In Cricket In The Leagues, John Kay describes a match in which Garry Sobers represented Norton and was hit back over his head. Sobers reportedly turned, ran towards the boundary shouting “leave it to me” and took the catch just in front of the sightscreen.
“Leave it to me” – and you could. To Ray Robinson, Sobers was “evolution’s ultimate specimen in cricketers”. He combined faculties of the game as no other, batting from one to nine in the West Indies order, bowling every variety of left-arm delivery, fielding in every position with uniform excellence and captaining with a knowledge that his predecessor Frank Worrell described as encompassing “everything” – this for two decades, with only the barest attenuation in performance as age encroached. Incorporate Sobers’ matches leading world XIs and his international record stretches from horizon to horizon: almost 9000 runs at 58, 265 wickets at 33, and 121 catches.
All this was accomplished, furthermore, with a unique elasticity and elan. Of his batting Barry Richards once observed that Sobers was “the only 360-degree player in the game”; that is, his follow-through ended where his pick-up began, swinging “right through every degree on the compass”. The generosity of swing was matched by a generosity of spirit, for Sobers was also a walker throughout his career – not only a mark of sportsmanship but indicative of a confidence in his abilities that needed no help from luck. And one notes of his bowling that, despite operating under front- and back-foot laws, he bowled only a handful of no-balls in his entire career. Such was his instinctive feeling for cricket’s calibrations.
In the post-colonial West Indies, not surprisingly, Sobers was a point of pride, almost a divine. CLR James – and none wrote better of Sobers than James – saw in him “the living embodiment of centuries of tortured history”, and “a West Indian cricketer, not merely a cricketer from the West Indies”.
The appointment of Worrell to lead West Indies to Australia in 1960-61 is generally regarded as the defining moment in Caribbean cricket. But, as Brian Stoddart suggests in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, Sobers’ succession, taken on the field in March 1965, was “the real break with the past”. Worrell was courtly, tactful, educated at an English university, a Freemason; Sobers’ background was both indigenous and indigent. He was raised by a widow in a small shack in Bridgetown’s Bay Land, a tenantry created for plantation workers after the cessation of slavery in 1838. Between docks that were a crucible of industrial dispute and a local cricket club for whites only. His rise from exclusion to eminence, Hilary Beckles contends in The Development of West Indies Cricket, sent “a signal of hope for collective redemption”.
In some senses, however, Sobers was an awkward hero in the cause of West Indian self-affirmation through sport. He did not view defeat in a Test as setting back the struggle for national prestige: “Cricketers are entertainers”, he said, when he scandalised fellow countrymen with his costly declaration in Trinidad in 1967-68.
He was awkwardly apolitical too. He explained his controversial visit to Rhodesia for a double-wicket competition in September 1970 by saying he “knew nothing of politics at the time”. His avowal that “there should be no barriers in sport” smacked of an apology for sporting contact with South Africa. (Sobers, in fact, makes clear in The Changing Face of Cricket that he did not play in South Africa himself only because he had “had my fill of publicity and criticism” during the Rhodesian affair; it had “nothing to do with what was happening in the country”.)