Garfield Sobers

Garfield Sobers: Cricket's Complete Man

On 31 August 1968, at St Helen's in Swansea, the Nottinghamshire captain faced an over from Glamorgan's Malcolm Nash and hit every ball for six — the first time it had been done in first-class cricket. "And he's done it! He's done it!" shouted the commentator Wilf Wooller. "And my goodness, it's gone... way down to Swansea!" Thirty-six runs in an over broke a record that had stood fifty-seven years. Glamorgan's captain Tony Lewis, who had the best view of it, described what he saw precisely: "It was not sheer slogging through strength, but scientific hitting with every movement working in harmony."

Bay Land, and Two Extra Fingers

Garfield St Aubrun Sobers was born on 28 July 1936 in Bridgetown, Barbados, the fifth of six children of Shamont and Thelma Sobers of Walcott Avenue, Bay Land. He was born with polydactyly — two extra fingers, one on each hand. His father, a merchant seaman, was killed in January 1942 when a German U-boat torpedoed his ship; Sobers was five. He was a natural at any game involving a ball — cricket, football, basketball — and he and his brother Gerald won three consecutive inter-school championships with Bay Street Boys' School. At thirteen he was recruited by two adult clubs, Kent St Philip and Wanderers; practising in the nets against the West Indies Test player Denis Atkinson, he developed into a serious left-arm spinner. Inspector Wilfred Farmer of the Police team gave him a place at fifteen.

Test Cricket at Seventeen

He made his first-class debut for Barbados on 31 January 1953, aged sixteen, batting at number nine against the touring Indians and taking 4/50 and 3/92. In March 1954 he played his first Test, against England at Sabina Park, selected as a bowler to replace the ill Alf Valentine, and took 4/75 including a wicket in his opening over. Keith Miller, watching him in Australia in 1954–55, predicted he would become a better batsman than bowler; in Barbados that series Sobers opened the innings and hit Miller's first three deliveries to the boundary, then took three more fours off him in his next over.

365

In March 1958, against Pakistan at Kingston, Sobers made his maiden Test century and did not stop until he had 365 not out, passing Len Hutton's twenty-year-old world record of 364. He batted 614 minutes and hit 38 fours and, remarkably for such a score, no sixes. At 21 years and 216 days he remains the youngest player to break the individual Test scoring record and the youngest triple-centurion in the game's history. It was not a solitary peak: he made 824 runs in that series, 557 with three centuries in India in 1958–59, and 709 with three centuries in five Tests against England in 1959–60.

Then, in September 1959, came the catastrophe. Driving on the A34 near Stoke-on-Trent, Sobers crashed; his passenger, the West Indies batsman Collie Smith, suffered a broken back and died three days later. Sobers could remember little of it and was fined £10 for driving without due care. He drank heavily afterwards, and the career nearly ended there. He resolved instead that he would be letting his country down if he vanished into alcohol, and would play "not just for Garfield Sobers but for Collie Smith as well" — setting himself, he said, the task of playing for two men.

King Cricket

He succeeded his mentor Frank Worrell as West Indies captain for the 1964–65 home series against Australia and won it 2–1, the first time West Indies had beaten Australia in a series. His summit came in England in 1966, where he was acclaimed as King Cricket: 722 runs at 103.14 with three centuries, twenty wickets at 27.25 and ten catches in five Tests, and a 3–1 series win. The Mighty Sparrow recorded a calypso in his honour. From 1961 he had also transformed South Australia, where attendances rose 89 per cent; in 1963–64 he was the Sheffield Shield's leading run-scorer and wicket-taker in the same season and the state won the title. In December 1967 Nottinghamshire signed him as captain on a contract Wisden estimated at £7,000 a year.

The captaincy years were not uniformly kind. He lost his first series in 1967–68, at home to England, after a declaration at Queen's Park Oval that let England chase 215 for the loss of three wickets and win. It remains one of the most debated tactical decisions in cricket history. Australia beat West Indies 3–1 in 1968–69, England won in 1969, India won at home in 1970–71. In September 1970 he outraged the Caribbean by playing a double-wicket tournament in Rhodesia. He handed the captaincy to Rohan Kanhai in 1972 and played his last Test in March 1974.

Why Garfield Is Called a Genius

Here the word is defensible on unusually firm ground. Don Bradman — not a man given to hyperbole about others — said in 1988: "I've got no hesitation at all in saying that Gary Sobers is the greatest allround cricketer I ever saw." Richie Benaud called him "the greatest all-round cricketer the world has seen." The specific quality is versatility executed at elite standard in incompatible disciplines. Sobers scored 8,032 Test runs at 57.78 — the fifth-highest average among players with 5,000 runs — and took 235 wickets, but the number that matters is that he took them in four different ways: left-arm orthodox spin, left-arm wrist spin and googlies, medium-pace seam, and genuine fast bowling with the new ball, in which he could swing the ball late at high speed off a loose, springy run and a whiplash action. Bradman explicitly defended his bowling average of 34 on these grounds: versatility cost him the accuracy specialists develop. He was also an outstanding close catcher and outfielder, and a footballer good enough to play for Barbados at left-back — one of the few athletes to represent his country in two sports.

Fred Trueman, who bowled at him for years, located the genius in the head rather than the hands: Sobers "has a great cricketing brain and his thought processes are lightning quick." C. L. R. James thought only Bradman and Sobers had the same capacity to see the ball.

The counter-case exists and is mostly about leadership. His captaincy record was ordinary after the initial triumph — a run of drawn and lost series, and a declaration in 1968 that cost his side a home rubber. He never took ten wickets in a match, and his best analysis was 6/73. The Rhodesia trip showed poor political judgement at a moment when the West Indies team was becoming a symbol. But the case against is about decisions, not ability. On ability there is no serious dispute: no cricketer before or since has been simultaneously among the best batsmen, one of the most inventive bowlers and one of the finest fielders in the world.

Legacy

He was Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1964, knighted by Elizabeth II in person in Barbados on 19 February 1975, made a National Hero of Barbados by act of parliament in 1998 — one of eleven, and one of only two living, alongside Rihanna — appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2003, and inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2000 a hundred-member panel named him a Wisden Cricketer of the Century with ninety votes, second only to Bradman. Since 2004 the ICC's Player of the Year has received the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy. His 254 for the Rest of the World at Melbourne in 1972 was, Bradman said, "probably the greatest exhibition of batting ever seen in Australia." It was not even a Test match. He was that far beyond the format.