By Dr Rudi Webster
The long awaited news of Clive Lloyd’s Knighthood from the British government in the 2020 New Year’s Honours was received with great delight and satisfaction by the people of the Caribbean and by cricket lovers around the world. Sir Clive was a great cricketer, an outstanding leader and a highly respected Caribbean ambassador who was loved and admired throughout the cricketing world.
Thirty-five years ago the Government of Australia recognized his exceptional achievements and awarded him one of its highest honours, the Order of Australia for his outstanding and positive influence on the game of cricket in Australia. In 1975 this award replaced the traditional Knighthood.
In the West, we often glorify the individual and individual performance but Sir Clive’s contribution went beyond that. He brought together a diverse collection of talented individuals who lacked direction, focus, discipline and common purpose and transformed them into an extremely disciplined, highly motivated and all-conquering unit that dominated world cricket for fifteen consecutive years. That unit became one of the best and most successful teams in the history of sport. This was a remarkable achievement.
It must be noted that in the very early stages of his captaincy, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Vivian Richards, Larry Gomes, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Malcolm Marshall did not have much of a reputation because they were just embarking on their Test careers. But with Clive’s guidance and leadership they developed quickly and soon became the champions and world-beaters that we all admired. Kerry Packer’s World Series of Cricket contributed greatly to that transformation.
A few days after West Indies’ humiliating defeat by Australia in 1975/76 I took Clive to a pub in Melbourne to drown his sorrows and I remember asking him two questions about his team and West Indies
cricket: “Who are we and what do we want; where are we now and where do we want to go?”
After a few pints of beer, Clive’s creative instincts took over and he started to tell me about his agenda for change. He showed me his vision for the team – the best team in the world for the next ten years – and he explained his strategic plan for making that vision a reality. He told me that he would search the Caribbean for players with the ‘right stuff’ and would mould them into a highly motivated, disciplined and professional unit.
He wanted his team to be the fittest team mentally and physically, the best fielding team, the best batting team and the best bowling team, and he wanted to become West Indies’ most successful captain. He said he would favour players who were hard working, enthusiastic and highly motivated and would make self-discipline, mental toughness, and a good grasp of the basic skills first important priorities. He thought his biggest challenge would be to get rid of insularity and eradicate bad habits, something that Frank Worrell had achieved in the Sixties. He would then get his players to buy into his vision, and would help them to trust, respect and care for each other. These were difficult challenges but he was confident he could overcome them.
Clive’s agenda for change was music to my ears. Two things excited me. First was his intention to create a vision to share with his players. Vision is a future that beckons but it is little more than an empty dream until it is shared and accepted. Only then does it acquire the force necessary to change a team and move it in the intended direction. And second, at the highest levels of sport the correlation between self-discipline/self-motivation and success is greater than the correlation between ability and success. Ability is just an indicator of what you can do but it does not guarantee that you will do it. Motivation on the other hand indicates why you will do it and how likely you are to do it.
Clive was not a flamboyant leader; he was a quiet achiever. Many people rate leadership in cricket on the quality of the captain’s strategy and tactics. Clive’s critics identified what they claimed were
deficiencies in these two areas and under-rated him as a captain, asserting that he was lucky to have four good fast bowlers in his side. Tactics and strategy are important factors in performance but they do not accomplish success on their own. It is the players who get things done; they breathe life into the team’s vision and strategy. At the end of the day, it is competent, well-prepared, highly disciplined and highly motivated players that are the key to the team’s success.
Ian Chappell, a former captain of Australia, once said: “Any captain can learn how to set a field, when to change the bowling, how to write out a batting order or how to formulate and explain a game plan. Motivation of the players to execute the plan or strategy is the most important factor in captaincy, particularly under pressure when things get tough and when smart thinking and extra effort are required.”
A US Army general once said that no one has as yet found how to administer or manage people into battle. They must be motivated to fight. He added that the greatest leader in the world could never win a campaign unless he understood the men he had to lead. The same applies to sport. It is the will, spirit and mental strength of the man who leads and the players who follow that take the team to victory. Lloyd’s captaincy fitted this model. Most of his players will tell you that his greatest strength was his knowledge of the players and his ability to press the right buttons to motivate them. These assets were largely responsible for his success.
Many years ago Clive told me: “My greatest lessons in leadership came from looking after my family. My father died when I was twelve years old and I became the only breadwinner in the family. I had to look after the home, my mother and my sisters, so I was like the head of everything – the leader. I didn’t look at it as leadership then but that is what it was. Those roles and responsibilities contributed greatly to my character and personal values. Later on, I was able to take the family values of caring, sharing, respecting and trusting that I acquired during that time to the West Indies team. I believe that imprinting that
strong sense of family in the team contributed greatly to the closeness of players in the team and to their performance on and off the field.”
Much has been written about Sir Clive and his team but alas not from the perspective of the players or the support staff. This has resulted in a huge rhetoric/reality gap. Sir Clive and his players are still around and before it is too late, our educational institutions should make a commitment to narrow that rhetoric/reality gap by looking at the team and its success from the perspective of the captain and players, thereby getting accurate and priceless feedback from them.
