off.’
Thirty years after the series ended, Tony Greig reflected on his Sportsnight appearance and confessed that he didn’t regret his comments because of the effect they had; he regretted them because ‘with hindsight, I cringe when I see them. Because it was very inappropriate. I’ve got no axe to grind with how the West Indians reacted. I would have done the same thing. There are times in your life when you get things wrong and you make mistakes, and that was one of mine.’
As Vivian Richards put it, it was a ‘stupid remark’.
* * *
Even before the ‘grovel’ interview, England’s players, selectors and cricket journalists knew that it was likely to be a difficult summer. Only Tony Greig, Alan Knott and possibly Derek Underwood had the talent to match that of any of the West Indies players. There had been a Test trial which solved nothing, as the England XI had bowled out The Rest for 48. Selection was further complicated by the fact that two of England’s best batsmen – Dennis Amiss and Graham Roope – had both played poorly for a Marylebone Cricket Club XI against the West Indies days earlier. Amiss had ducked into a short ball and left the pitch with a bleeding head. Roope had made 18 and 3.
Neither was picked for the first Test at Trent Bridge; the side chosen was one that could keep a game safe and possibly had the ‘tenacity’ wrote John Arlott in the Guardian, ‘to worry a finer but less purposeful team into error and defeat’. Arlott’s colleague at the Observer, Tony Pawson, predicted, ‘We have to rely on John Edrich, David Steele and Bob Woolmer to wear down the West Indian pace and hope that their more exciting stroke play may again get them in trouble from time to time.’ This was a team picked to hang on. Winning was a possibility; entertaining was unlikely.
There was also a realisation that this West Indies side was different from the sort of team that had toured England so pleasantly in the past. After watching Vivian Richards make a hundred against Hampshire, the Guardian noted, ‘There looks to be a greater meanness nowadays about the West Indies’ batsmen. They are not the jolly Caribbean beans of old.’
At the team’s first news conference Clive Lloyd was asked how many bouncers his bowlers would send down in an over. ‘Fast bowling is not all about bouncers,’ he replied.
The way the team had recently bowled against India made some British journalists prickle: ‘The West Indies have packed their side with fast bowlers for this summer’s tour of England and it is clear that there will be plenty of short stuff,’ stated Henry Blofeld. ‘Will the English umpires … do what their opposite numbers abroad have failed to do? And if they do [warn players about intimidatory bowling], will it be to loud cries of “discrimination” or even “racialism”?’
There came an even more distressing warning from the traditionally sober authority on the game, the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. In ‘Notes by the Editor’ there was a paragraph about the risk of serious injury from being hit by a cricket ball. The editor quoted a medical doctor and former chairman of the Cricket Society called R.W. Cockshut. Dr Cockshut had well-known opinions on several other subjects: one was the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, another was the belief that all young boys should be circumcised to promote chastity and lessen the temptation of masturbation in their teenage years. Dr Cockshut was clearly no stranger to hopelessly unrealistic theories.
As for cricket, he had published research which predicted that in 1976 alone there could be ‘up to ten deaths and 40 irreversible brain injuries caused by the impact of cricket ball on skull’. The weekly carnage would be prevented by awarding the batting side ten runs every time a player was hit above the hips. ‘Bumpers would disappear overnight,’ was Wisden’s conclusion. Dr Cockshut’s fears were never realised. The West Indies killed no one in 1976. The doctor’s desire to outlaw both short balls and foreskins came to nothing.
* * *
If Tony Greig wondered how the West Indians might respond to what he had said on television, he probably got his answer when he came in to bat on the fourth morning of the first Test at Nottingham. He arrived at the crease at 11.49 and was back in the dressing room by noon. Seven balls was all it took. The end came after Andy Roberts bowled two sharp deliveries which bounced and cut back into his body – 20 runs awarded to England in the world of Dr Cockshut – then a fuller ball, one of the fastest of the day, knocked back the England captain’s off stump. Tony Greig had made nought. Vivian Richards made 232. This meant he’d now scored more than 1,000 Test runs in 1976 alone. It was not enough to win the game though. The first Test of the summer ended in a draw.
Richards missed the second Test at Lord’s in London because he was ill. But Martin Adrien made it. ‘That’s right. Me and a couple of friends – we weren’t sitting where our tickets said we should because we soon realised where the fun part of the ground was.’
They made their way to the Nursery End opposite the famous Lord’s pavilion, to join hundreds of other people supporting the West Indies.
‘It was the first time I’d seen so many people from the West Indies in one place, and from different islands,’ he says. ‘At home my father mostly socialised with other Dominicans living in London; the cliques stuck together. There was lots of banter about which was the best island, which had the best players; the Jamaicans were believing that they were the West Indies, the Barbadians saying that without three or four of their own the West Indies were no good. “Where the hell is Dominica?” somebody shouted.’
Martin Adrien and his friends had brought nothing to eat, but it didn’t matter.
‘Other people were unpacking fried fish and offering it around, chicken, rice, salad, plenty of rum. It was a complete surprise to be included. It was an eye-opener to see all these different Caribbean people and how we watched cricket.’
