Twenty-six centuries and 30 half-centuries. That, according to the official record, is what the legendary left-handed batsman Garfield St Aubrun Sobers has produced for West Indies. But in Sobers’ mind, his record of achievement with the bat is seven 100s and nine 50s, less than half of what the record …
Read More »Saluting Sir Garry Sobers—Post-script: Have WI given the legend his just deserts?
“Did I entertain?” Garry St Aubrun Sobers never asked his fans that question. The answer would indisputably have been an emphatic, unanimous, unqualified yes. Those three words actually came out of the mouth of Brian Charles Lara at the end of a stellar 18-year career. Sobers, a West Indian sporting …
Read More »Saluting Sir Garry Sobers: Happy birthday to cricket’s unique ‘six-tool player’
Born 86 years ago today on 28 July 1936, Garfield St Aubrun Sobers became simply, as Sparrow sang, “the greatest cricketer on Earth or Mars”. Hyperbole? Calypsonians, we know, are so prone. Still, it isn’t easy to dismiss the claim made by the Calypso King of the World on behalf …
Read More »Monitoring Me 2: Sport as nirvana; Football’s Lord, Cricket’s Prince and the Calypso King of the World
Happiness, for this West Indian cricket lover, is an 80″television set. Or larger. With Lara, Brian Charles Lara—no longer “live” but in living colour—in full flow. Nirvana? In the terms of Edward Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam:” A stack of Tapia/Review, complete somehow; More, Sparrow, More; Beyond a Boundary and thou before …
Read More »PITT STOP: The long and short of it all; West Indies’ T20 cricketers deserve a fair shake
The West Indies is the region which is the chief victim of old-fashioned thinking about the game of cricket. It has always baffled me why in the 21st Century influential cricket people in the region have been unable to recognize how invidious distinctions between the long and shorter versions have been …
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