Monday, December 30, 2019

Sir Garfield Sobers - One of Five Wisden Cricketer of 20th Century

Many cricketers have declared him the true legend of Cricket and he remained a hero of modern cricketers as well. This guy was so special when in full mood. Garry Sobers minimal foot movement, great follow-through, the ball ricocheting off the boundary boards as not a man moved. The way he moved was magical; a lithe, lissome, loose-limbed creature. Just to be able to carry off the whole thing must have been a triumph.
His epic innings for a World XI against Australia at the MCG at New Year in 1972, when he was at full mood by scoring 254 of the finest runs you will ever see. He was a genius at work against some of the best bowlers in the world. It was described by Bradman as ‘probably the greatest exhibition of batting ever seen in Australia’.
Garry Sobers was the supreme all-rounder, an almost mythical figure who could bat, bowl quick, bowl swing, bowl cutters, bowl spin, catch pigeons, play golf and of course famously carouse. You would not recommend to a young player today all aspects of his self-confessed love of life. The gambling has obviously been a bit of an issue for him – but if he was a little bit late of a night, he felt he owed his teammates a good performance the next day.
So, perhaps that side of things did not do his game any harm. His 26th and last Test century against England at Lord’s in 1973 was apparently scored after a night on the tiles. In contrast to today’s hard-headed world where winning and stats are everything. There was a certain romance about the way he played to entertain.
Of course, this did not always work out to his advantage – there was that infamous declaration against Colin Cowdrey’s England team at Port of Spain in March 1968, which cost West Indies the match and ultimately the series – but the game was better for it. In the balcony, he was frustrated all alone and Caribbean press rated the declaration as a war criminal.
It was entirely appropriate that he should be the first man in the history of the first-class game to hit six sixes in an over. Therefore, on 31 August 1968, he smashed six sixes to Malcom Nash. Has there been a more versatile or natural cricketer? His status as the greatest ever Test all-rounder is rarely if ever questioned. Jacques Kallis’s figures bear comparison but Sobers was more of a front-line bowler and more capable of winning a match.
For most of his a career he would have been worth picking as batsman or bowler. There was nothing negative about his play. He didn’t use pad-play and he ‘walked’ if he knew he was out. Bradman said he saw no one hit the ball harder. He was largely untroubled by the best and fastest bowlers of his day – Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller, Fred Trueman. You name them – and even in an era before helmets he wasn’t in the habit of being hit on the hands or the body.
He was largely uncoached. Born in humble circumstances in Barbados, he was brought up as one of seven children by his widowed mother. When he was five, his father having been killed in the war while serving on a merchantman that was torpedoed in 1942. Moreover, one of his brothers died with an accident with a Kerosene lamp. His brave mother strongly holds the family, and hence, 14 years old Garry was a gopher in a furniture factory. That trouble days could not de-motivate him to playing cricket.
Even so, he was playing for West Indies by the age of 17, chosen initially as a left-arm a spinner who batted low in the order; just four years later, having moved up to number 3, he was breaking the world Test record by scoring an unbeaten 365 against Pakistan at Kingston, Jamaica. True, the bowling was not the toughest, but then nor had he previously scored a hundred for West Indies.
When Garfield Sober's record eventually fell, to Brian Lara in Antigua in 1994, he was on hand to witness the handing over of the baton to his young protégé. It is hard to imagine that he could ever have played differently to the way he did. But he was profoundly affected by the death of his West Indies teammate Collie Smith in a car accident in 1959 when Sobers was at the wheel.
‘In all my innings, I played with him inside me,’ Sobers said. These days, cricketers are used to the idea of playing all year-round, but it was less common before air travel made the world a smaller place. Garry Sobers was among the earliest jet-age players and throughout his pomp, he maintained an amazingly full schedule.
A cricketing genius played domestically with great success in England for Lancashire League teams. And later for Nottinghamshire, and for South Australia in the Sheffield Shield, all the while continuing to perform for Barbados and West Indies. Of course, his body felt the burden in the end. But he was naturally fit and amazingly did not miss a Test match between 1955 and 1972.
His record against England was astonishing. In 36 Tests against them, he scored 3,214 runs at an average of 60.64 and took 102 wickets at 32.57, as well as 40 catches that he would have taken with minimum effort. His performances in the 1966 series in England must rank among the finest of all time: 722 runs, 20 wickets and 10 catches. But he also averaged more with the bat than the ball.  Which has always been one of the best measures of an all-rounder’s worth – against both Australia and India.
At the time of his retirement in 1975 – the year he was knighted by the Queen at Barbados Garrison Racecourse. His career tally of 8,032 runs in official Tests had not been better but that haul takes no account of the many runs he also scored in matches for the Rest of the World against England in 1970 and Australia in 1971–72 that ranked as Tests in all but name.
Indeed, for several years England matches counted in the Test records before being reclassified on the insistence of the game’s rulers. His regrets must be that he missed out on the riches the modern game has had to offer. Just imagine how much he would fetch in an IPL auction – and that, after taking over from Worrell, West Indies did not really progress under his captaincy.
Although he was hardly the only great player for whom leadership did not work out. Garry Sobers had little enthusiasm for the politics that motivated many West Indies players. Some of whom he disappointed by visiting Rhodesia and not criticizing the Caribbean rebels that toured apartheid, South Africa. He has numerous cricketing achievements. In 1964, he was declared Wisden Cricketer of the Year. Then in 2000, he was selected as one of five Wisden Cricketers of the Century.
Overall, he played 383 first-class matches, in which he scored 28,314 at 54.87 with 86 hundred, 121 fifties, 407 catches, including career-best 365* against Pakistan. Moreover, his bowling stats in first-class cricket is very impressive as well, by getting 1043 wickets at 27.74 with the best of 9 for 49, including 36 times five wickets in an inning and one time 10 wickets in a match. These stats clearly show, how was he truly legend cricketer.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Alan Knott England 1967–81

