In his biography of Sir Garfield Sobers the former English cricketer, Trevor Bailey, wrote that while Sir Donald Bradman was the greatest batsman ever, Sobers was the greatest cricketer to play the game. The term GOAT is overused in India and Virat Kohli with a test batting average in the forties is referred to as one. After 93 tests had a batting average of 57. But Sobers was beyond a GOAT and was a legend who would make the top ten sportsmen of all time with people like Mohammed Ali, Pele, Maradona, and Federer. So, what made him a sporting legend?
Sporting legends come from accomplishments, attitude, and behavior because these make an athlete beloved to the global public. Further, you can tell someone is a legend when their opponents applaud them. Thus, when Pele and Maradona played the opposing team’s fans wanted to see these sportsmen do well and live up to their high reputations. Sobers fell in this category because whenever spectators went to see him, they wanted to see something spectacular with either the bat or the ball and for a long time the great man was able to oblige. And then there is behavior.
Modern day Indians think being aggressive on the cricket field is a sign on mental toughness but it really is just an exhibition of loutish behavior. In the 1970s, under the captaincy of Ian Chappell, the Australians became the masters of sledging yet the other great team of that era, the West Indies, never resorted to such behavior. When the great West Indian fast bowler Andy Roberts was asked why he never sledged he replied, “I let the ball do the talking.” For the record, Gavaskar thought that Roberts was the most difficult fast bowler he played in his career.
Sobers was no different in that he exuded class. Ian Chappell tells the story that when Sobers played for South Australia their captain insisted that everyone wear the South Australian cap. That year the apartheid South African team consisting of Eddie Barlow, Colin Bland, and the Pollock brothers toured Australia and went to Adelaide to play South Australia. Sobers, uncharacteristically, asked the South Australian captain if he could wear his West Indies cap for the game. Permission was granted and Sobers went out to bat and scored 150. When he came back in Ian Chappell asked him, “Garry, why did you insist on wearing the West Indies cap?” The great man replied, “I knew the South Africans had never seen a West Indies cap so I wanted to make sure they saw one for a long time!” Modern cricketers could learn from this because your actions, as Sobers fully recognized, define who you are in a sport.
Sobers was picked to play for the West Indies at the age of seventeen as a replacement for the injured spinner Alf Valentine. Sobers went in to bat at number nine but by his second test series against Australia he was batting at the number five position and that was against the bowling of Lindwall and Miller. Sobers hit a fifty against them and had a string of moderate scores which showed his promise but it took sixteen tests for him to hit his first century.
That was the 365 not out he scored against Pakistan at the age of 21 and in doing so he broke Len Hutton’s record for the highest score in test cricket. He followed it up with two more centuries in the series and three on the tour of India that followed.
A lot has been written about Sobers’s batting style especially the fact that he always played pacers on the back foot but it is his record around the world that shows just how good a batsman he was. In those days there was not a lot of test cricket and as Sobers recounted in his autobiography he wished that he had played more tests between the ages of twenty-one to twenty-six because that is when he was in his prime.
The shortage of tests meant that few people were able to flourish in foreign conditions: Sobers played five tests against India in 1958 and came back to play three more in 1966. Yet in the 1958 series he got three centuries and in 1966 he batted five times and got five fifties (he also took 14 wickets and was second only to Lance Gibbs in that department).
The other problem was that umpires in those days tended to favor the home side—the first time Javed Miandad was given out LBW in Pakistan was when neutral umpires were introduced. Despite these disadvantages, Sobers got four centuries in Australia, five in England, and three in India. Moreover, Sobers was the kind of batsman who could win matches with his batting. Coming in as late in the batting order as number six he repeatedly changed the complexion of a game by getting a big score and setting the stage for victory. Sobers also played the best fast bowlers of his time which included Lindwall, Miller, Trueman, Statham, Snow, and Lillie and scored against all of them. As for spinners, Sobers scored freely against bowlers of the caliber of Benaud, Vinoo Mankad, Subhas Gupte, Bedi, Chandrashekhar, Prasanna, and Underwood (for the record, he thought that Gupte was the most difficult spinner he ever played).
If his batting skills made him the best batsman of his generation—he was just as good against pace or spin—his role as an all-rounder was even more impressive. Two series stand out as showcases of his amazing all-round skills. In the 1966 tour of England he scored 722 runs and took 20 wickets, a feat that has not been surpassed in sixty years. Later, in 1970, he captained a Rest of the World XI against an England side that was at that time the best in the world. Sobers put in a phenomenal performance. In the first test he dismissed England for 127 by taking 6 for 21 and then scored 183 to ensure an inning victory. He went on to get 580 runs and 21 wickets in the series, a truly amazing feat leading a journalist to say that Sobers could have beaten England single-handedly with the help of a wicket keeper and perhaps Mike Proctor!