It wasn’t all peace, love and boiled dumplings at the Nursery End in 1976 though. Just before five o’clock in the afternoon on the first day Tony Greig came to the wicket. There were shouts of ‘This ain’t no cricket match no more; it’s all-out warfare. War, war! Grovel, grovel!’ Later on a fistfight between two West Indies supporters started about whether or not their former captain, Rohan Kanhai, should have been selected for the tour. ‘Age doesn’t come into it,’ said the bloody-nosed victor. ‘Send for Rohan – ask the great E. W. Swanton!’
Not everyone took the cricket so seriously. The lunch box could be more important than the soapbox. Cricket was a West Indian social occasion.
‘Take my mother,’ says the cricket writer, Colin Babb.
She does not even like cricket. But she always wanted the West Indies to win because of what the team represented to her as a migrant in this country. It was crucial because it showed that collectively we could beat the English. So people like her were fans of participating in the day. They came and brought food and everything else because it was a day out with the family. For some folks it was more exciting that they were going to meet their cousin from Birmingham rather than anything Viv might do. It was about having a good day out.
By 1976 West Indians living in Britain had been enjoying a day out at the most famous cricket ground in the world for more than a quarter of a century. Lord’s – the headquarters of the game – was a special place for their cricketers; it was on this ground in 1950 that the side won a Test match in England for the first time.
‘Yes, sir, I was there,’ says Sam King, speaking at his house in Brixton, south London. ‘I was there in my uniform with my buttons polished.’ In 1950 he was Corporal King, a 24-year-old technician in the Royal Air Force who had timed his leave to coincide with the Test match. He had always enjoyed the game and in England had played for RAF sides as a batsman and wicket-keeper. ‘In emergencies,’ he confides, ‘I could bowl some medium. I had signed up for the RAF in 1944 from Jamaica. My mother had said to me, “Go and help. The mother country is at war. If you live, it will be a good thing.” I worked on Lancasters and Spitfires at bases across the United Kingdom but my favourite was the American Dakota. I was good with those old propeller aircraft. If it break down, you call me up, even today, and we’ll get it going.’
For the five days of the 1950 Test Sam King left his friend’s house in Mitcham in south London every morning and took a train to Lord’s. West Indies sides had been to England four times since 1928 to play Test matches but had always been beaten. One of the players he saw was Sonny Ramadhin, a slight 21-year-old spinner who had never played first-class cricket, never mind Test cricket, until earlier that year. No one from an Indo-Caribbean racial background had been picked to play Test cricket for the West Indies before.
Ramadhin’s grandparents were labourers who had come to Trinidad from India to cut sugar cane in the nineteenth century. Sonny, who was orphaned by the time he was three, had learned to bowl in cleared patches of cane stubble. When he was a teenager, it became clear that he had a particular gift. He was a slow bowler who turned the ball sharply towards a right-handed batsman off the pitch. But with no obvious change to his bowling action, he could also spin the ball the opposite way.
Sixty-five years after he first came to England, Sonny Ramadhin is still here. He lives in a village on the edge of the Peak District, a few hundred yards from one of the pubs he managed after he retired from playing. His son-in-law Willie Hogg and his grandson Kyle Hogg both played county cricket for Lancashire.
‘My local club in Trinidad was called Leaseholds Limited,’ recalls Ramadhin.
Leaseholds were the oil people on the San Fernando side of the island. In 1950 I had a job driving a tractor, cutting the fairways on their golf course. Leaseholds had two golf courses – not for all the employees of course, just the whites. We weren’t allowed to play on it. Anyhow, my hobby was fishing, not golf. As for the cricket, my bowling was something natural. I used to bowl to the older men in the practice net and they were amazed that I could turn the ball both ways. But I didn’t know that people couldn’t read me until I came to England. All I knew was that I bowled an off break and a leg break.
The official souvenir programme for the 1950 tour of England does little to clear up the mystery of Ramadhin’s talent. ‘The nature of his spin has not been exactly specified but it is known that he bowled round the wicket in at least one match, which suggests a break from the off. But it is also said that he spins more with the finger than with the wrist and that although he does not bowl the googly he is able to disguise his off break – which indicates a preponderance of leg-spin. We must wait and learn.’
By the last day of the 1950 Lord’s Test match England were still learning. Sam King had seen Ramadhin take 11 England wickets. Among others, he had dismissed Cyril Washbrook, Bill Edrich and Godfrey Evans. ‘I was surprised to get all these English people out. I didn’t know which one was which or who was the next batsman coming in. I just bowled against whoever walked out.’
Ramadhin’s room-mate on tour, Alf Valentine of Jamaica, took seven more wickets with his slow left-arm spin. No runs were scored from 75 of the overs he bowled in the game. Like Ramadhin, he had never played Test cricket before he went to England.
‘There were hardly any West Indies supporters in the ground to see it at all,’ remembers Sam King. ‘Certainly no more than 50, probably nearer 20. On several of the days I sat on my own. But don’t forget, there were not many of us in the whole country. After the war I returned to England in 1948 – I was one of those Jamaicans who arrived on the Empire Windrush. I remember walking once from the Union Jack club in Waterloo to Woolworth’s in Brixton to buy some razor blades and I didn’t see a single black man or woman on the whole journey.’
