Garry Sobers (1936-2026): The Complete Cricketer

If AI were to create the perfect cricketer, the result would be likely to resemble Garry Sobers more than any other cricketer who has played since the days of W G Grace.

For a start, he was a left-hander. There is something about left handed batters; they just look better. The Englishmen Frank Woolley and David Gower were both regarded as exceptionally graceful stroke makers because they were left handers. There is a story of, I think, Paul Collingwood, working out in a gym and watching a repeat of a cricket match on TV in a mirror. He wondered who the elegant left-hander on screen was and eventually realised it was himself.

There have been very few Test class left-handed all-rounders, players who bat and bowl left-handed. But when they appear, they really are outstanding. The obvious examples are Sobers, his near-contemporary Alan Davidson, Wasim Akram and Ravindra Jadeja. The left arm bowler always poses special challenges, as shown by the two Australian Mitchells, Johnson and Starc. Many great Test sides have had a left-arm spinner in their armoury.

There have been great right-handed all-rounders too, of course, like Imran Khan, Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee and Kapil Dev, and more recently, Jacques Kallis – whom many modern judges call the greatest of all time – Andrew Flintoff and Chris Cairns. Then there are special all-rounders like Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst (who batted right-handed and bowled left-arm) and Ben Stokes (who batted left-handed and bowled right-arm).

None of these, however, was as versatile and complete an all-rounder as Sobers. He began his Test career, against England in the final Test of the 1953-54 series at Sabina Park as a seventeen-year-old orthodox slow left arm bowler who batted at number nine; he took four for 75 in 28.5 overs in England’s first innings. By the fourth Test of West Indies’ next series, against Australia in 1954-55, on his home ground in Barbados, he was opening the batting against the ageing but still fiery Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller; of course he eventually settled in the middle order.

For the rest of the decade Sobers was an orthodox left-arm spinner, essentially in a defensive role. In the late 1950s, however, like many overseas players, he started playing in the Lancashire League in England, and there he discovered that he was a natural swing and seam bowler. This development was encouraged by the great West Indian captain Frank Worrell, who had himself been an effective medium pacer but was now slowing down. By the fourth Test against Australia at the Adelaide Oval in 1960-61 he was opening the bowling with Wes Hall. He had a rhythmic, easy action and swung the ball late, making him a potent user of the new ball. As the 1950s went on Sobers developed his skill as an unorthodox left-arm spinner, turning the ball with wrist rather than finger, the left-armer’s equivalent of the leg break; he also developed a well-disguised googly, turning the other way. He was literally three bowlers in one. John Arlott, in a tribute to Sobers on his retirement written for the 1975 Wisden said that “[n]othing in his cricket was more impressive than his ability to switch from one bowling style to another with instant control.”

But his batting developed more quickly. He scored his first Test century, at the age of 21, against Pakistan at Sabina Park in 1957-58, and went on to make it a big one, 365 not out, beating Len Hutton’s Test record of 364 against Australia at The Oval in 1938. (Sobers was famously present in Antigua in 1994 when Brian Lara broke his record with 375 against England.) By the end of the third Test against India in Kolkata he had made six hundreds in ten innings in his last six Tests.

To get the major numbers out of the way, in 93 Tests, Sobers made 8,032 runs at 57.78, took 235 wickets at 34.03 and held 109 catches.

That of course ignores his record in the five matches played between England and the Rest of the World in the English summer of 1970 to replace the cancelled South African tour. These games were billed and played as Test matches and recorded as such in Wisden. The Rest of the World side was full of star players and the standard of cricket was extremely high. Test status was subsequently withdrawn. Sobers led the Rest to a four-one victory. He scored 588 runs at 73.50, with two centuries, and took 21 wickets at 21.52. In the game at Lord’s, which England won, he made eight and 18 and took two wickets. He was the leading run scorer and wicket taker on either side. He dismissed Ray Illingworth, the influential England captain three times in the first two games, bowling him on 97 at Lord’s.

