By Clayton Goodwin
My own appreciation of Guyanese cricket was slow in maturing. The ground-breaking West Indies team of 1950 which captured my pre-teen attention contained only one member with the initials (then, British Guiana) after his name. That was Robert Christiani, middle-order batsmen and deputy wicket-keeper, and he did not dominate proceedings to the same extent as the three Ws – Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott, and Everton Weekes – and the sensational spin-bowling twins Sonny Ramadhin and Alfred Valentine. The mainland territory seemed to be an outlier in Caribbean cricket, and my ignorance was turned to sympathy for the apparent underdogs when I read in a West Indian newspaper supplement of the tour by Len Hutton’s team in 1954 which my Uncle Freddie, a hospital administrator, had brought home for me from one of the nurses. There I read that the tourists had thrashed the “Mudlanders”, as they were so described, by a rather massive margin.
My childhood was spent in rural Kent, and visits to London were few and far between. On one of those visits at the end of 1956, to watch local football team Gillingham play south-east Londoners Millwall (the result was a 1-1 draw, by the way, and the Gills won the reply decisively), I bought a copy of The Cricketer magazine from the W.H. Smith bookstall on London Bridge rail station. There I saw a report of how unfancied British Guiana had won the inter-colony Quadrangular Tournament with clear-cut victories over the supposedly mighty Barbadians and Jamaicans. There were a host of new names to learn in their youthful run-scoring batting – Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Joe Solomon – all marshalled by the guidance of Clyde Walcott who, we learned, had transferred from Barbados to raise the game on the sugar estates. He had certainly done that.
I can kept a special eye on Rohan Kanhai, the only one of that youthful generation to be selected alongside opening batsman Bruce Pairaudeau, on the tour to England in 1957. The young man did not let his admirers down. He was one of the few stars to sparkle in that disappointing summer, and, surely, he would have done much better if he hadn’t been forced to keep wicket and opening the batting due to the failure of the specialists in those roles. In the morning pre-match practice before the second day of the West Indians’ county game against Kent at Canterbury, I was able to stand close to the players and hear Rohan’s voice as he mocked Tony Lock’s style of bowling (throwing?) which had destroyed the West Indian batting in the Test Match just concluded at The Oval. Although Kanhai, and Pairdaudeau, failed to trouble the scorers unduly in that innings, we were rewarded by witnessing a powerful century from Clyde Walcott which stays imprinted on my mind.
Through the next six years we had to be content with following the West Indies progress from afar by way of newspaper reports. We saw Kanhai develop into one of the outstanding batsmen of his generation, and Butcher blossom on the tour to India, and Joe Solomon – does anybody not know of his superlative fielding in the closing stages of the (first) tied Test Match at Brisbane. On that Australian tour, too, Lance Gibbs showed keen evidence, and a hat-trick, of the record-breaking off-spinner legend that he was to become. Far from being the outsiders who deserved our sympathy the (soon-to-become) Guyanese were now a powerhouse of the game in their own right. Nor should we omit from mind those players from the old B.G. who had built their career in England, including Peter Wight of Somerset who broke my young heart in hitting a double-hundred against Kent.
When the West Indies came to England again in 1963 I was in the press-box, officially as a messenger for Hayter’s agency but asked also to report on behalf of New Contact, one of the embryonic UK West Indian publications which flourished for a time and then disappeared. From that vantage-point, after having had to miss seeing Gibbs bowl through the England batting in the victory at Old Trafford, Manchester, I was in the perfect position to witness every ball (almost) of the legendary Test Match at Lord’s. There were many heroes there. Not more so than Basil Butcher, then comparatively unknown to the local public, who with the tourists in some peril on the Saturday afternoon hit a splendid century in partnership with his captain Frank Worrell. He was at the crease, too, when the series-deciding victory was achieved at the Oval. Rohan Kanhai’s contribution to that triumph is described elsewhere in these pages.
On that Saturday afternoon and early evening at Lord’s in 1963, Butcher drove the England fast bowlers repeatedly into the shadows lengthening over the pavilion. Guyanese cricket, itself, was no longer in the shadows. Clive Lloyd dominated the next two decades with his batting, his fielding and his captaincy. There is much debate as to whether Lloyd’s team of 1984, which won all five Test Matches, or Donald Bradman’s “Invincible” Australians of 1948, were the greatest international cricket side of all-time time. Many shrewd judges, including Richie Benaud, himself an Australian captain, give their nod of approval to the West Indians. Debatable point? There is no debate, however, that Clive Lloyd led the much successful combination of cricketers for the greatest length of time.
The “Lloyd Years” contain too much good cricket for me to do justice to each and every one. This era contains the memorable stroke-play of Alvin Kallicharran, also recorded elsewhere in these pages, and of Roy Fredericks, who formed a first-wicket partnership with Gordon Greenidge which, while it may not have been the best of all time was certainly the most explosive with memorable strokes. Rohan Kanhai, now the senior statesman of the party, linked the Golden Age of Frank Worrell and Garry Sobers with that of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. And there was more excellence to come. Meanwhile Gibbs kept the bowling on top of the opposition while we awaited the era of outstanding fast bowling (and plenty of it). When they arrived those purveyors of extreme pace included Colin Croft who certainly looked the most menacing. I remember how he broke the seemingly match-winning partnership of Majid Khan and Zaheer Abbas in the World Cup semi-final at the Oval, and turned the match around, in 1979. After his playing career Croft became a commentator and print-journalist, whom I had the privilege to edit in my days with Cricinfo-ECB.
And so, it continued into the late-1980s and the early-1990s. Two outstanding feats whet my memory. Roger Harper’s lightning pick-up from a stroke to his own bowling and throw which ran out Graham Gooch, before the bemused batsman knew what was happening, in the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) Bicentenary Match at Lord’s in 1987 was amazing in his achievement – and for that fact that it did not win Harper the award for fielding. Harper was as entertaining with the bat as he was with the ball and in the field as he demonstrated by hitting a double-century against Sussex at Hove in 1988. His compatriot Carl Hooper also had a justified reputation for similar eye-catching excellence. One of those innings came in the pre-tour warm-up game against a team of past/present cricketers at Arundel in 1995. In that Hooper hit a battery of sixes including several that splattered into the car-park to the consternation of the owners of those vehicles.
Still the heroes kept coming. Ramnaresh Sarwan led the batting into the present. Then in 1999 the West Indian under-19 side came to England with a very special batsman – another left-hander to go beside Lloyd, Kallicharran and Fredericks. Shivnarine Chanderpaul proclaimed his brilliance with 203 n.o. in the first international match in a style which belied the later defensive pose which senior circumstances forced on him. During the next match at Hove I spoke with Chanderpaul and saw at first-hand how frail his physique appeared to be compared to that of his colleagues. There was nothing frail about his performance. Shivnarine dominated that series and kept West Indies’ head above water in the years of famine which followed those years of plenty. It doesn’t do to think of where West Indies’ cricket would have been without him then.
That’s it. Time and space have beaten. So many more memories that I could have recorded and so many more players that could have been included. I apologise to the players concerned, and to yourselves, if your favourites have been omitted. Let us hope, however, that this review has set the ball rolling for you, and others, to recall the deeds achieved by Guyanese batsmen, Guyanese bowlers, Guyanese fielders and wicketkeepers, Guyanese writers, publishers and broadcasters, Guyanese umpires, and Guyanese fans and their friends and colleagues. I doubt if any set of cricketers from another country has given me such a consistent and prolonged sense of fun and excitement. Unless, of course ….. Smile – that’s how it is with cricket.