Never before has there been an all-rounder such as Garry Sobers, and never again is it likely that one will appear. In 2000, Wisden named Sobers as one of the five cricketers of the last century, but that is far too simplistic, a statement of the obvious. From his first appearance on the international scene, in 1954, as a 17-year-old, until his retirement two decades later, by which time the rigorous demands of his bowling action had severely damaged his knees, Sobers, who has died aged 89, was the complete cricket machine: his versatility unique, his style and panache unsurpassed, and his exuberance contagious to those who watched. None of the other acclaimed all-rounders, from WG Grace and Wilfred Rhodes through to the great multi-dimensional cricketers of the 70s and 80s – Tony Greig, Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev, Richard Hadlee and Mike Procter – and on to Andrew Flintoff, Jacques Kallis and Ben Stokes, of the modern era, could match the package of supreme skills that Sobers displayed.
As a left-handed batsman, he was the finest the game has seen, sufficient credential alone to enter him into the Wisden pantheon. Other left-handers will have claims made on their behalf: the South African Graeme Pollock and Brian Lara of the West Indies at the head of the list, with Neil Harvey, the Australian, and even Frank Woolley, say some who saw him, as an undercard. But Pollock was suspect against good spin and had a Test career curtailed by his country’s banishment, while the brilliant Lara, Sobers’s protege, who was to break his 1958 world record Test score of 365 not out, had trouble coping with aggressive short-pitched bowling.
Sobers, with a generous backlift and full follow-through, had no such weakness. He was a murderous driver of the ball, a hooker of pace (and downward at that), and quicksilver against spin. He was unsettled only by swing early in an innings before his foot movement got into gear. In 98 Tests, collar characteristically up, shirt slashed almost to the waist, or bundled into a long-sleeved sweater, according to the temperature, he scored 8,032 runs at an average of 57.78 with 26 centuries – a number at that time exceeded only by Donald Bradman and the Indian opener Sunil Gavaskar.
At Swansea in 1968, while playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan, he made history when he struck Malcolm Nash for six successive sixes in a single over, the first to achieve the feat at first-class level: it was not until 1985 that it was equalled, by Ravi Shastri, playing for Bombay.
He bowled too, and until the advent of the great Pakistani Wasim Akram there had been no finer left-arm exponent of the new ball. His run-up, a casual loose-limbed lope, belied the waspish, at times blistering, pace that was generated from an action that took him beyond classical side-on, so that just before delivery the batsman was presented with the sight of his right shoulder blade. It was this action that enabled him to swing the new ball excessively and late. More than one batsman of note had his feet knocked from beneath him by a wicked darting yorker. He could reduce his pace, too, and use swing and cut as principal weapons.
Sobers began his international career as a slow orthodox left-arm finger-spinner, however, and he employed this as well, adding left-arm wrist-spin and googlies for good measure. Ambidexterity alone was missing.
Then there was the fielding, not in the outfield (although in his youth he had speed and agility), but close to the wicket, where he stood at slip to the pacemen and at short leg to the spinners – particularly the off-spin of Lance Gibbs. He was unobtrusive, but his sleight of hand was mesmeric, his reflexes astounding. Leaving aside wicketkeepers, the scorecard entry “Caught Sobers, Bowled Gibbs” was for many years the most frequent fielder-bowler combination in Test history. In all he took 109 catches – at the time of his retirement more than anyone but the Englishmen Wally Hammond and Colin Cowdrey.
He captained West Indies in 39 Tests, with a sense of adventure in keeping with the character of someone who loved to gamble at racecourses around the world. All this he did while pursuing rum, women and the sort of hedonistic lifestyle that makes the tales about Botham seem like nursery rhymes (in his autobiography, Sobers dealt candidly with his jousts with the bottle in his early adult life).
His all-round feats at international level were prodigious, with 824 runs in the 1957-58 series against Pakistan coming at an average of 137.33, and five subsequent series producing in excess of 500 runs: against India the following year, 1958-59 (557 runs at 92.83); England in 1959-60 (709 at 101.28); in England in 1966 (722 at 103.14); England in 1967-68 (545 at 90.83); and India in 1971 (597 at 74.62). In 13 of the 22 series in which he played, he took 10 or more wickets and in three held in excess of 10 catches.