Between 1948 and 1950 well under 1,000 immigrants came to Britain from the West Indies. In 1951 the figure was around 1,000 and in 1952 and 1953 it was about 2,000 each year.
Despite their small numbers, the fans from the Caribbean watching the last day’s play at Lord’s in 1950 were noisy and enthusiastic. ‘As each wicket had fallen this morning,’ reported the Guardian, ‘they had leaped from their seats, embraced each other in an ecstasy and danced and sung to the accompaniment of their guitars until they felt Goddard [the white captain of the West Indies] needed their advice once more on exactly how he should dismiss the next batsman.’
The last England wicket fell soon after lunch. The West Indies had won a Test match in England for the first time – by 326 runs. Some of the supporters ran across the field to congratulate the players, although Ramadhin – who often played that summer wearing his pyjamas under his cricket whites because he was cold – sprinted for the pavilion. The Times reporter witnessed a rush of people, ‘one armed with an instrument of the guitar family singing with a delight that rightfully belonged to them’.
‘I was actually on the pitch because I wanted to take a look at the wicket,’ Sam says. ‘It seemed like a good one, but a little damp. Anyhow, I was thinking about getting the train back to Mitcham and someone says to me, “Kitchener is making a song, man. Come on.” So we went up to his side and there were about 20 of us there.’
Kitchener was Lord Kitchener, a musician and calypsonian who had been a fellow passenger of Sam’s on the Windrush.
‘We sat down and Kitch was writing a celebration song, and somebody shouted, “Put Valentine and Ramadhin in”. The next time I heard the song it was on the wireless – they played it all the time – even on the news.’
Cricket lovely cricket, at Lord’s where I saw it;
Yardley tried his best – Goddard won the Test.
They gave the crowd plenty fun; the second Test and West Indies won.
With those little pals of mine – Ramadhin and Valentine.
These words are from the version called ‘Victory Test Match’ recorded soon after by another calypsonian who was at the ground, Lord Beginner. This recording and Kitchener’s tunes strummed and sung in London that day were almost certainly the first cricket calypsos heard in Britain.
‘I didn’t learn of the song until weeks and weeks after,’ says Sonny Ramadhin. ‘I heard people singing it, and I also heard it on the radio before one of the later Test matches. It was great to hear people singing your own name – it was as if they were worshipping you! When the team got back home after that tour it was the only calypso they played – the steel bands, everyone. People were given a day off work – Ramadhin and Valentine Day they called it. It was like a bank holiday.’
That win at Lord’s meant more to the region than most people in Britain could realise. For C. L. R. James, its significance was such that he was certain Caribbean self-identity could not begin to be fully realised until the inventors of cricket had been beaten in England by the West Indies. In The Development of West Indies Cricket: The Age of Nationalism the Barbadian academic and cricket writer Hilary McD. Beckles described how the win affected the father of a friend: the man, an immigrant bus driver in the West Midlands, had a formal picture taken of himself in evening dress, gloves, hat and cane the day after the Lord’s win. The hire of the outfit came to two pounds and ten shillings, and when his wife found out the cost, she left him for a week. He wore the suit and its trimmings all day in celebration as he drove his bus along its route around Birmingham. He told his son why – despite the trouble it caused him – it had been the most fulfilling day of his life: ‘Winning the series three–one. The first time we beat them wasn’t the big thing. It was Lord’s, son – going into their own backyard and taking their chickens out of the coop and frying them on the front lawn. For me, son, the empire collapsed right there. Not Churchill or Wellington could bring it back. Shackles were gone and we were free at last because the chickens were out of the coop.’
‘We all knew that England ruled us as a colony,’ says Sam King, ‘but our attitude was that if we could beat them at Lord’s, we could beat them at anything. In the days afterwards we were all a little bolder. At my RAF station it meant that I could stand up a bit taller.’
That determination to beat England, the desire for some sort of change to the way things had been, went completely over the heads of the English cricket establishment. Sir Pelham Warner, who had grown up in Trinidad and captained England, wrote this welcome to the 1950 tourists: ‘The West Indies are among the oldest of our possessions, and the Caribbean Sea resounds to the exploits of the British Navy. Nowhere in the world is there a greater loyalty to, love of, and admiration for England.’
‘This one cricket match had a great effect. We showed we could do something well,’ concludes Sam King. ‘After that day employers here began to realise that if you took a West Indian and trained him as a machinist or a car sprayer or whatever it was, he could do it. He could work, he could achieve. And when the English saw that, they asked us to get our Caribbean friends to come to England and work for them too.’
By 1963, when Frank Worrell brought his side to Lord’s, there were many more West Indian supporters to watch. And the talk was not just of the cricket. As well as opinionated running commentaries on the players’ abilities, there were arguments about the politics of the Caribbean and the experience of a decade of living in England. The Trinidadian-born writer V. S. Naipaul published a feature article in Queen magazine after spending five days sitting with, and listening to, West Indians during the engrossing Lord’s Test that summer.
‘You know what’s wrong with our West Indians? No damned discipline. Look at this business this morning [Wes Hall and the England bowler Fred Trueman had been clowning with each other on the pitch]. Kya-kya, very funny. But that is not the way the Aussies win Tests. I tell you what we need is conscription. Put every one of the idlers in the army. Give them discipline.’
