Tag Archives: Garry Sobers

There’s an immediate challenge in compiling a biography of someone who was a legend during his lifetime. Inevitably, myths spring up—so that even if you can separate fact from fiction, it is almost sacrilege to bring balance to the scrutiny because people prefer to hold on to their folklores. Frank …

At a critical moment in the final Super Eights game, one of the team coaches left the pavilion and came to the boundary’s edge. Bangladesh looked well on course to get the 115 runs they needed to stop Afghanistan in their semifinal-bound tracks. One point is enough to make the …

Bazball brings a broad smile to British faces. It brings back very happy memories, but not from before the last decade. Mention, however, the nameless West Indian brand or Barbados—or Babylon—and what we get is a scowl. Or a furrowed brow. Not easy to erase is the memory of what …

As if West Indies cricket does not already have enough problems, what with our failure to qualify for the last two white ball World Cups (20 and 50 overs), we now have the spectre of insularity rearing its ugly head once more. It takes me back to the late 1960s …

Calypsonians are as cantankerous as they come. So when Relator suggests that Sir Garfield Sobers was no great shakes as a captain, we have to take that with a pinch of salt.  Yet it is there, on the record, in his 1972 hit “Gavaskar”. So we have to deal with …

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 …

“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 …

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 …

Cricket West Indies and West Indies cricket will this week say their last goodbyes to a former Test player who has served the game in the region for many years in several different capacities. David Holford, the former West Indies allrounder who passed away on Monday in his native Barbados …

The Hero Caribbean Premier League (CPL) has announced that its finals will be hosted by Guyana for the next three years, starting in 2022. This year’s tournament culmination will have its first-ever staging in Guyana and the announced three-year long-term agreement will now ensure encore presentations in 2023 and 2024. …

March 2022. The Apex Second Test in Barbados. Garfield St Aubrun Sobers sat, as he has long sat, beside his queen atop the Kensington pavilion, monarch of all he surveyed. But frail-, fragile-, feeble-looking even. I felt for him. I feared for him. Through my mind flashed an image of …

Sonny Ramadhin’s recent death reminded us that more than once MCC tinkered with the rules. The changes may have helped England in 1957 but they certainly haven’t really helped them do all that well in the Caribbean at any time. Their last away series win in the 20th Century came …