During the five-Test tour of England in 1966, which he captained, he scored 722 runs and took 20 wickets at 27.25 each from 269.4 overs, plus 10 catches. He often took the new ball despite the presence of the dynamic fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith; Sobers did not like to languish. Outside the world of Test cricket, his first-class career embraced Barbados, South Australia and, from 1968 to 1974, Nottinghamshire, whom he captained. He also enjoyed fruitful times with Radcliffe Cricket Club in the Central Lancashire League, Norton in the Staffordshire League, and finally Littleborough in the Central League once more.
Garfield St Aubrun Sobers, known as Garry, was born in the Barbados parish of St Michael, in a then nameless street that was to become Walcott’s Avenue, Bridgetown. The sixth of seven children of Shamont, a seaman working in the Canadian merchant navy, and Thelma, Garry came into the world with an extra finger on each hand. Both were eventually removed: one fell off with the aid of a piece of cat-gut when he was a child, and he cut off the other with a sharp knife while in his early teens. He was brought up from the age of five by his mother, his father having died at sea in a ship torpedoed by the Germans in January 1942, and went to Bay Street school in Bridgetown.
His exceptional sporting talent was spotted at an early age, and he spent his formative years playing street cricket, using a tennis ball (which helped him develop his talent for striking the ball on the top of the bounce). He first joined the Kent St Philip and Wanderers clubs in the Barbados Cricket League, and at 15 he moved to the Police team.
His progress was rapid, and in 1953 he was included in the Barbados team for their opening match of the season; he made his debut as a spin bowler against the Indian tourists following a request from the West Indies Cricket Board to rest the international fast bowler Frank King. He marked the occasion with seven wickets in the match from 89 overs, with the legendary batsman Polly Umrigar his first victim. He was barely 16 years old.
In March 1954, when he was 17, the illness of the established left-arm spinner Alf Valentine saw Sobers brought into the West Indies side to play against Len Hutton’s England at Sabina Park in Jamaica. He took the wicket of the opener Trevor Bailey in his first over, and finished England’s first innings with 4 for 75 out of a total of 414, making 14 not out and 26 as West Indies were beaten by nine wickets.
In the next few years he gradually established himself as a fixture in the side, making his way up the order, and playing series against Australia, New Zealand and England, before the visit of Pakistan in 1957-58. It was at Sabina Park once more, in the third Test of that series, that at the age of 21 he made cricket history in scoring 365 not out, overtaking Hutton’s 364, a Test record that had stood since 1938. It was his 17th Test match but his first Test century. Batting first wicket down, he spent a shade over 10 hours at the crease (three hours fewer than Hutton had needed), hitting 38 boundaries, and in the process sharing a second wicket stand of 446 with Conrad Hunte.
Sobers’s record was to stand for the next 36 years until Lara broke it by making 375 in St John’s, Antigua in 1994. Lara – no slouch, noted Sobers – had nonetheless taken two hours longer. The record, feted across the Caribbean and beyond, was life-changing for him; his celebrity was assured. He finished the series with 824 runs at an average of 137.33.
The 1950s, however, finished traumatically for him. While playing league cricket in England in 1959, he was involved in a car accident; driving to London for a charity match, he crashed the car he was driving into the back of a truck, killing his best friend, the brilliant West Indies batsman Collie Smith. It was a tragedy with which Sobers was never able to come to terms: it undermined his zest for cricket, and led to heavy drinking and an increase in his gambling habit, particularly in casinos.
Nevertheless, the first four years of the 60s were perhaps those in which he finalised his cricket education. In 1960-61, he played a major role in what has come to be seen as one of the finest of all Test series, scoring a century in the first tied Test in Brisbane under the captaincy of Frank Worrell (the first black cricketer to captain the West Indies side for a full series).
The following year, he achieved what had hitherto never been accomplished by making 1,000 runs and taking 50 wickets for South Australia in 10 Sheffield Shield matches. He went on to repeat the feat the following year, when his team won the competition.
When Worrell retired after the 1963 tour of England, he recommended Sobers for the role of West Indies captain. It took weeks of deliberation before Sobers was persuaded to accept; he was worried the captaincy might constrain the freedom of spirit he brought to his cricket and his life. However, he responded by leading West Indies to their first series victory against Australia, in 1965, at the start of a run of 39 matches in charge.