‘Which one is Solomon? They look like twins.’
‘Solomon have the cap. And Kanhai a lil fatter.’
‘But how a man could get fat, eh, playing all this cricket?’
‘Not getting fat. Just putting on a lil weight.’
‘O Christ! He out! Kanhai!’
‘… And boy, I had to leave Grenada because politics were making it too hot for me.’
‘What, they have politics in Grenada?’
Laughter.
‘You are lucky to be seeing me here today, let me tell you. The only thing in which I remain West Indian is cricket. Only thing.’
‘… You hear the latest from British Guiana?’
‘What, the strike still on?’
‘Things really bad out there.’
‘Man, go away, eh. We facing defeat and you want to talk politics.’
With one ball left in the 1963 Lord’s match, all four results were still possible. The England batsman Colin Cowdrey, who’d earlier had his arm fractured by a delivery from Wes Hall, had returned at the fall of the ninth England wicket.
‘Cowdrey comes in,’ wrote Naipaul, ‘his injured left arm bandaged. And this is the ridiculous public school heroism of cricket: a man with a bandaged arm saving his side, yet without having to face a ball. It is the peculiar style of cricket, and its improbable appreciation that links these dissimilar people – English and West Indian.’
The game ended in a dramatic draw. The Lord’s Test of 1976 was drawn with much less excitement. The third game of the series was in Manchester.
* * *
Cedric Rhoades was a proud host. He was chairman of Lancashire County Cricket Club and was pleased with how the wicket for the Old Trafford Test had turned out. There had been no rain in Manchester for three weeks, but the pitch had been inspected and approved by officials.
‘We have got a pitch fit for any Test,’ said Rhoades. ‘It is hard and fast and will play true. It should give every cause for satisfaction, and both batsmen and bowlers will get a fair crack out in the middle.’
He was certainly right about a fair crack out in the middle. It was almost an inch wide and ran towards the stumps at the Stretford End of the ground. The shorn grass on the wicket grew only in clumps and was encircled by bare patches of dry earth. The ball could rise sharply from a fast bowler’s good length or keep trickily low. If it hit the edges of the long crack its movement couldn’t be predicted.
Who’d want to open the batting on this pitch?
After he checked into the team hotel, Brian Close was soon found by his captain. ‘He said, “Come and have a cup of tea up in my room with me,”’ recalls Close.
So I dumped my bags and went to Greigy’s room. There he was, lying on the bed. He turned round and said, ‘The selectors and I have been thinking, and we want you to open the innings with John Edrich in this Test match.’ I said, ‘Nay, Tony. I haven’t opened the batting for quite a number of years now. And anyway, what’s Bob Woolmer in the side for? He’s an opening batsman, isn’t he?’ Greigy said, ‘Yes, but the selectors and I have been thinking, and we reckon he’s got a lot of Test years left in him and we don’t want him killed off.’ Those were the exact words. So I said, ‘Oh. So it’s all right to sacrifice me then.’ And that’s how I came to open the innings at Manchester.
But it would be the West Indies, not England, who had to bat first. And they struggled. On the first morning they were 26 for 4 and later in the day 211 all out. Only Gordon Greenidge, with a hundred in the best innings of his career so far, kept the West Indies from what may have been a losing first-innings total. England’s problem was that they were then bowled out for 71. Wayne Daniel knocked Tony Greig’s stumps out for 9 runs. By the Test’s third evening England were batting to save the match after Greenidge and Vivian Richards made second-innings hundreds. England would have to score 552 to win.
Brian Close and John Edrich were the England openers. When Close had batted in his first Test match in 1949, only five men in this West Indies side had been born. Now he was 45, almost bald and had a sticking plaster on his left elbow. John Edrich was 39. When their counties had played the West Indies earlier in the 1976 season, both Close and Edrich had done pretty well. Newspapers reported that the West Indies had been ‘powerless to stop’ Edrich when he made a hundred for Surrey at the Oval, while Close had ‘time to spare’ against Roberts and Daniel, scoring 88 for Somerset at the end of May.
It was to be a little different on this muggy evening in June.
There have been many accounts of the aggressive bowling and desperate defensive batting seen during this passage of play. Some versions contradict others. One of the least subjective is likely to be the statistical record compiled by Bill Frindall, who was the BBC radio scorer for the Test Match Special programme. He noted each ball with particular symbols he had devised and made additional comments on that evening’s play as it took place.
The session lasted for an hour and twenty minutes, beginning at ten past five and ending at half past six. Seventeen overs were bowled: four by Andy Roberts, seven by Michael Holding, three by Wayne Daniel and three by the spinner Albert Padmore. Including one wide and nine no balls, the batsmen faced 112 deliveries – Close 57 and Edrich 55.
Saturday had been very warm with a breeze in the morning but by late afternoon it was just hot and sticky. Noisy too. The England bowler Mike Selvey was playing in his first Test match. ‘It was a very strange day. It was humid, building up as the play went on, getting very oppressive. The weather seemed to reflect the nature of the crowd. Among the West Indian fans – and there were a lot of them – there had been this cacophony, a tympanic noise from the drinks cans all day, banging out a rhythm. Building up, building up.’
