LONDON, (Reuters) – Hunched in a chair several sizes too small for his giant frame, Clive Lloyd sucks on a red lollipop.
“Kojak,” the former West Indies’ captain explains solemnly.
A bald American television detective with a penchant for lollipops and the catchphrase “Who loves ya baby?” was, for reasons now obscure, considered cool during the mid-1970s.
Lloyd, visiting London recently to promote his new biography “Supercat”, remains indisputably cool more than 20 years after retiring as captain of the world’s most successful side.
Tall, stooping and bespectacled, Lloyd hit what remains the most memorable one-day century ever in the 1975 World Cup victory over Australia, a series of seemingly casual left-handed swats to all part of Lord’s.
In the following year, spurred by ill-chosen remarks from England’s South African-born captain Tony Greig who had promised to make them “grovel”, Lloyd’s men dismantled their old imperial masters with a 3-0 away series victory. But it was the 1980s which placed a scattering of Caribbean islands and Lloyd’s home country of Guyana indelibly on the sporting map.
LOSING TEAM
Under Lloyd, then Viv Richards and finally Richie Richardson, West Indies were undefeated in a series between 1980 and 1995.
Then it all went wrong, gradually at first then with disconcerting speed after the turn of the century. Under Lloyd between 1979 and 1985, West Indies lost only three matches. In the latest ICC rankings, West Indies are the eighth-ranked Test side, ahead only of Bangladesh.
“We didn’t put systems in place,” Lloyd told Reuters. “We just went along hoping that our cricket would fall into place. Well it’s not going to happen. Football came along. We had more people coming along in boxing, athletics and squash.
“If your team is not winning, who wants to join a losing team? People are gravitating to other sports so we have to harness talent, try to get back up the ladder and encourage young people to play the game.”
Lloyd’s team, featuring the calculated brutality of Richards with the bat and a quartet of fast, ferocious and intelligent bowlers backed by gloriously athletic fielding, were rated by the U.S. magazine Sports Illustrated as one of the three most dominant in the world in any sport during the 1980s.
By that stage of his career, Lloyd was a member of the slips cordon and a steadying influence with the bat, a figure of massive authority in the middle order still capable of reducing opposing bowlers to frustrated impotence. Before a serious back injury sustained in 1971 he had been one of the great cover points, with extraordinary reflexes which transformed him from apparent somnolence into a blur of motion.
GREAT CAPTAIN
With the bat, Lloyd averaged under 40 before assuming the captaincy. As a captain his average was more than 50, including the years when Australia’s Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson were at their destructive peak.
His captaincy was questioned by some critics, who suggested his only task was to change the bowlers at regular intervals. It is a criticism emphatically rejected in Supercat by two of his finest bowlers, Michael Holding and Andy Roberts.
“There is no doubt that Clive Lloyd was a great captain,” Holding said. “And he was a great player because he knew how to reach his individual players.”
Added Roberts: “Any man could have led us on to the pitch, but would he have got the same respect as that which we gave Clive? Of course not.”
Now Lloyd, at the age of 63, will do what he can to recapture the glory days for the only force which unites the West Indies. Outwardly, at least, he remains optimistic.
“The young people still want to play cricket. If we continue to do well and harness the talent we have, it will take some time like everything else.
“We need to be put in the right sort of direction but if we can do that I have the feeling that our cricket can come back to the halcyon days.”