Alan Knott was born on 9 April 1946 at Belvedere, Kent. He was a former wicket-keeper batsman who represented England at the international level in both Tests and ODI. Alan Knot made his Test debut at the age of 21 against Pakistan at Nottingham which England won by 10 wickets. He took 7 catches (3 in first innings, and 4 in Second innings) in the match and Mushtaq Muhammad dismissed him on Zero.
Philip Eric Knott was one of the purest eccentric wicket keepers there can ever have been. He played alongside many great England cricketers. But many saw him enough for over the years. He was a teammate, opponent or simply observing him on TV, to get the very real sense of a genius at work.
His departure for World Series Cricket opened a door into the England team for Bob Taylor, with whom he played many times, and Taylor’s own class as a glove-man was itself a clue as to the quality of the man who had been referred to him year after year.
Alan Knott superior batting played a part in this; as keepers, they were both outstanding. It would feel wrong not to include someone in a list of this sort who was a specialist wicket keeper as opposed to those such as Adam Gilchrist, Kumar Sangakkara and AB de Villiers who, fine keepers though they were or are, were chosen for their sides as much if not more for their batting skills.
Alan Knott had the silkiest of hands. People often say that you only notice a wicket keeper when he is doing things wrong and, on that basis, it was easy to overlook how well Knott was doing his job. Keeping wicket standing back to fast bowlers and standing up to the stumps for spinners are very different tasks, but his technique and movement were always excellent.
The ball just seemed to nestle into his hands every time he took it. Many remember him taking a catch off quite a thick edge while standing up to a left-arm spinner. Probably Derek Underwood, with whom he formed a great alliance. His hands just seemed to glide into the right position, and you were left wondering how on earth he could have reacted so quickly.
Very few keepers would have held that catch; most would have seen the ball clatter off their wrist. Keeping does not get any better than that. Taylor ran him close, so many cricketers feel privileged to have played alongside both. As a talented wicket keeper sometimes are, Alan Knott was a complete eccentric, but only bonkers in an endearing rather than an irritating way.
Concentrating intently on every ball that is bowled for hour after hour probably encourages a certain quirkiness and fastidiousness; they feel everything must be just right if they are not to commit the inexplicable, costly error. One of Knott’s obsessions were keeping himself ultra-fit, this at a time when fitness was not quite the prerequisite for England selection that it is now.
Like Jack Russell – another member of the wicket keeping fraternity with oddball tendencies – Knotty looked a bit of a shambles in his beloved floppy white hat, but you hardly cared about that when the ball went so precisely and regularly into the gloves. He was born to his work. He established himself as Kent’s regular keeper at the age of 18 and having been chosen for his first Test at 21 cemented himself as England’s first-choice glove-man within months, excelling on his first winter tour of West Indies under his Kent colleague Colin Cowdrey in 1967– 68.
England had been through several keepers in a previous couple of years and we're grateful for the stability Knott offered. He became a central figure in a highly successful England Test side in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and helped Kent win multiple championship titles and one-day trophies. He was also a very gutsy, pugnacious batsman who made a specialty of digging England out of trouble in a resourceful, unorthodox fashion.
His strengths as a keeper were his massive strengths as a batsman too. His agility and quick-footedness made him nimble around the crease and therefore difficult to bowl to. His ability to concentrate for long periods and watch the ball closely helped not only when he was standing behind the stumps but when he was in front of them too.
It was a great a testament to his batting skills that he coped better than most of England’s specialist batsmen with the raw pace of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in Australia in 1974–75. Only Dennis Amiss scored more runs for England in that series; a defiant century at Adelaide was one of five three-figure scorers Knott made in Tests.
He may have used unusual methods at times, but he would not have scored the runs he did in that series – with no helmet for protection in those days, of course – had he not possessed a fundamentally sound technique. He also took another century off Australia is a famous partnership with Geoff Boycott at Trent Bridge in 1977 when they rescued England from a desperate start that had seen Derek Randall fall victim to Boycott’s famously erratic running between the wickets.
In 95 Tests he scored 30 half-centuries in addition to his five hundred, which suggests impressive reliability. In later times, keepers were expected to offer more with the bat then they were then, but his Test record of 4,389 runs at an average of 32.75 put him in the all-rounder class for his generation.
He finished with what was then a Test record of 269 dismissals, which would have been many more had he did not sign up with Kerry Packer and for a rebel tour of South Africa, decisions that meant he appeared in only six Tests after 1977. He was only 35 at the time of his last Test and could easily have kept going for a few years beyond that. 
A renown cricket journalist Simon Wilde describes him "a natural glove man, beautifully economical in his movements and armed with tremendous powers of concentration". Hist test career was ended against Australia at The Oval, the 6th match of the Ashes series in 1981. He scored extraordinarily 70 not out innings that save the match.
Alan Knott was born on 9 April 1946 at Belvedere, Kent. He was a former wicket-keeper batsman who represented England at both level in Tests and ODI. Alan Knott was born on 9 April 1946 at Belvedere, Kent. He was a former wicket-keeper batsman who represented England at both level in Tests and ODI.[/caption]
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