Sir Frank Worrell would have turned 100 on Thursday. If anyone could arrest the decline of West Indies Test cricket towards extinction – a big if after England’s 3-0 walloping – it would have been Worrell.
The crisis is immediate. West Indies have papier mache where their specialist batting should be. Other countries outside the cosy big three of England, Australia and India, struggle to keep Test cricket alive on a diet of a two-Test series here today and gone tomorrow – but none faces such enormous costs as the West Indian territories who have to import every single piece of equipment.
Worrell was not only a great cricketer but a pan-Caribbean statesman. He died of leukemia aged 42, in 1967, shortly after he had brought West Indian cricket – a unique combination of athleticism and artistry – to fulfilment.
It was Worrell who saved West Indian cricket after England won the 1957 series by the same margin as this time, 3-0. England killed West Indies spin bowling in the Edgbaston Test: the mystery-spinner Sonny Ramadhin was not awarded one leg-before-wicket dismissal in his 98 overs by home, not neutral, umpires as Peter May and Colin Cowdrey kicked him with their front pad.
Not many people merit two biographies at once, but Worrell is eminent enough to do so now. Simon Lister’s Worrell captures the first black West Indies captain on the field; Vaneisa Bakh’s Son of Grace captures his private life. Together they do him justice.
Lister tells us how inadequate the West Indies captain John Goddard was in 1957. “At the start of an innings he liked to tell each fielder where to stand – including the wicketkeeper: ‘You – behind.’” When Goddard began a speech at an MCC dinner and could not find his notes, he just sat down. He used to dine, not with his players, but with the two tour managers: all three were white.
But Worrell was a complicated man, with a very complicated private life, including many affairs as Bakhsh relates. And as no man is a prophet in his own land according to the proverb, Worrell left Barbados soon after he had become the youngest batsman to score a triple-century in first-class cricket. Worrell emigrated to Jamaica where, Bakhsh explains, a local businessman sponsored him; otherwise there was no money to be made playing cricket in the West Indies.
We know the first black West Indies captain (after George Headley had been given one game) was Worrell in 1960. But both biographies point out that Worrell was first offered the captaincy in 1957, after that disastrous tour. The West Indies cricket board, to its credit, did offer the job to the right man – and Worrell refused. He was studying for a degree at Manchester University, while making his living as a league professional in Lancashire; and it was conceivable that the board would depose him after a couple of Test series against Asian opposition, once England and Australia came along.
‘An iron fist in a velvet glove’
When Worrell accepted the captaincy, the dourly defensive world of Test cricket in the 1950s sprang to life like spring flowers. A ticker-tape reception and a crowd of 100,000 farewelled Worrell’s team in Melbourne after their tour of Australia and the first tied Test, in Brisbane.
For the 1963 tour of England Worrell put his faith not in spin but Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, and crushed inter-island rivalries in the dressing-room, allowing Rohan Kanhai and Garfield Sobers to flourish together. As a captain, one of his team told me, Worrell had “an iron fist in a velvet glove”.
Now, if Worrell were alive and given the task of resuscitating West Indies Test cricket, and to make sure that England did not kill it at Edgbaston – not just their spin bowling as in 1957 – what would he do?
It is a crisis: the anecdotal evidence is that every young cricketer in the Caribbean wants to become a T20 specialist, earning millions around the world. Nobody wants to hang around batting against a red ball all day; and in several territories, like St Lucia, there is no club cricket left for them to play.
Their last domestic first-class competition illustrates the state of affairs. Eight first-class teams (including Combined Campuses and Colleges, who did not win a game) playing each other once; Guyana winning the title again as they have the quick, flat finger-spinners for the pitches which groundsmen are paid far too little to prepare; no totals of 400 or more except if Combined Campuses were bowling; the highest run-scorer was Mikyle Louis, who can thrust his front foot down the pitch and battle bravely but had everything else to learn when thrown in the deepest end and given his Test debut as an opening batsman in England.
And, all the while, the West Indies Women’s team – the World T20 champions less than a decade ago – is also going down the pan.
West Indies Test cricket too precious to lose
We can only speculate what would happen if Sir Frank Worrell were given a magic wand to wield in his iron fist and velvet glove. My guess is he would gather all the West Indian prime ministers together for a few (or more) drinks; and persuade them to disband the West Indies Cricket Board as it is constituted with two representatives from each of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Leeward and Windward Islands, plus a few independent directors who are there to appear great and good, not because they care about the game (i.e. the same as the ECB).
Worrell, next, would persuade the all-time greats like Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Curtly Ambrose, Sir Richie Richardson and Sir Clive Lloyd to form a nominations committee; they would put forward the names of the new board directors. They could select West Indians living in the Caribbean and currently abroad; several, I suspect, would be female; and everyone would care.
West Indies Test cricket is too precious to lose. The human form has seldom been seen to such effect as when Sir Garfield Sobers did anything on a cricket field, when Worrell himself played a late cut, when Michael Holding began his run-up, or when Richards tugged his maroon cap, chewed his gum, and smote his first ball to the boundary.
Article courtesy of
Source link