An average of 57 is exceptional. Of course Don Bradman, on 99, is not really comparable with anyone else. Leaving him aside, only Herbert Sutcliffe, Ken Barrington and Walter Hammond, among batsmen who played at least 30 Tests, had averages higher than Sobers.

But it’s not the numbers that people remember. There was a glorious lustre to Sobers’ batting – to everything he did on a cricket field anywhere, but especially his batting – that was utterly memorable. I saw a lot of him on TV, a few times live when he was playing county cricket, and, best of all, I was at Lord’s in 1973 when he made his last Test match century, finishing on 150. As with Vivian Richards, the walk to the crease, in Sobers’ case made an immediate and instantly recognisable impression. Arlott, inevitably, gave the best description: “As he walked out to bat, lithe, but with adequately wide shoulders, he moved with long strides which, even when he was hurrying, had an air of laziness, the hip joints rippling like those of a great cat.” He was very still at the crease as the bowler approached, but then came the exceptionally high back lift: Lara was similar, and some pundits have mentioned the Indian boy wonder, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Sobers had a sound technique and could defend when necessary – Arlott said “he was born with basic orthodoxy in batting” – but he was essentially an attacking batsman and he had all the shots. In 1971-72 he led a different World side on a full tour of Australia. There were five “representative” games that were not Test matches. They were, however, very keenly contested, and two very significant players were introduced to international cricket: Dennis Lillee and Tony Greig. In the third match, at Melbourne, Sobers made 254. Bradman, surely the shrewdest judge of a batsman in the history of the game, said: “I believe Garry Sobers’ innings was probably the best ever seen in Australia. The people who saw Sobers have seen one of the historic events of cricket, and they were privileged to have such an experience.”

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He was a brilliant fielder, both close, especially at slip, and in the deep. Michael Manley, the former Premier of Jamaica, has a marvellous description in his A History of West Indies Cricket: “His first-ever fielding position in a Test was at short third man. In the first over of the match Hutton steered a ball from Frank King in that general direction. Sobers moved to his right, picked up, half-pivoted, being a left hander, and returned the ball like a bullet to the wicket-keeper. The whole thing was done with a feline quality, with that fluidity which is the hallmark of the athlete who goes beyond skill into some other extraordinary realm of unconscious co-ordination.”

It was entirely fitting that this extraordinary cricketer played a leading part in what must surely be the greatest Test match of all, the tied Test at Brisbane in 1960-61. He made 132 in West Indies’ first innings, “an immortal innings”, as Jack Fingleton called it in his book on the Test. For much of the time Sobers was accompanied at the crease by his captain, Worrell, the side’s first black captain and a hugely significant figure in West Indies cricket history and in Sobers’ career. This innings somehow symbolised that. “Sobers could have had no better partner than his captain, one with icy coolness to temper youthful impetuosity.” This was a critical part of Sobers’ career, and of the development of West Indies cricket. Back in the late summer of 1959, an incident occurred that was surely the bleakest in Sobers’ life. He, the fast bowler Tom Dewdney, and the all-rounder Collie Smith, were all playing Lancashire League cricket. Smith, 25, (Sobers was 22) was highly promising – he was West Indies’ most successful batsman on the tour of England in 1957 – and he had become Sobers’ best friend. The three of them were going home, sharing the driving, after a match. Sobers was driving when an accident occurred. Dewdney was unhurt, Sobers’ left hand was injured; Smith, who had been asleep in the back seat, was thrown forward and broke his back. He was in a coma for a few days and then passed away. Sobers, according to Manley, “was in a sort of quiet despair, blaming himself for the loss of his friend”. One good thing that happened at that time was the return to Jamaica of Worrell, who had just graduated from Manchester University. By the time England toured the Caribbean in 1959-60, with Worrell back in the side, Sobers was back to his best; he scored 709 runs at an average of 101 in the series. Worrell’s ascendancy to the captaincy, a remarkable story in its own right, was a transformative event in the history of the West Indies, and not just its cricket. One can be certain that Sobers benefited from this as much as anyone.

