Lara-another Sobers?
By Pryor Jonas
Stabroek News
May 10, 2003
Here is the Test team versus Australia at Sabina Park, in March, 1955: in batting order, John Holt, Glendon Gibbs, Alfie Binns, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Frank Worrell, Collie Smith, Denis Atkinson, Frank King, Sonny Ramadhin, Alf Valentine. Australia won by nine wickets.
Our captain for that game was Denis St Eval Atkinson. No one who knows his cricket could justify Atkinson's preferment. The whole truth, however, was that Stollmeyer had initially been selected captain for the series but due to injury could not play in that first Test match.
This was how Guyana's Gibbs got his break, a wicked ploy by the West Indies selectors. It was Gibbs's first and only Test. Someday I'll recount the humiliation Glendon Gibbs suffered, all so unnecessarily.
When Stollmeyer couldn't play, his deputy naturally took over. The point I'm making and certainly there's no need to make it to anyone who knows his cricket, is how insular we have always been on this question of captaincy. Even a Bajan could not justify Denis Atkinson's being made Stollmeyer's deputy.
How embarrassed Atkinson himself must have felt. When Gary Sobers was appointed captain of the West Indies team in 1964, this was at the expense of the incumbent vice captain Conrad Hunte.
Everything does come to light sooner or later, and it's when you read Sobers's autobiography that you realize how Frank Worrell, who had retired from cricket the year before after a very successful England tour, was the man backing Sobers.
In 1964, Worrell had the clout that he lacked in Australia in '60/61, when Richie Benaud's side beat us 2-1. Frank had asked for Roy Gilchrist, the Jamaica fast man, to be with him Down Under, but the West Indies Cricket Board of Control said an emphatic no!
Now, however, Frank Worrell could persuade the directorate to select Sobers. He never really savoured Hunte and his `moral re-armament' doctrine. I have a copy of Conrad Hunte's Playing to Win with me. Here is an excerpt, giving Hunte's shell-shocked reaction:
"I was not angry, just stunned. It was some time afterwards that the full weight of the injustice I felt the Board had done me hit me. I wanted to quit West Indies' cricket."
And now Sobers: "When Frank retired he didn't ask me if I wanted the captaincy; he went straight to the Board and recommended to them that they should elect me as captain without asking if I wanted the job.
In our last game at The Oval he asked me to lead out the team the day before he retired. I don't know what he was thinking; maybe he was just making a point in public that I should succeed him and that he was recommending me. But when he confirmed his recommendation all hell broke loose in the Caribbean because everyone expected Conrad Hunte to take over.
I had remained in England when the tour finished and when the Board wrote and told me I was going to be captain it took me all of six or seven weeks to reply to that letter."
That was Sobers. But where does Lara come in? By looking at their respective records. The best all-rounder of his (and in my view any) day, and the best batsman today (a view substantiated by Dr Ali Backer) are, on performance, among the worst captains in Test match cricket history. We'll conclude this series on captaincy next week.