The fact is that in his career Sobers took more than 20 wickets in a series on four occasions if you count the unofficial tests of 1970. He also got over 500 runs in a series on seven occasions. With such statistics it is not surprising that he is regarded as the best all-rounder of all time.
At the start of his career Sobers was surrounded by a wealth of bowling talent which meant that despite his ability to bowl pace and spin he had to play the supporting role. That meant getting the new ball after Hall and Griffith, bowling into the wind, and allowing Lance Gibbs to take the side of the pitch which was the most spin-friendly. Sobers’s record suffered as a result but even then, his bowling performances were worth mentioning.
In 1960-1961 series in Australia Frank Worrell made Sobers bowl thirty-nine consecutive overs in one innings and this was a testament to his skills and his grittiness. In total he bowled 191 overs in the series, one less than Lance Gibbs, but his bowling was a mix of pace and spin. This is a lesson to today’s bowlers who breakdown after having bowled far less than that in a series.
By the 1966 series in England, when he was 30, Sobers had become the leading fast bowler for his country since Hall and Griffiths had started to fade and no new promising pacemen were available. From then, till 1973 when Keith Boyce and later Andy Roberts emerged, the thirty something Sobers was the spearhead of the West Indies pace attack and their leading batsman. This from a man who by his early thirties was suffering from persistent injuries to his knee and shoulder which made him stop bowling wrist spinners. Lance Gibbs was still there but no longer the match winner that he had been in the early 1960s. Even as late as 1973, when he was thirty-seven years old, he was bowling pace for the West Indies in the tests against England.
By the early 1960s it was obvious that Sobers was the natural choice to succeed Frank Worrell as the captain of the West Indies. Sobers responded by upping his game and won three consecutive series against Australia, England, and India—and he was outstanding in the series against England and India. Then came the series where the mystique of Sobers as the infallible cricketer and captain took a hit.
England toured the West Indies in 1968 and Sobers, as always, was irrepressible with the bat as he made 545 in the series. For good measure he also took 13 wickets but what damaged his reputation was a rash declaration at Port of Spain that left England 215 to score in about 165 minutes. Sobers thought it was a sporting declaration and he could bowl out the opposition but his bowling attack was not the one of yesteryear. Griffith was a shadow of his former self, Hall was not playing, and Gibbs and Sobers could not spin out the English who coasted to a comfortable win. There was a firestorm of criticism against Sobers for taking a risky chance but he defended it as an attempt to liven up the game.
That was the end of the aura of West Indian invincibility as the aging team lost a series in Australia, despite Sobers hitting 497 and spinning the team to victory in the first test, drew one against lowly New Zealand and then losing to both England and famously Ajit Wadekar’s India. He captained the West Indies one last time in a drawn home series against New Zealand and then passed the baton to Rohan Kanhai.
The problem was that the West Indies by then depended primarily on Sobers for success and he could not deliver all the time with both bat and ball. Roy Fredericks and Clive Lloyd had emerged as batsmen but were not in their prime and there was no new paceman or spinner of any promise to replace Hall, Griffith, or Gibbs. Judging his captaincy, therefore, is difficult after the initial years since he led a team in decline.
Sobers did not care about records although at one time he held the records of the highest test score, the only man to hit six sixes in an over, and the best all-round performance of all time. Sixty years later the all-round performance still remains but others have surpassed or equaled him in test scores and the hitting of sixes. Yet as Sobers himself pointed out he did not go in a calculated way to hit six sixes. He was trying to boost the score for a declaration and only after the third six did he think he could do it. Similarly, he could have gone on after hitting 365 not out but deferred to his captain who declared the innings. Compare this was Brian Lara who was not as gifted as Sobers but tenaciously chased records as the West Indies began a steady decline into cricketing insignificance.
While Sobers’s record is generally outstanding, it has one blemish in it. He never had big scores against New Zealand either in that country or in the West Indies. Sobers in his autobiography says he has no answer for this but one of biographers, Trevor Bailey, gives an interesting explanation. According to Bailey, Sobers was probably not motivated to perform since New Zealand in those days were a weak team. In fact, from 1948 to 1973, Australia refused to play tests against New Zealand because they felt the Kiwis were not good enough opposition. Whatever be the reason the fact is that this shows that despite his greatness Sobers was a human being.
To conclude one can only speculate on the impact Sobers would have had in ODIs and T20s given his spectacular batting and incisive bowling. If there were two players born to play T20s it would be Sobers and Viv Richards. Having said that, Sobers disdained modern cricket since he thought all the protective gear and the field and bowling restrictions in limited over cricket had taken away from the challenge of playing the game. But when you are the greatest cricketer that ever lived you can justifiably mock modern trends.
Amit Gupta is a Senior Fellow of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, USA. He writes on international security issues as well as Sports and Politics. The views in this article are personal and he may be contacted at
Amit Gupta
(agupta1856@yahoo.com)
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