After four balls from Andy Roberts, Brian Close stepped away because he was put off by the racket and movement in the crowd. At the end of the next over Clive Lloyd walked towards the West Indies supporters to ask them to be less of a distraction. If there’s too much noise, he told them, how will the umpires be able to hear our snicks from the bat edge?
According to Frindall, the West Indians bowled 16 bouncers at the two English batsmen that evening. Each bouncer was marked in his scorebook with an upward-pointing arrow. There was also one downward-pointing arrow to signify a ball that kept low; by now this was a pitch of inconsistent bounce. Holding and Daniel bowled six bouncers each and Roberts bowled four. Brian Close was first hit on the chest by Holding from the last ball of the sixth over – not by a bouncer, but by a short-length ball that leaped up.
This was the point when the intent of the West Indies bowling seemed to change. Roberts was replaced by Daniel, who bowled six bouncers at Edrich in his first two overs. In between, Holding bowled a further two at Close.
‘I remember bowling a couple of short balls to John Edrich,’ confirms Daniel. ‘I didn’t get to bowl at Close much because he was marooned at the other end. The pitch was a lively one that evening. My main memory is fielding at leg gully and thinking that if the ball came off the bat edge to me, how am I going to catch it? It was fast and hostile.’
By six o’clock, after 50 minutes of batting, Close and Edrich had not crossed or scored a run from the last seven overs. Close had faced all of Holding’s last 25 deliveries. Roberts came back on for Daniel, and Edrich managed to hit him for four through backward point. They were England’s first runs – other than extras – for 39 minutes.
Then, at four minutes past six, Holding began his fifth consecutive over to Brian Close from the Warwick Road End. It would be one of the more infamous overs of modern Test cricket. Three slips, a gully, a leg gully and a short leg were waiting for a deflection. Close played at and missed the first ball. The second was a 90-miles-per-hour bouncer which would have hit him straight in the face had he not snapped his neck away from the ball. The third was another bouncer which scorched across Close’s nipples. The next ball, also short, caught Close more towards the leg side, and slammed into his ribcage. This was the blow that made him buckle and grimace as if he had been punched very hard. He staggered, stayed up, and for a pace or two the Yorkshireman’s bat became a walking stick.
‘And that’s hurt him,’ said the television commentator Jim Laker. ‘That’s somewhere I think round about the mark where earlier he let one bounce off him. And although he will never show any trace of emotion whatsoever, or give anybody the impression at any time in his cricket life he’s ever been hurt, that really must have stung him.’
Vivian Richards was fielding close by at short leg. Yes, he was playing for his country, but this was his county captain in pain. ‘I went up to him. “Are you OK, skipper?” Closey eventually gathered himself together and bellowed, “Fuck off.” What a man.’
Holding ran in again for the fifth ball. Again it was fast and short, and Close jerked back as if avoiding a jab to the chin. Behind the wicket Deryck Murray caught the ball, fingers pointing up, in front of his own face. And that was enough for the umpire Bill Alley. It was to be the last bouncer, but not the last short-pitched ball, that Close and Edrich would see that evening.
Alley walked towards Holding and, raising his finger as if giving him out, warned him officially that – according to the laws of cricket – he was guilty of ‘persistent bowling of fast short-pitched balls … constituting a systematic attempt at intimidation’. He could receive one more warning but a third offence would mean Clive Lloyd would have to stop him bowling.
On the edge of the pitch a policeman went into the crowd. ‘Scuffles along boundary,’ noted Bill Frindall in his scorebook.
Holding’s last ball was not short but it hit Close again, this time in the groin.
‘Brian Close is going to be a mass of bruises when he eventually gets back into the haven of the pavilion,’ Laker told BBC viewers. In fact Close was hit on the body three times, once in Holding’s third over and twice in the sixth, Frindall marking each occasion with a navy-blue dot. So Close probably had three bruises on his body. There is a famous photo of him bare-chested in the dressing room with six or seven weals on his torso. But that was actually taken in 1963 after Close’s innings against the West Indies’ bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith at Lord’s.
‘As a fast bowler,’ reflects Michael Holding, ‘you know that you can do damage, but you still have to go and do what you think is necessary to get people out. If that means bowling a bouncer, if it means bowling directly at someone’s body, you have to do it. It is up to the batsman to have enough skill to hit the ball and defend himself to see he doesn’t get hurt.’
‘The key to it was the poor pitch, it really was,’ says Mike Selvey.
They didn’t bowl in a way that you’d describe as dangerous. They targeted the torso, that’s where most of it went, at rib height. But of course there was this crack at the Stretford End which ran longitudinally down the pitch. Now for a right-hander facing a right-arm bowler, it was irrelevant because it was too straight, but for left-handed batsmen, as Edrich and Close both were, it was lethal. The crack was quite wide by Saturday, and the pitch was just nasty – up and down – and of course it was all exacerbated by their pace as compared to the speed at which Mike Hendrick and I were bowling.
‘The umpire was there to regulate the game,’ says Wayne Daniel. ‘I was just trying to bowl as fast and aggressive as I could, but to intimidate never came into my mind.’