Sobers was the natural successor to Worrell but – well I suppose nobody is good at absolutely everything – he was not the greatest captain. John Woodcock noted that he was probably just too easy-going. He certainly liked a flutter. The most famous example of his tactical flair came in the fourth Test, at Port of Spain, in the 1967-68 series against England. Sobers set England 215 to win in two hours 45 minutes. Part-time leg-spinner Basil Butcher had taken five wickets in the first innings and Sobers seems to have thought he might work his magic again. The target seems almost laughably easy now, but this was 1968. Still, even Geoffrey Boycott realised they had to go for it, and he managed to convince the chronically indecisive captain Colin Cowdrey. England cantered home by seven wickets, winning the series 1-0. (Sobers scored 545 runs at an average of 90.)

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He had one great series as captain, in England in 1966, winning the series three-one and seeing to the demise of two England captains, M J K Smith (permanently) and Cowdrey. England were completely on top in the second Test at Lord’s until Sobers and his cousin, David Holford, put on 274 for the sixth wicket, and earned a draw. Brian Close led England to victory in an extraordinary final Test at The Oval; Sobers was out first ball in the last innings caught by Close off John Snow. In the series as a whole he made 722 runs at an average of 103 and took 20 wickets at 27.

There were proper tours in those days. West Indies played 27 first-class matches in all: they actually played five games after the Oval Test. Sobers played a total of 18 matches, scoring 1,349 runs at 61 and taking 60 wickets at 20. It was no surprise when, in 1968, county cricket opened its doors to overseas players, Sobers was one of the first to be signed, by Nottinghamshire. Back in 1964, Norman Preston, the editor of Wisden, in his profile of Sobers as one of the almanac’s Five Cricketers of the Year, had shrewdly observed that Sobers was a player for the big occasion. Sobers was a loyal servant of the county from 1968 to 1974. He averaged 48 with the bat and 25 with the ball. You can’t really ask for more than that. And you can’t expect all the stops to be pulled out every day – and back then county cricket really was a seven days a week business. (Sobers also had three seasons with South Australia in the 1960s. He became the first Sheffield Shield player to score 1,000 runs and take 50 wickets in the same season.)

While at Nottinghamshire, in fact in his first year there, he did of course do something that nobody else had ever done before. Playing against Glamorgan at St Helen’s in Swansea in 1968 he hit the left arm bowler Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over.

People probably think, wow, what a great T20 player he would have been! (He played one ODI and made 0.) I am somehow glad it didn’t come to that. If I go to see a great actor, I want to see him playing Hamlet, not doing a TV advert.

Of course, Sobers wasn’t just one of the Five Cricketers of The Year, in 1964. He was one of the Five Cricketers of The Century, chosen by a panel of 100 selectors for the almanac’s 2000 edition. 100 voted for Bradman; 98 voted for Sobers: I have said before that we ought to be told the identities of the men – I think in this case we can safely say men – who did not think Sobers was one of the best five players of the twentieth century.

His genius was evident from an early age. Anybody who wants to can enjoy it now on YouTube. And “enjoy” is so much the right word. There was something truly joyful about Sobers’ cricket. And everything one hears about him suggests that he was a very remarkable person, modest, approachable, friendly. Of course he had – who doesn’t? – his little foibles. The great Indian wicket-keeper Farokh Engineer told me a very funny story about lending Sobers some money which immediately went on a horse which came nowhere. And a curfew would certainly not have appealed.

He was knighted for his services to cricket in 1975. Woodcock noted that the venue could hardly have been more appropriate, given the enthusiasms of not only the recipient but also the bestower – respectively Sir Garfield St Aubyn Sobers and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – the Garrison Savannah, home to the Barbados Turf Club.

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