Enterprising is one way to describe his attitude to captaincy, for he had little time for defensive play or dull tactics. It brought its rewards, but also one blunder that was to dog him forever. On the final day of the fourth Test in the 1967-68 series against England in Port of Spain, Trinidad, he declared his team’s second innings closed, a call based on disdain for England’s defensive tactics. It was a decisive match in a deadlocked series: England had to score 215 to win in 165 minutes, on what Sobers read as a turning pitch.
England won by seven wickets, and went on to force a dramatic draw in the final match, which gave them the series. Sobers, who always maintained it was a calculated and reasonable decision, taken in consultation with senior players and management, was pilloried and seen thereafter as a reckless gambler.
In 1966, however, he enjoyed a monumental series in England, excelling in all areas and batting particularly brilliantly. In the first Test at Old Trafford he made 161, and followed that with an unbeaten 163 at Lord’s to save a game that looked lost. At Headingley, in the game that was to decide the series, he made 174 and followed that with 8 wickets for 80 in the match. Even in the final match at the Oval, with the series decided, he resisted the temptation to ease off, scoring 81 in the first innings, and then bowling 54 overs as England made 527.
In 1968, with registration rules relaxed, he became the highest-profile overseas signing in county cricket when he joined Nottinghamshire, a struggling county at that time. Aside from Test calls, he was to play for Nottinghamshire for seven seasons and galvanised the team, despite the gradual decline in the condition of his knees that came to affect his bowling and batting.
In 1970, while captaining the Rest of the World in the first unofficial Test against England (supplanting a proposed tour by South Africa), he took six for 21 with the new ball and made 183 before helping spin his side to victory. In 1971-72, batting for the Rest of the World against Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, he produced an extraordinary innings of 254, still regarded as one of the finest ever seen in that country, or indeed anywhere, the footage of which is still used as a tutorial on back foot play.
In the course of this he savaged the fast bowler Dennis Lillee, who had dismissed him for a duck in the previous match, plundering 29 from three overs of the second new ball. His hundred came from 129 balls, the complete innings occupying 326 deliveries, with two sixes and 33 fours.
His last Test century, his 26th, came at Lord’s in 1973 when he scored 150 not out against England, helping West Indies to a win by an innings and 226 runs – their most comprehensive victory at that time. It had been scored, he later revealed, on the back of a full night’s drinking, no sleep and two very large port and brandies mid innings.
Retirement brought him mixed fortunes. In 1975, in front of 25,000 people on the Garrison Savannah in Bridgetown, Barbados, he was knighted by the Queen for his services to the game. But his declining health necessitated operations on his knees and, later, his eyes. His celebrity on the island sustained him, though, and he became a tourism consultant, in which capacity he was often to be found on golf courses, or, more damagingly to his personal finances, at the racecourse or the bookies.
He spent money assiduously, too frequently on gambling (fun rather than necessity, he said, although he did confess to a degree of addiction). Money raised on his behalf by benefactors, including a sum of more than £100,000 from a benefit in Barbados in 1994, had to be put in trust as a pension for fear that he would simply fritter it away. In 1998 he was made a National Hero of Barbados by the prime minister Owen Arthur, and in 2003 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia. The award that pleased him the most came in 1992, when he was created an honorary doctor of laws by the University of the West Indies.
In 1994, he was sitting in the stands at the ramshackle Antigua Recreation Ground when Lara hit a short ball from the England seamer Chris Lewis to the square leg boundary, to create a new record Test score. During the inevitable interruption in play, Sobers made his way out to the pitch to embrace the young man. In cricket, Sobers was a feisty but generous opponent, unselfish, intolerant only of artifice or those who could not see the fun to be had from the game. Thus he enjoyed the record while it stood but offered no regrets when it changed hands.
During the 1966-67 tour of India, he had briefly become engaged to an actor, Anju Mahendru, though he broke it off after leaving the country. In 1969, in England, he married Prudence Kirby, an Australian. In 1977, he moved to Australia to work for Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. He frequently returned to Barbados, however, and when he and Prudence separated in 1984 (they divorced in 1990) he once again made the island his home.
Sobers is survived by their three children, Matthew, Daniel and Genevieve and six grandchildren.