‘Fast bowling does intimidate batsmen,’ reckons Brian Close. ‘The faster you bowl, the more intimidating it is. It’s part of the job, and if you’re a batsman you’ve got to cope with it. You just go out and do your job of protecting your wicket and building an innings and scoring runs, that’s what a batsman’s job is. And whatever the difficulties are – whether it’s bounce, pace, swing, movement, spin – you’ve got to cope with it. You’re there to make runs.’
Tony Cozier was covering the series and saw every ball of the evening session. ‘A lot was made of Daniel and Holding bowling like they did, but what do you do?’ he asks. ‘These men out there batting were 39 and 45. You don’t blame the bowlers, you blame the England selectors. How can you take a 45-year-old man and make him go out in front of that sort of attack? It was crazy. Absolutely crazy.’
‘Brian Close was a brave man,’ says Clive Lloyd, ‘but at that age should you really be sticking your chest out when the ball is coming at 90 miles per hour? He should have been watching the game from the bar, enjoying a drink. These men were past it. The pitch was not good enough. There was no instruction from me to bowl an intimidatory line. As it was – tactically – the length wasn’t right. We should have bowled fuller, and they’d have probably lost four wickets that evening.’
Tony Greig was very clear that Brian Close and John Edrich had been chosen to face the West Indies for a reason: ‘We always knew we were going to get into trouble. That’s why I picked these two blokes because they could be discarded. There was no real point in putting a youngster in there because I knew what we were in for. It was very dangerous. The truth is that we had to pick a team for a Test match where we knew we were going to be jumping around all over the place.’
Neither did Greig blame the West Indies for the way they bowled. ‘Boy, if I had been Clive Lloyd that day and I’d been dishing it out, you better believe I would have let those bowlers go until such time as we were pulled into line. It was not up to Clive Lloyd to say to his bowlers, “Look, be nice to two of the toughest opening batsmen in the history of the game.”’
Albert Padmore bowled the last over of the day. It contained two full tosses, but Close was so unused to playing attacking shots, it was still a maiden. He and Edrich headed for the pavilion. In the England dressing room the players who hadn’t batted gawped at the pair that had. Somehow they had survived without being seriously hurt. Mike Selvey remembers the scene.
Brian sat opposite me on the other side of the room, almost certainly with a broken rib, saying, ‘I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right. Cup o’ tea, just get us a cup o’ tea.’ And on my left was Edrich. He was sitting with his pads still on and he was leaning forwards on his bat, and his cap was pushed right back on his head. And he slowly started giggling to himself, not manic, but noticeable. And someone said, ‘What is it, Eedee?’ and through his chuckling, John went, ‘Have you seen the scoreboard, Closey? Have a look through the window. You’ve got one run. All that, and you’ve got just one run.’
In the Sunday Times the former Sussex player Robin Marlar noted the bravery of the England openers and wrote, ‘The number of balls pitched at a length on a line to hit the stumps were so few they could have been counted. The rest were, by inference, directed at the batsman’s body or to induce a fending-off catch. Intimidation? Of course it was. And umpire Alley finally warned Holding. Some like steak tartare, but this cricket was too raw for my stomach.’
The West Indies would win the match by a huge margin. On the last afternoon Tony Greig, who was barracked on sight by the many West Indian supporters in the ground, was clean-bowled once more, this time for three.
‘“Grovel” is an emotive word’, wrote John Arlott, ‘and it has stuck in more craws than he can possibly have anticipated when he used it.’
Neither Brian Close nor John Edrich played for England again. ‘The silly buggers sacked us both,’ says Close.
* * *
For two days before the fourth Test in Leeds the International Cricket Conference held its annual meeting at Lord’s. In its concluding statement it condemned intimidatory bowling and ‘earnestly emphasised the need to bring the spinner into the game’. The same day the West Indies picked four fast bowlers to play in the next Test match. If they won at Headingley, they would win the series.
Gordon Greenidge, who had batted so poorly in Australia, made his third century in as many innings against England. His runs helped his side to a lead, just as Andy Roberts’s six wickets helped the West Indies to a win by 55 runs on the fifth day. He was bowling at least as fast as he had in Australia. Standing at second slip, Greenidge decided that he needed to wear a box when Roberts was bowling.
This West Indies side had beaten England in England. Clive Lloyd now shared this feat of captaincy with only four other West Indians – Goddard, Worrell, Sobers and Kanhai. His team led the series two–nil and there was still a Test left to play. Lloyd was in charge of men who were playing entertaining, even dramatic cricket. ‘Intense fast bowling, spectacular fielding and aggressive batting’ was how John Arlott described it. The day after the Headingley victory he wrote that ‘the West Indians’ joy at their win revealed how much success matters to them; but no other team of modern times has remotely suggested that they felt the manner of winning equally important’.
On the balcony at Headingley the players who had rushed from the pitch jumped into the arms of those who had watched. Deryck Murray embraced his father, who had been looking on from the dressing room. A long time after the match was over the group was still being serenaded from the outfield by West Indians gathered below. ‘I was looking at the faces of the people crowding around and you could feel their pride,’ says Wayne Daniel.
