thinking about what could have been, while trying to motivate your teammates to seize their moments. Too much damn time to think. Couldn’t imagine having to do it for five days.
For the viewer, bliss. A friend for five days. You end your week on a high. In those days, a Test match in England started on a Thursday (the build-up), reached its peak over the weekend (when you could go to see it live if you had been working during the week) and, if you were lucky, it would reach a conclusion on the Monday (a great way to start the new week). A novel. A box set. For the live audience, unpredictable. They don’t know what they’ll get. Five days can at times blend into one. But the 1984 series was different. The games didn’t blend. The results were predictable, but the drama within the games was unpredictable.
First Test: A Malcolm Marshall bouncer strikes English Test debutant Andy Lloyd in the head. Dramatic. As the ball rises towards Lloyd’s head, he twists to avoid it. Too late. Hits. Hurts. In a split second, it looks as if the ball has spun Lloyd round 180 degrees. Pause. He’s down, toppled, facing the stumps that had once been behind him. Lloyd is hospitalised. He never played Test cricket again. West Indies win.
Second Test: England are close to victory but West Indies’ opening batsman Gordon Greenidge starts limping. Hobbling as if struck with cramp. Greenidge’s limp is like Michael Jordan’s tongue sticking out or Zinedine Zidane puking up on a football pitch. Something beautiful is about to happen. Greenidge scores 214 not out. West Indies win.
Third Test: Malcolm Marshall, the best bowler in the world, arguably the greatest fast bowler ever, a man at/near the peak of his powers, breaks his thumb. Larry Gomes is close to getting a century, but nine West Indian wickets are down. Either Marshall comes out to bat with a broken thumb (in two places) or Gomes will be disappointed. Marshall comes out. Cast on one forearm, holding the bat in his other arm. Batting with one arm, he fends off England’s meagre attack. Gomes gets his century. Marshall returns, cast on forearm, cricket ball in the other. He is now bowling. Decimates England. Gets seven out of 10 English batsmen out. Michael Holding, a great bowler but a poor batsman at best, also demolishes the bowling of Bob Willis, hitting five sixes on his way to 59 runs. Willis retires from Test cricket. The West Indies win.
Fourth Test: Winston Davis is a fast bowler who cannot get a game for the West Indies because of Holding, Marshall and Garner. He gets his chance here and fractures English batsman Paul Terry’s arm. Terry returns, arm in sling to help teammate Allan Lamb get a century. But he never plays for England again. Davis, like Holding, is a mediocre batsman. But he scores 77 runs. West Indies win.
Fifth Test: England blackwashed. West Indies win the series 5–0.
Gordon Greenidge was voted Player of the Series, with an average of over 81. Marshall, Garner and Holding scooped almost 70 wickets between them. For Viv Richards, it had been a relatively quiet series. He averaged just under 42 with the bat. But for the best part of the summer, Richards had been subdued, which was unusual for a player who saved his best for England.
During the ‘grovel’ series of 1976, Richards hit 291 in the fifth Test at The Oval. In the 1979 World Cup final at Lord’s, it had been Richards’ 138 not out against England that had been the game-winning performance to secure victory. Later, in 1986, in front of his home fans in Antigua, Richards would hit the then fastest Test century ever, in just 56 balls. The combination of Richards’ cruel excellence and posturing on the pitch, his aloofness and politics off the field made England’s cricketing establishment uncomfortable. He did not fit their notion of what a black man should be. Didn’t come across as grateful enough.
Former Wisden editor Dave Frith once wrote, ‘For me that should be the limit of aggression in Test cricket, but now we are in very serious times and all sorts of things are motivating people – religious belief and racial conviction – and most of all these resentments. And I think it’s rather sad if you need a resentment like that to fire you up. You should glory in the gift that you’ve been given. I mean, he was a born athlete, Viv Richards. He surely could have gone out there and done just as well and retained his cool. I wish he didn’t get angry so often, because I believed in him. But after that evening I was left quite worried, I thought, Well, he’s talking to young kids, and if he preaches that sort of stuff, the world’s not going to be a very peaceful place.’8
In Richards, cricket had found a player that had been fundamentally rupturing the status quo. Rupturing the norm. Rupturing every conceivable notion of what a West Indian cricketer could and should be. He had been creating a new blueprint. Changing the narrative away from the compliance demanded by the civilising abolitionists. Richards’ assertiveness was a threat. His politics became a proxy for radicalism. England had for many years treated the West Indies, both politically and in cricket, with contempt. It had not been right, in their eyes, for Richards to be fuelled by oppressions of the past; a past not relevant to the present or to the future.
My mum couldn’t watch. The ‘othering’ of blackness, the casual racism, the biased commentary – my mum felt every remark, every dig, every complaint. She knew that most commentators had little or no conception of where these players had come from. Or where she’d come from. If in Ali–Holmes I saw for the first time vulnerability in my father, in my mother’s response to the critics of the West Indies, I had seen where some of my politics had come from. A staunch and boundless love of black people. For the first time, I recognised that the fear I felt because of others’ fear was in fact real. Not an abstract conception I had been internalising, running away from, trying to explain, failing to explain. The switch. A switch. I thought less about what we as black people were doing wrong and more about what the mainstream media had been claiming we were doing wrong. Not us. But them.
As the West Indies’ dominance continued, the criticisms heightened. Not just Richards. Clive Lloyd – bespectacled, respected, more diplomat than cricketer – had been severely criticised for his tactics. The coverage of his captaincy often felt like he had betrayed his colonial masters; he had failed to follow in the footsteps of Sir Frank Worrell and others who never used such tactics. Lloyd had little or no respect for the former rulers. Didn’t care what they said, or how they portrayed him.
In the eyes of the media and English public, it always appeared as if the West Indies were never worthy winners. They won because so many of their players developed their talent in the English county cricket system. They succeeded because of natural athleticism. They were successful because they cheated. Implied. Never really said. The bouncers unfair, the slow over rates an unsportsmanlike tactic. They made the game boring, they were boorish. The criticisms became a perverse obsession, lacking critical thought. The criticisms had frequently been vile. Often laced with what many would see as racist or stereotypical undertones. Usually delivered by the white establishment’s recognised names.
‘Until we can breed seven-foot monsters willing to break bones and shatter faces, we cannot compete against these threatening West Indians. Even the umpires seem to be scared that the devilish-looking Richards might put a voodoo sign on them!’ from a letter published in Wisden Cricket Monthly.9
‘The summer game, it had become something else. It had lost its romance, it had lost its sportsmanship, it had lost its lovely edge; it was now a place where people got frightened,’ said David Frith, editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly.10
‘Their game is founded on vengeance and violence and fringed by arrogance,’ said Frith.11
‘Most people on whose support English cricket depends, believe monotonous fast bowling to be both brutalising the game and boring to watch,’ said the Sunday Times’ Robin Marlar.12
English journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse was ‘sickened’ by ‘the downright thuggery of fast bowlers working in relays to remove batsmen by hurting and intimidating them’.13
John Woodcock, editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, wrote an article with a picture captioned ‘the unacceptable face of Test cricket’.14 He had also classified the West Indies’ fast bowling as ‘chilling’ and warned that its ‘viciousness was changing the very nature of the game’.15
‘It seemed that cricket had