I knew a little of cricket before 1968, but not much. On holidays in Australia from our then home in PNG, I saw a little of the 1967/68 series against India, but it didn’t really register with me.
I then heard about some ‘Ashes’ series against England, but then, there wasn’t any TV in PNG to follow the series through the news.
But when my father bought me my first ABC tour guide in late 1968, I was hooked. My father told me all about the 1960/61 series, about the drawn first test, and all the great players.
Reading through the tour guide and Alan McGilvray’s pen-portraits of players from both Australia and West Indies, I became intimately connected with the players for the very first time.
Sadly, while that 1968/69 series was basically a walk-over for the Aussies, too many of the aging Windies players failed to measure up against the Aussie young guns.
I was back in Sydney to begin boarding high school in early 1969 and a visit to the SCG for the 5th test was my first introduction to live sport.
A composite best Windies team from that series was:
Roy Fredericks, Joey Carew, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Seymour Nurse, Gary Sobers(c), Clive Lloyd, Jackie Hendricks(k), Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Lance Gibbs, David Holford(12th).
Great players, cool names.
Fredericks and Lloyd were just starting out, while Sobers, Kanhai, Gibbs and Holford would also play-on for another 5-6 years. But by the end of 1969 Carew, Butcher, Nurse, Hendricks, Hall and Griffith were gone.
So who are the best Windies players I have seen in 40 years of following test cricket? Well, here it is:
Gordon Greenidge – punishing right-hand opener.
Desmond Haynes – sublime right-hand opener.
Brian Lara – exotic left-hand bat.
Viv Richards – intimidating right-hand bat and useful off-spinner.
Clive Lloyd (c) – powerful left-hand bat, a brilliant cover fielder and very good right-arm medium pacer in his younger days before a serious back injury.
Gary Sobers (vc) – the world’s greatest-ever all-rounder, left-hand bat, left-arm medium fast, left-arm slow orthodox, left-arm chinaman. He did everything and was also a freakish fielder.
Jeff Dujon (wk) – competent keeper and right-hand bat who epitomised Caribbean cool.
Malcolm Marshall – right-hand bat and right-arm fast. Short and slippery, with the ball skidding through dangerously fast.
Curtley Ambrose – left-hand bat and right fast-medium. Menacing intent from a great height.
Mike Holding – right-arm fast, fast, fast. Whispering death they called him with a beautiful, languid, long run-up.
Lance Gibbs – miserly and dangerous right-arm off-spinner.
Backups:
Roy Fredericks – whirlwind left-hand back-up opener.
Rohan Kanhai – sublime right-hand back-up bat. Famous for the falling hook and pull shot.
Ridley Jacobs – combative left-hand back-up keeper-batsman.
Andy Roberts – right-hand bat and right-arm fast. Revered as the ‘father’ or ‘older brother’ of the modern Windies pacemen.
Joel Garner – right-arm fast medium. ‘Big bird’ they called him, and he gave nothing away.
So there you have it, a powerful line-up indeed. How good is the line-up? Well, consider these players who couldn’t make the list:
Lawrence Rowe, Seymour Nurse, Richie Richardson, Alvin Kallicharran, Basil Butcher, Shiv Chanderpaul, Deryck Murray(k), Ian Bishop, Sylvester Clarke, Courtney Walsh, Colin Croft, Keith Boyce, Collis King, Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sarwan, David Holford, Merv Dillon, Carl Hooper, Jimmy Adams, Larry Gomes.
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