You could feel their happiness standing there looking up at us. You could feel their expectation, their hope. I thought, I can’t let these people turn away feeling bad. I had to represent the West Indies for these people. What that meant was that we couldn’t lapse and have fun. We had to be on top of it all the time. The senior guys repeated this time and again. Andy Roberts, Roy Fredericks, Deryck Murray – they were tough, hard men. I remember bowling a half-volley at Leeds, and the look I got from Andy Roberts at mid-off I’ll never forget. He said nothing but his face told me, What the hell are you doing? You can’t be bowling half-volleys for the West Indies. I had never seen such competitive discipline before. I certainly learned what Test cricket meant in 1976. You could never be off, you always had to be on – and that lesson came to me straight from those guys.
* * *
‘I was there with my dad, my PE teacher and my maths teacher. They were all cricket nuts. I was 11.’ Trevor Nelson is a DJ and broadcaster whose parents came to London from St Lucia. The first time he saw the West Indies play was at the Oval in 1976. It was the last Test of the summer.
It was like a carnival. Everyone had tin cans; there was a sense of freedom, freedom of expression. I was a kid, but now I can remember that day and understand why there was such a noise. From day to day people like my dad had been wandering around in this society knowing they were the underdog and kind of feeling they shouldn’t be there sometimes. There was no sense that these black people could stick their chests out proudly. They were second-class citizens. But in the ground it was the first time I saw black guys boasting, shouting stuff, getting excitable. It was confusing because the county cricket me and Dad watched on TV on a Sunday seemed very quiet, respectful. But here people were selling fried fish and other food. My dad brought a massive hamper, chicken, sandwiches, stuff to share. He was joking with his friends. I’m almost certain I witnessed someone cooking in the ground.
The Oval is very near the London suburbs of Brixton and Lambeth, places where lots of people who had come from the West Indies lived. By the beginning of the 1970s just under half of all the black people in Britain lived in London. For the final Test several thousand West Indies supporters gathered in the stands on the first morning in the northern part of the ground near the Vauxhall End with their backs to the gasworks. There were men in three-piece suits with their wives who had left Trinidad 25 years ago, youths in flared trousers with tight-fitting shirts whose parents had been born in Barbados, bearded teenagers with braids and leather caps who had Jamaican grandparents. There were banners and signs, rum and beer, horns and hand bells. All tickets had been sold for the first three days, and the English cricket authorities had asked Clive Lloyd to appeal to the fans not to make too much noise during play. Their concern was that the din might go beyond exuberance and become intimidatory. But any hope for peace and quiet was a forlorn one. The din would last for as long as the Test match.
Martin Adrien spent two days there with his friends. ‘The Oval was a celebration Test. It was an event. You were going somewhere. So for a day at the cricket you could well wear a suit. It was like your Sunday best, and at the time for a fair number of those people cricket would have been second only to church.’
Vivian Richards was the chief celebrant and batted masterfully again. His first Test innings in England that season had been 232 at Nottingham. In this final one he scored 291.
‘I was the right age to be impressed by Viv,’ recalls Martin.
He was the first man I remember who had a bit of arrogance. His walk was slow, I remember that. ‘I’m coming, but you’ve got to wait for me.’ Looking back, I suppose what I was struck by was here was a man representing the region. His success was the region’s success. He was scoring runs for the Caribbean. I think for the first time I had seen at close hand a successful West Indian. He was proud. In 1976 that was dynamic and a little bit disturbing.
‘You see to me, growing up in London, this wasn’t how black people should look,’ adds Trevor Nelson.
On TV it was always the white people who were in charge and the black people were always chasing them, but on the cricket field that wasn’t the case. My dad and his friends were proud. I had an inner glow that we could beat England at this posh game and we weren’t posh. All black people I knew were working class. White people who play cricket were upper class, or so it seemed, but we battered them. We didn’t have the equipment they had, the system, the coaches, the pitches – but, yeah, look at that. We’re good!
The West Indies made 687. They had never scored so many runs against England in a single innings. As he took it all in, Trevor Nelson was intrigued by how the cricketers affected his father’s behaviour.
England seemed to me to look quite old – I don’t know, maybe it was David Steele’s silver hair. They looked like blokes who worked during the week and played at the weekend. But the West Indies looked like warriors. They looked as if they’d come to steal something, to rob you, take the spoils. And my dad was revelling in the way England were getting beaten. He was so pro-West-Indian, it was unbelievable. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen before. I always saw him as a reasonably impartial, reserved man until we got to that ground. Then he became like just a mad West Indian fan taking the living piss out of the English. I mean all of them were. Every time there was a boundary they were just dancing, screaming, singing, rubbing it in. Massively. I actually think there was a bit of payback going on there. There was a lot of payback going on there. And I realised that West Indians could be good at something. Cricket. Cricket was it.
When the West Indies declared their second innings late on the fourth afternoon their lead was huge. As he led his sweaty, dusty and downtrodden side from the field, Tony Greig knew England had no hope of winning. In view of all of the West Indian spectators, he sank to his knees and crawled a few yards on all fours. He had grovelled. The crowd howled in delight. And now he had to bat.
* * *
Michael Holding walked towards the white disc on the ground that marked the start of his run-up. For now he held the ball in his left hand. Putting some spittle on the index finger of his right hand, he used it to polish the side of the ball. As he reached his mark, he turned towards the batsman knowing he was 21 strides away from bowling his next delivery. Seven months ago he had cried on the pitch at Sydney. Now he had already taken eleven wickets in the match, and would go on to take another three.
