“In the air… and out!” That’s Richie Benaud, the Voice of Cricket, describing a dismissal. Yeah, describing. Five words. More than enough. He is, you see, on television. The name Jimmy Magee probably does not ring too many bells. But he outdid Benaud. That came during Diego Maradona’s magical half-the-field-run-and-score …
Read More »Memories of Sir Everton Weekes: ‘Reds’ Perreira recalls two great innings by late West Indies maestro
“[…] I still remember watching Sir Everton Weekes during that third Test in Bourda, when he scored 81 out of a paltry West Indies total of 182. “Wickets were falling continuously around him—[JK] Holt (12), [Jeffrey] Stollmeyer (16), [Clyde] Walcott (8), [Frank] Worrell (5), Garfield Sobers (12) and Denis Atkinson (13) …
Read More »Captaincy playbook: ‘Careful captaincy’ made the difference for great West Indies sides
The West Indies has had a phenomenal number of exceptional cricketers in its history. The captains have been mostly middling. I restricted the playbooks to those of Frank Worrell, Richie Benaud and Mike Brearley simply because they were known as thinking men—able in both the technical and ‘man-management’ aspects of …
Read More »Captaincy playbook: Benaud was ‘energetic and often inspired, engendering total loyalty’
Cricket, like everything else, goes through troughs and peaks. Teams have floundered and risen. West Indies had malingered in the state of ‘potential’ for a long time, relying on talk without action, but perhaps with the world in one of its states of upheaval and change, it might be that …
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