Dropping seven catches and winning a match

Imagine a team dropping seven catches and yet winning a Test match. Imagine a side scoring 449 in the first innings and losing a match.

Well Australia led cleverly by Michael Clarke won the Test after dropping seven catches and West Indies lost the Test after scoring 449 in the first innings.

Playing the West Indies in the First of Three Tests for the Sir Frank Worrell Trophy, at the Kensington Oval in Barbados, the Australians after dropping seven catches beat West Indies by three wickets in fading light.

Before going on to comment of the fantastic victory of the baggy green caps after conceding a first innings lead of 40 runs, I would like to describe the cricketer in whose honour and memory this series is always being played.

Frank Worrell Trophy

I refer to the Sir Frank Worrell Trophy. Now Sir Frank was one of the “terrible Ws’.The other two being Sir Everton Weekes and Sir Clyde Walcott.

The three Ws formed a devastating trio of batsmen during their time. Those were the days when there were no helmets, chest, thigh and elbow guards. They had only the ‘box’ and rubber gloves and no heavily stiffed pads like is the style now.

All three were right hand batsmen and the bats were like magic wands in their hands. They were twinkle-toed in their footwork, were quick of eye, feet to the pitch of the ball and the down ward swing of the bat sent the ball scorching to the boundary or over it as if directed by some divine force.

Scourge of bowlers

They were the scourge of the bowlers and the darlings of the crowds who flocked in their numbers to watch the exquisite and daring stroke play of these Caribbean maestros.

After Weekes and Walcott hung their bats, Worrell continued to carry on the saga and his final hurrah was leading the West Indies to Australia for a Five Test series in 1960/61, after which he was struck by the dreaded disease Leukemia that terminated his life early.

On that tour with the aggressive Australia Captain Richie Benaud, they brought Test cricket alive and worth watching with captaincy that was daring, challenging and exemplary.

Individual play

West Indies cricket before Worrell took over the leadership was famous for individual play. That was because the cricketers came from many islands. They were brilliant, but were not playing as a team.

Before the start of that series in Australia, Worrell at a team meeting hammered it into them that they were all brilliant cricketers and that if they put the island differences aside and play as a team they have the talent to be the best in the world.

That team had three of the greatest cricketers that the world has seen or will see in Garfield Sobers, Rohan Kanhai and Wesley Hall.

Sobers was known as the four-in-one cricketer, Kanhai a stroke player from out of this world and Hall probably the fastest bowler who writers should have tagged as ‘black lightning’, who hit batsmen with his thunderbolts and sent stumps cart wheeling with his devastating pace.

Soothing balm

Worrel’s appeal for Team Play was like soothing balm. It galvanized the team, brought meaning to the game, made the series vibrant. The results are now part of history.

It was the harvest sown by Worrell that captains such as Garfield Sobers, Clive Lloyd and Vivian Richards reaped as they ruled the world as cricket champions in the 1970s and 1980s.

After that tour, Australians were England bound for the ‘Ashes’ and the Orcades. The passenger ship touched at the Colombo Port where the Aussies led by Benaud played a whistle stop match at the Colombo Oval.

I visited the Orcades in the company of my colleagues at ‘The Times’ Russel Raymond and M.B Marjan looking for interviews when we spotted Australian opener Bob Simpson sporting a bump on his forehead.

Bump off bumper

When asked, Simpson said that the bump was off a bumper from Wesley Hall which he failed to make contact with the bat and took on his forehead. There were no helmets at that time too. To get back to where this coulum started, the Test match helped the Aussies go one-up in the series. It was the bold, daring and clever captaincy of Michael Clarke that made the differnece. After his tailenders Ryan Harris 68, Ben Hilfenhaus 24 and Nathan Lyon 40 helped them to 406 or 9 – 43 runs short the Windies total, Clarke declared a few minutes before tea.

With that declaration it was apparent that Clarke was out to bring that game alive as it was meandering to a draw. His bowlers, especially medium pacer Hilfenhaus ripped the Windies batting apart with three wickets before tea and that was the beginning of the end for the Windies.

Sad sight

Hilfenaus with 4 Harris 2 and Lyon 2 dismissed the home team for 148 and Australia had to get 191 for victory. After making 449 in the first innings it was a sad sight to watch the batting crumbling without a fight.

In their chase for victory the Aussies were given a few shocks by off spinner Deonairne. But batsmen of the calibre of Shane Watson 52, ‘Mr. Cricket’, the reliable Michael Hussey 32 and Ed Cowans 32 did enough to see their team through by three wickets.

The only standout batsmen in the Windies team are Darren Bravo and Shiv Chanderpaul. Bravo made a fifty and Chanderpaul a century in the first innings. But that was not enough to save their side from defeat.

In the IPL

We were wondering as to what players of the class of Chrys Gayle, Kieron Pollard, Sunil Naraine and Marlon Samuels were doing playing in the lucrative Indian Premier League in India and turning mtheir backs on their country.

At the time of writing, reports have it that Gayle and the authorities have settled their differences. But Gayle will be available only after the IPL. The Second Test is now on at Port of Spain, Trinidad.

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