The cricket ball in his hand was nearing the end of its life. The royal warrant insignia of a lion and a unicorn stamped on one side in gold leaf had flaked away. The dyed red leather outer case, which had been especially chosen from the hides of Scottish cattle unblemished by the nicks of barbed wire, was scuffed, cracked and swollen. Parts of the Northern Irish linen thread which made up the seam had frayed and loosened. The ball, which had been shaped and baked and stitched and polished by hand in a small Kent village called Chiddingstone Causeway, would soon be discarded into a box or a basket somewhere in a shed or a cupboard at the Oval.
Holding accelerated towards the batsman, each stride longer than the last. Halfway through his run-up he transferred the ball from his left hand to his right without even knowing he was doing it. Two seconds later, running almost as fast as he could, he jumped and let the ball go at 90 miles per hour with a full circle of his arm. Some fast bowlers were ugly to watch and others were beautiful. Holding was beautiful.
Tony Greig saw the ball coming of course. He knew what he had to do to stop it hitting his stumps, but the ball came too fast. It curved in towards him in the air and with a dipping trajectory tore past his feet. Greig, off balance and falling to his right, knew he had been beaten. The ball struck the bottom of the middle of the three stumps, knocking it sideways. The leg stump shot completely out of the ground. A ricochet caused the off stump to lean in the opposite direction.
Michael Holding had clean-bowled the England captain again.
The noise of celebration was intense. It whipped around the Oval stands and could be heard on the pavement outside the ground, where, at a homemade stall, West Indian supporters looked up and added their own cheers. The stall was doing good business selling shots of rum, lengths of sugar cane and a vinyl single called ‘Who’s Grovelling Now?’
Who’s grovelling now?
Who’s grovelling now?
Greig, you’re a loser somehow.
If you had your way, you would never let us play,
So tell me – who’s grovelling now?
Lloydy, you’re a champion
You never, never lose your cool.
Though the bigots try to put you down
You never, never wear a frown.
You play the game like a gentleman
You lick the ball like calypsonian
You put your men them at ease –
You’re the king from the West Indies.
* * *
In time Michael Holding’s 14 wickets at the Oval and Vivian Richards’s double century would be seen as jewels in the crown of West Indian cricket. Big moments in the renewal of a cricket nation. When these young men had been small boys in the early 1960s, the West Indies had risen to the highest level of the international game under the captaincy of Frank Worrell and then Garry Sobers. But by the end of the decade the foundations of that success – the wins against Australia, England and India – had collapsed. The best players were stale after years of cricket and had not been replaced. That weakness caused division, and the qualities necessary for leadership – playing skill, example, authority, insight, cussedness and luck – had evaporated. The period of rebuilding after 1965 had been fitful and incomplete; for nearly seven years, the West Indies didn’t win a series. From December ’68 until July ’73, they didn’t win a Test match. And there was no assurance that this latest West Indies would bring lasting success.
‘We shouldn’t forget,’ reflects Ronald Austin,
that the teams Lloyd took to Australia and then to England carried with them no guarantees. Many people back in the West Indies expected little. These men were potentially good young cricketers, but Richards, Greenidge, Roberts and Holding had excelled only in a few regional games between the islands and in a small number of Test matches. Nor had the leadership of the West Indies side – a uniquely important role – been solved by Lloyd’s appointment. I think he’d led Guyana in just a few matches in the regional competition. The decision to make him captain of the West Indies was not a unanimous one, and Lloyd has said since that of the selectors who chose him, only Clyde Walcott truly believed in his qualities.
The historical, geographical, racial and political complications of West Indies cricket meant that some in the Caribbean had actually been pleased at the failure of Lloyd and his team in Australia. There were others who suggested that after his catastrophic spinal injury in 1971, Lloyd would always be psychologically feeble. He had lain in hospital for weeks not knowing if he’d walk again, never mind play cricket, after diving for a catch while fielding for the Rest of the World at Adelaide.
A commander will always be more confident of success if he knows that he has protection and support in his rear, and Lloyd did not have that.
Neither had the West Indies ever enjoyed the experience of being a ‘professional’ team. They didn’t play enough regional or Test cricket for that. In 1963, when Frank Worrell’s side won in England, Jamaica had not played in Trinidad for 13 years. Barbados had hosted Trinidad – its nearest big cricket neighbour – just six times since 1949. In contrast, during those years the two best county sides in England – Yorkshire and Surrey – played against each other 26 times. West Indian cricketers had to cross the gap between club cricket and the international game almost in one step. This is why in his book Summer Spectacular about the 1963 tour of England J. S. Barker wrote that, despite their talent, it was no surprise that the West Indies now and again ‘tobogganed into a scarcely credible abyss of ineptitude’.
So as the players drank beer and champagne on the Oval dressing-room balcony, celebrating a three–nil series win against England, all of these things were swirling around the balcony with them. All of these impediments and uncertainties from years gone by, as well as the recent past, were somewhere in Clive Lloyd’s mind. But the summer of 1976 had ameliorated West Indian cricket. The professionalisation of the West Indies began in England under Lloyd’s captaincy.
The fire in Babylon had been lit.