‘When I am playing for my country,’ says Michael Holding, ‘I have five million West Indians depending on me to perform at my best so they can walk the streets and be proud. I have to do my job.’
Holding’s job was to bowl very fast. He needed discipline, intelligence and discernment to do it well. He also needed the old West Indian skill of bowling short.
‘I am genuinely sorry when I hit a batsman. I am not bowling to hit him, and the last thing that I should wish for is for him to have to give up his innings and retire hurt. But I know that I must have him aware that the ball can be made to do something.’ These are the words, not of Michael Holding but of Learie Constantine, who played Test cricket from 1928 until 1939. He knew that the ‘short, flying ball’ was an integral part of the fast bowler’s attack. ‘These are the realities of cricket,’ he said. ‘These things cricketers know.’
The regular bowling of the short ball was the single greatest controversy surrounding West Indian cricket. The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack didn’t like it. West Indian bowling was ‘unpleasant, not to say dangerous’ was the view of Wisden’s editor in the 1934 edition. It seems that short-pitched bowling by black men has always troubled some cricket writers much more than the cricketers who faced it.
The England opening batsman Geoffrey Boycott, who was undone so thoroughly by Michael Holding in that one over in Barbados in 1981, has frank views on the matter.
Why bother with spinners? Clive Lloyd just bothered with four fast bowlers and said, ‘We’re going to bowl you out.’ I don’t blame him. People say it was bad for the game – I’ve seen writers write about that – but any human being who tries to tell me he wouldn’t have played four fast bowlers because they were winning Test matches is a liar. We’d all have done it, and I’d have been stood at mid-off or mid-on cheering them on. Just like the West Indian fielders did: ‘Go on. Give him a few more, Crofty. Sit him on his backside. Yeah, get after him.’ We’d have all been doing it. It’s the nature of the game. If you’re competitive, you want to win, and as long as you win within the rules I can’t see anything wrong with that. Good luck to the West Indies. It was a part of their history which I admire and I respect.
In 2005 England won the Ashes for the first time in nearly 20 years. Their success was largely down to Steve Harmison, Simon Jones, Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard. All four were very good fast bowlers. There were few complaints about how they had won. At Lord’s, when a ball from Harmison hit the Australian captain Ricky Ponting and cut his face, a great rolling roar went around the ground. When the Ashes were safe there was national rejoicing, and the players were driven through London on an open-top bus to Trafalgar Square. Ashley Giles was there. He was the England spinner and played in every Test that summer. He was part of the side’s traditional ‘balanced’ bowling attack. Giles took 10 wickets at an average of 57.80 runs each and his best performance was 3 for 78.
In the blackwash summer of 1984, when criticism of the West Indies’ fast bowling attack had never been stronger, Roger Harper was the West Indies’ off-spinner. He played in all five Tests and took 13 wickets at an average of 21.23 runs each. His best performance was 6 for 57.
‘When we started to win,’ reflects Michael Holding,
people started saying, ‘We have to find some way of degrading this. It can’t be as good as they are making it out to be,’ so they started looking for excuses. They started to say we haven’t got a ‘balanced’ team; cricket was about having a ‘balanced’ team. Well, this is not a trapeze act; it is about winning a cricket match. You pick the team that will win you the game. Then they decided to say that fast bowling was intimidatory: ‘It’s not fair; you can’t score off so many bouncers.’ Well, we had a batsman who didn’t mind if you bowled six bouncers at him. His name was Viv Richards. If you were good enough, you could score enough.
* * *
This book began with Michael Holding’s tears at Sydney in 1976. Young men don’t often cry in public, especially not in front of thousands of people with many more watching on television. So it was a memorable moment for Holding. It was also a significant day for his team. What they saw that afternoon closed the door on an old world for the West Indies. They watched Ian Chappell nick the ball to the wicket-keeper and stay at the crease knowing that he was out. The umpire’s arm remained down. This was modern international cricket. From that day on Gordon Greenidge certainly never walked if he edged it; let the umpire tell him he was out.
The armour plating that was to make the West Indies almost invulnerable for the next 19 years began to form around the team that afternoon at the SCG. ‘The Australians taught us, and we took notice of them,’ said Vivian Richards.
Clive Lloyd had arrived in Australia in October 1975 telling reporters, ‘I don’t like losers. If you don’t think you have a chance of winning, there is no sense in taking part.’ When he left Australia at the end of the tour he was a loser. He had little going for him except his cussed spirit. Had the next series against India been lost, who knows what would have become of Lloyd? It was a close-run thing. He became a great captain and leader, but there were never any guarantees. In 1966 when Lloyd was LBW to Garry Sobers for nought in Barbados, the received wisdom in Georgetown had been that he might never play for British Guiana again. The idea of him playing for the West Indies, let alone being captain, was outlandish.
It was a close-run thing.
Lloyd knew that if he was to survive, and his team to thrive, they had to change. He knew that if he was going to lead a great side, it would not come about by accident. His team did not fall from a passing comet, fully formed, tossed up, pads buckled, ready to play. There was a strategy.
