Michael Holding was crying.
Crying on a cricket pitch.
He was a young man, just 21 years old, who still lived at home with his parents on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. He worked as a government computer programmer at the Central Data Processing Unit on East Street in Kingston.
He sat on his haunches and stared down at the grass as the tears came. He wasn’t alone. Far from it. He was in Sydney in Australia. He was representing the West Indies in a Test match, and roughly 39,000 people inside the Sydney Cricket Ground were watching him weep. It was just after tea on Sunday 4 January 1976.
Holding was a fast bowler. Really very fast. But he hadn’t played Test cricket before this tour. He had been chosen by the captain of the West Indies, Clive Lloyd, for his promise, not his results.
The West Indies were in Australia to play six Test matches. This one in Sydney was the fourth. Lloyd’s side were behind in the series but it was still close. It was the toughest cricket Holding had known, but they could still win.
First ball after the tea break on the second afternoon, Holding had got the wicket of the opening batsman, Ian Redpath. Caught behind by the wicket-keeper, Deryck Murray. That brought Ian Chappell to the crease, the former Australia captain. The West Indies were getting back in the game.
Chappell had given up the skipper’s job the previous year, worn down by the grind and determined not to endure the fate of his predecessor, who had found out he’d been sacked from teammates told by a reporter. ‘The bastards won’t get me that way,’ Chappell had promised his wife when he accepted the captaincy. Anyway, it wasn’t his problem any longer; the responsibility of leading the country’s cricket team now lay with his younger brother Greg, who was padded up in the dressing room, next in.
Ian Chappell was an articulate, thoughtful, intelligent man. He could also be opinionated, caustic and had a visceral disregard for bullshit. As he said himself, there were more opinions around the Chappell family breakfast table each morning than there were glasses of orange juice. ‘Aw, you’re just like your old man,’ the South Australia wicket-keeper Barry Jarman had once taunted the young Chappell on the team bus. ‘You think you know everything.’
Chappell walked from the Sydney Cricket Ground dressing room to the middle of the pitch. Collar pointing up, moustache pointing down. Shirt unbuttoned almost to the nipples. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His articulacy, thoughtfulness and intelligence weren’t evident at this exact moment; he just looked like what he was – a bloody tough cricketer.
First ball, Michael Holding bowled him a beauty. It was fast – short but not too short – on the line of the off stump. It moved away just a little after it bounced. Chappell had to play at it.
‘Oh yeah, and I hit it,’ he says. ‘Because it was short, I edged it right next to my ear, playing a defensive shot, so to me it sounded like a bloody gun going off.’
Behind the stumps Deryck Murray took the catch. His second in two balls.
‘It was about the only time in my career that I thought about walking,’ says Chappell. ‘I actually did a little shuffle towards the gate because I was batting at the Bradman–Noble end so the dressing rooms were off to the right. I took a pace but then my natural instincts took over and I stood there. I couldn’t believe it when Reg Ledwidge didn’t give me out.’
Murray was holding the ball above his head in his glove, shouting the appeal. At first slip Alvin Kallicharran threw his hands high. Lawrence Rowe at second slip joined in, and Clive Lloyd at third jumped off the ground. But umpire Ledwidge said no. He decided that the ball had not touched the bat. Ian Chappell was not out.
By now Michael Holding had run to the fielding position of extra cover as his celebration turned to dismay. He crouched down and he began to cry. The tears were caused not just by the injustice of the moment. At that instant Holding had been overwhelmed by the potency of his emotions during the past two months; the peevish, disagreeable and ill-humoured atmosphere that had polluted the West Indies dressing room. The lack of respect shown by some teammates to Lloyd and to the tour manager, who was a friend of Holding’s father. The inability of his captain to provide harmony away from the ground and tactical acuity on it. The cutting comments of the Australian players and the hooting vulgarity of the spectators. He missed his family and had spent Christmas apart from them for the first time. Sitting in a crappy three-star hotel room eating rum-flavoured fruit cake sent by his mother was no substitute. And apart from all that he was being paid about £350 for the whole damned tour. If this was Test cricket, you could forget it.
‘We were playing against a very good team, highly motivated with some great fast bowlers under conditions that most of us were unfamiliar with,’ says Holding. ‘Big grounds, huge crowds, very partisan. Yes. It was like a war. Eventually you get to realise what Test cricket is all about, and it is not as simple as it may seem.’
Holding’s room-mate, Andy Roberts, was the first player to console him and help him to his feet. Lance Gibbs ran over to offer solace. Holding went back to his bowling mark but was so distracted that it took him nearly ten minutes to complete the eight-ball over. The crowd jeered and mocked. Chappell was sufficiently embarrassed by the umpire’s mistake to consider giving his wicket away. The temptation passed. Instead, he hooked the last ball of Holding’s over for four.