Cricket

The following is the second part of Owen Thompson’s recall of that unforgettable summer in 1976 that ushered in the West Indies cricket team’s glory years: While the events of that 1975-76 tour of Australia unfolded (between October 1975 and February 1976), a certain Robert Nesta Marley was getting ready …

In 1976, Tobago-born Owen Thompson was but a boy of 14 when Greg Chappell’s Australia put a 5-1 merciless whipping on Clive Lloyd’s West Indian cavaliers. That turned out to be the last time for a long, long time. In those days, Thompson, who now works in film and television …

‘Resentful,’ yes. Try as I might, however, nowhere in the dictionary could I find ‘relentfull’ or ‘relentful.’ But if I were West Indies coach Phillip Simmons, I would have minted one or the other word to use in my post-match comments on the third day of the decisive Third Test …

That cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties is, though never irrelevant, a very tired cliché. That Test cricket is the most severe examination a player can get, though not clichéd, is not exactly new. West Indies did learn a new cricketing truth today, however. It is that, even when …

“[…] 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) …

Conventional wisdom holds that Stuart Broad’s Sunday evening new ball spell killed off the West Indies chances in the Second Test at Old Trafford. The truth, however, is that, had Jason Holder been at the top of his game on Monday morning, he might have found a pulse where the …

I am willing to wager more than a few quid on a West Indies victory. Only a handful of England’s actors (skipper Joe Root, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes and Stuart Broad) remain on the 2020 set. But Jason Holder has no fewer than seven of his 2017 West Indians, including …

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 …

It was reported that during the 2019 ICC World Cup, the England team pulled up and did some soul searching. They revisited videos of sessions featuring themselves—not at play—but talking about their feelings. Their feelings. It takes a lot of courage to do that; courage and trust. I’m thinking here …

I’m trying to outline the philosophies that shaped the way three outstanding captains approached leadership: Richie Benaud, Michael Brearley and now, Sir Frank Worrell. Born in 1924, dead at 42 in 1967, Sir Frank was an outstanding citizen of the West Indies, whose stature transcended cricket. He began his international …

I had been reading Mike Brearley’s 1985 classic, ‘The Art of Captaincy’, and re-reading ‘Frank Worrell’, by Ernest Eytle. It struck me in both that in a sense, like Richie Benaud, they did not become captains of teams, but rather, they moulded teams out of collections of individuals. In their …

Practically all the tributes that have congregated in memory of Sir Everton Weekes have come from cricketers and sports writers. They list his age, his career statistics and his batting style. Some have recounted an encounter. Cricket reporters tend to give the numbers; cricket writers are more interested in telling …