I have two indelible pictures in my mind – inscribed there not through seeing the exploits myself but through listening at the time with a fearful pride and thereafter hearing eye-witnesses tell their vivid stories of how it happened.
One picture, now grown so large in the imagination that it has taken on the shape of legend, is of Joe Solomon, aiming with ice-cold courage at one stump, throwing down the last Australian wicket in the most famous of all Test matches, the tied Test at Brisbane in December 1960.
No wonder a hardened old veteran of countless cricketing days once said to me: “Yes, I know all our West Indian heroes and I trust their greatness – but, if there was a score to make and my life depended on its making and I had one man to choose to play it the batsman I would choose would be little Joe Solomon with that true, straight aim of his.”
The other picture is of Roy Fredericks in bright sunshine on a lightning fast pitch at Perth in 1976 swivelling on the ball of his right foot to dispatch Thomson and Lillee again and again, hit low for four, lofted high for six, to the legside boundary, his bat seeming to flash in the sun like a sword. Such quick-eyed, sure-footed defiance in the face of fierce and violent bowling has never been matched in cricket’s long and wonderful history.
As I write these lines countless images of great Guyanese cricketers come to mind. And the first thing that strikes me is that in remembering them, because it is cricket, and because I will always be a West Indian by conviction, I think of them not just as Guyanese but as great West Indians above all – for in cricket, at least, I believe we are all citizens of one country. Thus they are imbedded in a national consciousness which, for once, takes no thought of race, creed, religion, politics or personal belief and seeks no regional distinction.
When I was a boy I had a number of cricketing heroes – the whole Trinidad side, yes, but also for instance Frank Worrell whose elegance and aplomb surpassed even Jeffrey Stollymeyer’s and whose genius and charisma were self-evident.
And there was Robert Christiani of British Guiana. To a group of us schoolboys at Queens Park Oval he seemed the D’Artagnan of batting, his daring and his recklessness appealing greatly to our sense of adventure and rebellion. I followed his career closely and it is he who provides me with my first image of a great Guyanese batsman.
I was in my first year at Cambridge, in 1951, avidly following from a distance the West Indies touring Australia, and one day I read an account of an innings by Christiani which I can recall to this day. I remember it described his batting at the end of one West Indian innings as being “stormy and colourful as a sunset in bad weather.”
What strange, coruscating quality in his batting makes me remember that after so long?
An image in 1956, shortly after I arrived in Guyana to live, emerges certainly as one of the most vivid cricketing memories I possess. Guyana is playing at Bourda and I am watching a young man named Rohan Kanhai for the first time. He did not make many runs – I think under 50 – but so tremendously did the obvious, the special genius of his batting strike me that I have remembered that innings all my life.
He went on, as we all know, to become one of the legendary figures in West Indies cricket. His centuries in both innings of the Fourth Test at Adelaide in 1961 have been acclaimed in the history of the sport as taking the art of batsmanship to peaks of unconstrained brilliance and improvisation never scaled before in Australia.
It was said that grey beards shook their heads in awe and the excitement in the eyes of small boys lasted afterwards for weeks. I wish I had been there. There will never be another like him.
Space is limited. How to capture the flavour of so many unforgettable images over the years? I must give one more. It is of Lance Gibbs bowling against the best Australian batsmen.
In these days when most off-spin bowlers, spoilt by too much limited-over cricket (limited indeed in every sense of the word) bowl flat and fastish middle-and-leg, hoping to contain, it is good to recall and cherish that greatest of all off-spin bowlers, unafraid of being hit, varying flight and direction, pace and curve, toss and turn, trying with infinite guile and biting spin to get the batsmen out, every ball. Remember him, the young and lanky Lance, during the 1960-61 series, how close he came to a hat-trick in the Third Test, getting McKay, Martin, and Grant in four balls – and, astonishingly, how he followed that up by actually achieving a hat-trick in the very next Test.
Most of the images in this short column emerge out of that famous 1960-61 series in Australia. And the image that one returns to again and again, of course, is of Joe Solomon breaking the stumps to tie the Brisbane Test.
Our cricket has since brought forth – and will continue to bring forth – wondrous, indelible deeds and unforgettable heroes. But we cannot expect, and should not want to, experience another such series or another such Test as that incredible Test in Brisbane in December, 1960. Nothing unique can be repeated. And history does not need more than one Thermopylae.
“Their shadows stay not, but their splendour stays.”
