It is 9.30am on Friday, August 24, 1973 and Mum is faffing about, changing her dress and swapping fancy shoes for functional. I’m stressed. Lord’s is 40 minutes in the car and we have to find a parking spot in St John’s Wood. It’s the morning of my first Test match, ever.
West Indies have Garry Sobers, we have Geoff Boycott. The officials have Dickie Bird.
Nobody played cricket like Sobers. The bat appeared as an extension of his body. The ball, a bullet from his gun. His fingerspin was above average, his wristspin below. He caught catches for fun. His predatory ground fielding was worth the admission money alone. His movement was liquid, his speed electric, his smile warm, his hangovers legendary. He was cool. He was God. He was playing for West Indies in an hour and a half and Mum was trying on shoes.
We got there late, of course. We were guests in a box in the old Grand Stand. I was 15 years old and wore a tie and jacket to watch cricket, which felt ridiculous. The day before, Rohan Kanhai had made a hundred. I imitated his fabulous strokeplay in the small garden at home against my mate, who had a crack at bowling like Bob Willis. Kanhai drove square of the wicket with a big stride forward, his right knee often touching the ground and his bat spinning around his neck in its follow-through. He was brilliant. Bob’s doppelganger on the patch of grass at home was a bit wild and not always easy to reach, but reach and smash I did, until we ran out of balls and Mum pulled the pin because the roses were lying wounded in their bed.
Back at Lord’s the next morning Sobers began quietly, which was a worry. He had aged, and within a year had retired from the game altogether, but the arrival of Bernard Julien’s boyish enthusiasm at the other end regenerated the great man and suddenly England’s best were disappearing to all parts. Each of the five bowlers went for more than 100; Tony Greig for 180 but with three wickets. Bob took 4 for 118 in 35 overs. Thirty-five! Wouldn’t be allowed now. The others? Geoff Arnold caned, Derek Underwood milked, Ray Illingworth mistreated.
Sobers played these back-foot drives, often lifting himself off his feet with the bat speed. When the stroke had finished, the toe of that bat had completed more than a 360-degree arc and finished up by thumping into his backside. It was incredible to watch, like no one else. In the modern era, Brian Lara has been similar but without quite the sense of trying to hit the ball so damn hard.
I cannot tell you how thrilling it was to see this man in the flesh. It was an affirmation of cricket’s uniquely different ways and myriad heroic achievements. For every Boycott forward-defensive, there was a Sobers back-foot drive. Both had their merit but one sent the pulse racing.
During that innings Sobers briefly retired with a stomach upset; the hangover I guess. But he came back and continued where he left off. He had every shot but not necessarily as applied to the line and length of the ball bowled. His basic principle was to play back to fast bowling and forward to slow. So sharp was his eye that he seemed to toy with the movement of the ball. The more it swung, the squarer he hit it. The more it spun, the nearer he got to it. His footwork was slick and uncomplicated, his head still and his body uber-relaxed.
There is a photograph in the Melbourne Cricket Ground media centre of Dennis Lillee in his follow-through, having released the ball, and Garry dead still in his stance at the crease, toe of the bat on the ground, and not a muscle in his body seems to have moved. Remarkable. The photograph is from the innings that Sir Donald Bradman called the best he ever saw: 254 for the Rest of the World against Australia at the MCG in 1972.
Bradman had no doubt that Sobers was the greatest cricketer. Unless you saw him, it is hard to understand why he should be rated by people of the time ahead of Jacques Kallis, for example, but he just was better than anyone else. Better than Keith Miller, Imran Khan, Ian Botham, Kapil Dev, Richard Hadlee, Ben Stokes, even Kallis. His cricket was instinctive, free-spirited, and pretty much always explosive. There was no format, no structure, nor restriction. This was just a guy who grew up on the beach and played like he was still there. No helmet, a tiny thigh pad (eventually), no worries. He played in England for Nottinghamshire, Australia for South Australia, and at home for Barbados. All who played with him revered him.
His debut for Nottinghamshire was on a cold spring morning in 1968. The Notts players were in the nets the day before the early-round Gillette Cup match and hadn’t as yet met the new signing. Around midday, a slim, loose-limbed fellow strolled his way across the Trent Bridge outfield to meet his team-mates. He was wearing a sheepskin coat, collar turned up, exactly as his cricket shirts always were, to protect his neck from the chill wind. He shook all the hands and offered drinks in the evening. They gravitated to the pub, and to him, of course, but left before the witching hour to gather sleep and sweet dreams. Garry stayed a while longer.
He took three Lancashire wickets the next morning with his slippery left-arm swing and later walked to the wicket with the team cocking up the low run chase. He made 75 not out and saw them over the line. After being named Man of the Match, he wandered back into the dressing room, where he congratulated the lads: “Well played all you fellas, who we got in the next round?” The room was awestruck. The dreams were realised.