Lloyd wanted only one thing from his players – excellence. He wanted them to play as well as they could. He was not preoccupied with vengeance, payback or righting historical wrongs. He wanted his team to entertain people with the best skills they had. He wanted to win cricket matches.
The captaincy of Frank Worrell had been drenched with symbolism. Garry Sobers’s leadership was inspirational because he could bat, bowl and field his team to victory by himself. The assertive captaincy of Vivian Richards combined with his batting exploits assured West Indians of their place in the world. But Lloyd’s leadership was the most significant of all because of what he created. He taught the West Indies how to win. The construction of the team, the discipline, the batting and the four fast bowlers were all about winning.
They began to play cricket in a new way. They were no longer cavaliers reliant on talented individuals; this side had a fresh intelligence at its centre. That appealed to supporters of the West Indies. Their cricket team would be successful because of what went on in the head, not just thanks to the athleticism of the body. These cricketers were serious people, tutored and drilled to win. New players were brought in to continue the pattern. This was a team that could not be patronised like those of the past. The dominance of Lloyd’s men and Richards’s men was achieved through hard work, discipline and technical excellence; it had very little to do with carefree, instinctive spontaneity.
When Graham Gooch was the captain of England in the early 1990s and Micky Stewart was the manager, they tried to reform English cricket with a regime of physical fitness, rigorous practice, team spirit, pride and punctuality. It was a good idea – and nothing more than what the West Indies had been doing since 1978.
Lloyd and Richards may have distilled the values of hard work, discipline and technical distinction, but they didn’t invent them. To those who looked, these qualities had been developing in West Indian cricket for almost a century. They were part of the story of Charles Ollivierre’s excellence.
Ollivierre was 23 when he came to England with the West Indies side in 1900. He had played three games of first-class cricket in four years before the tour, yet he scored nearly 900 runs in a foreign country on unfamiliar wickets when the sport in his own island was at a rudimentary stage. This would have been impossible had it been down to talent alone; his innings must have featured character, intelligence, aptitude and judgement. Ollivierre began the tradition of West Indian batsmanship. A hundred years later Brian Lara probably completed it through his technical competence, his stamina and stroke play, his ability to dominate bowlers, and most of all the talent to change the course of a Test match. The tradition which Lara perfected had been refined on its way to him by George Headley in the 1930s and 1940s, and after the Second World War by players such as Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott, and later still, by Rohan Kanhai.
In Rites the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite describes a Walcott innings against England at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown shortly after the war. Johnny Wardle had just been hit for four.
‘You see dat shot?’ the people was shoutin’;
‘Jesus Chrise, man, wunna see dat shot?’
All over de groun’ fellers shakin’ hands wid each other
as if was they wheelin’ de willow
as if was them had the power;
one man run out pun de field wid a red fowl cock
goin’ quawk quawk quawk in ’e han’;
would’a give it to Clyde right then an’ right there
if a police hadn’t stop ’e!
Brathwaite’s Walcott was scoring his runs for a nation; those runs belonged to the people, and the people knew it. Cricketers were the only pan-Caribbean heroes.
‘If a West Indian made a century at Lord’s or in Australia’, recalls Ronald Austin, ‘it was almost like getting inspiration from Scripture. Cricket was deeply interwoven into our lives. And not just young men like myself. My mother was obsessed with the game – all the older women were. You’d go to Bourda for a Test and you’d see them there with baskets of food for the whole day; they’d all come to watch Everton Weekes or Garry Sobers. Cricket penetrated every aspect of society.’
Ronald Austin’s recollection of boyhood cricket in British Guiana connects with that most famous of rhetorical questions posed in Beyond a Boundary. ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ asked C. L. R. James.
West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands. English people, for example, have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the few who did so much for so many, the success of parliamentary democracy, those and such as those constitute a national tradition. Underdeveloped countries have to go back centuries to rebuild one. We of the West Indies have none at all, none that we know of. To such people, the three Ws, Ram and Val wrecking English batting, help to fill a huge gap in their consciousness and in their needs.
In Georgetown and Brooklyn, Streatham and Birmingham the successes of West Indian cricketers brought great pride to the diaspora. Just ask the three bus drivers of this book: the man with the hired top hat and cane in 1950, the man who stopped the traffic on Kensington High Street for Viv, and Harold Blackman, whose London Transport XI in the 1980s were as unbeatable as the West Indies. ‘We used to think, The same thing they do, we can do. They gave us a spurt, they gave us heart,’ says Harold.
The West Indies brought a nation of cricket lovers, whose flag flew only from a pavilion roof, to its feet. Not for a tournament, not for a season or for five years, but for the best part of two decades. Their fine play allowed their people to stop apologising for being West Indian.
‘There was a lot we had to overcome, and we did it,’ says Andy Roberts. ‘We did not complain, and here we are. We end up having one of the greatest teams in the history of sport. Several dots on the map dominating the world.’