Clive Lloyd:

Brought good fortune to the West Indies

By A.C De Silva

FLASHBACK.... 'Wheeling the willow' against England has always given West Indian cricket teams enormous satisfaction and a sense of great power. The converse is also true.

To West Indians, defeat by England, is seen as a national disaster of incalculable proportions. The pulse of the nation stops. West Indian pride dies in a torment of self doubt.

It is as if any defeat by England is a signal that West Indian Cricket for fines are, from that moment, doomed to 'shallows' and 'miseries'. And it hurts. Pride newly won is most easily affronted, as the former West Indies captain - Gary Sobers, discovered during the MCC's 1967-68 tour of the Caribbean.

Fall of a hero

Sobers 'sporting' declaration in the fourth Test of that series in Trinidad allowed England to overhaul what should have been an impregnable West Indies position. So doing, England won the match and the series, and within the space of an afternoon fall from grace had been dramatic and almost total.

When he led the West Indies on to the field that afternoon he'd been a hero, the greatest West Indian player of all time. But when Cowdrey's team won, Sobers had to be given police protection to leave the Queen's Park Oval.

The West Indies teams which came to England in 1928 and 1933 had won only five of the 30 first-class fixtures. There hadn't been any appreciable difference in the fortunes of the side which toured England in 1939. The West Indian breakthrough came with the 1950 victory for John Goddard's squad, when the visitors won 17 of their 31 first-class matches and lost only three.

Seven years later the West Indies lost to England, but when Frank Worrell led the West Indies back in 1963, his team won half the first-class games contested and lost only two. In 1966 and 1969, under Sobers and in 1973 under Rohan Kanhai, West Indies performances weren't as good.

One man show

Clive Lloyd's team, of which Viv Richards was a member in 1976, Changed all that.

Of the 26 first-class matches played Lloyd's 1976 team won 18, six were drawn and only two were lost. It was by far the best performance by a West Indies team ever seen in England. And the man who made it possible and whose batting shone like the brightest star, was Viv Richards. He saw his success in 1976 as an extension of the general feeling among the West Indies players whenever they took the field at Kennington Oval. Looking around at the thousands of West Indian faces in the crowd, the message from the senior players was: "We must not lot those people down."

It was Deryck Murray who first said that as the West Indies were going to field. Murray and Clive Lloyd used to make sure the players were aware that although they were playing cricket, they had a wider responsibility. It is a knowledge of those West Indies in England who live such dull, uninteresting lives. A win by the West Indies changes that and they walk around with their heads high, you know, because the West Indies did well in the field.

After his exploits for the West Indies against England during the summer of 1976, Richards has had a lean period with the bat. In five Test matches against Pakistan, which began in the West Indies later in the same year, he had scored less than 300 runs and had not once made a hundred. But his form had begun to return when he got 143 playing Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia for Queensland.

So that by the time he reported to Somerset in the spring of 1977, he was ready for the fray.

At this point of time, the Packer scenario came on the scene. But while Richards had been breaking the heart of bowlers throughout that 1977 season, the very foundation of the international cricket programme were shacking with the news of Packer coming into the scene.

West Indian players were drawn to the Kerry Packer cricket experiment with the money at stake. The West Indies authorities realised that it was powerless to stop their players going over to Kerry Packer as the money offered tempting.

Different views

England and West Indies cricket bosses had vastly different views of the Packer intervention. The English authorities felt that players who opted to join the Packer cricket tour had somehow betrayed a sacred trust; where the West Indian Board saw that Mr. Packer was offering the West Indian players that financial security which they had always sought and which they had never been able to find in the West Indies.

Thus while the English and Australian authorities angrily resolved to 'punish' Packer and his players, the West Indies Board moved to limit some of the damage to West Indian cricket that could be caused by the Packer alternative.