SIR GARFIELD SOBERS (28 JULY 1936 – 17 JULY 2026)
“Seymour Nurse, he don’t read Chaandrasaykaar, Baasil Butcher has no clue to his bowling. About the others, the less said the better. What makes you think you can master Chaandrasaykaar in ten minutes of coaching, Wesley, old maan?”
These words spoken in his Barbadian singsong by the greatest cricket all-rounder of all time— to fast bowler Wesley Hall—held spellbound his audience of about ten former cricketers accorded the privilege of dinner with Sir Garfield Sobers one evening at the Madras Cricket Club some 15 years ago by the club’s president then, the late SP Sathappan.
Sobers went on to regale us with this story of his alleged conversation with Hall during a Test match on the 1966-67 West Indies tour of India. According to him, the West Indies innings was in a bad way with wrist spinner BS Chandrasekhar posing a few problems to the touring batsmen, and Hall had approached him with the following offer of help:
“Captain,
please tell me how I can tell when Chaandra is bowling a leg break and when a
googly. I really want to help you to take us to a good total.”
Hall wouldn’t take no for an answer despite Sobers’s discouraging words. Finally, yielding to Hall’s stubbornness, Sobers told him he would help with hand signals from the non-striker’s end whenever the batsman was facing Chandrasekhar. He would stand a step behind the crease, watch Chandra’s fingers and put his right hand out if it was a googly, and keep it straight otherwise.
The ploy proved successful enough for Hall not only to support Sobers in the recovery but to actually remain unbeaten on 30 or so runs at teatime.
Hall could not contain himself during the teabreak when Seymour Nurse expressed his surprise and delight at Hall’s masterly display with the bat. “Wes, how do you play Chaandra so well when I can’t handle him at all?” the star batsman asked him.
Hall’s response was classic. Simpering modestly, he said, “You know I read him from the hand unlike our captain who plays him off the pitch.”
Unfortunately, Sobers had overheard Hall’s boastful narration. Came Hall’s first post-tea encounter against Chandra who fired in a googly, and the skipper’s right hand remained firmly lodged by his thigh. Unsurprisingly, Hall’s middle stump went flying.
The stories Sobers spun that evening were mostly wild tales as this one was, with my research afterwards showing no proof of Hall scoring 30 in any Test in India. None of us minded, because every moment we spent with the legend was something to cherish forever.
No batsman entered a cricket ground with greater nonchalance or elegance. If Vivian Richards of the swaggering, gum-chewing arrogance overawed rivals, inducing visions of the imminent decimation of their attacks, I imagined even as a young spectator that Garfield St Aubrun Sobers had a slightly different kind of impact on his opponents - more like inducing a sense of resignation, even reluctant admiration, for so often did he walk into a challenging situation and turn the game on its head almost effortlessly.
Not only did his batting leave fielders gasping for breath in admiration, it sometimes elicited spontaneous applause even from the bowler whose deliveries he dismissed from his presence. And he was himself the first to applaud a worthy opponent.
Sobers made a quiet debut on March 30, 1954 in the six-day fifth Test at Sabina Park, Kingston, Jamaica, against the touring MCC, when he made 14 not out and 26 batting at No. 9, and took 4 for 75 in the first innings of a match England won by nine wickets.
Omitted
for the first Test versus the touring Australians in the next season, he did
nothing dramatic in the next four Tests, until the final Test, in which he scored an unbeaten
35 not out and 64 as a middle-order batsman. His 43-run cameo as stand-in
opening batsman in the fourth Test, in his home country, Barbados,
had convinced at least two Australian allrounders of his enormous potential -
one of them Keith Miller, whom Sobers hit for three boundaries in his first
over. Richie Benaud, who like many of his contemporaries considered Sobers the
greatest allrounder in cricket, waxed lyrical about the innings. He swore that
the 18-year-old left-hander's fierce square cuts and slashes outside the off
stump off Ray Lindwall and Miller had him scurrying to the pavilion to fetch
the cricketer's "receptacle for cuff links" - a rare instance of a
fielder in the slips needing abdominal protection.
The first time I saw Sobers in action, in the fourth Test of the 1958-59 season at the Nehru Stadium, Madras, a huge reputation preceded him, after his world-record 365 not out (followed by a century in each innings in the very next Test) against Pakistan the preceding season, and tons of runs (25 & 142 not out, 4 and 198, and 106 not out) in the first three Tests of the India-West Indies series.
I had already devoured every word written about him and followed his versatile exploits as a batsman who played at almost every position from 1 to 9, medium-fast to fast bowler, orthodox left-arm spinner, chinaman specialist, and brilliant fielder and catcher. Sobers disappointed an eager Madras crowd with the bat, after promising much with his confident entry, shirt-collar up, after the openers Conrad Hunte and Holt were dismissed and he joined Rohan Kanhai with the scoreboard reading 152 for 2.
Sobers was deceived when on 29 by Vinoo Mankad, last-minute appointee to the captaincy and crafty veteran left-arm spinner, who was playing in his last Test as it turned out. Sobers failed again in the second innings, this time falling to legspinner Chandu Borde after making a mere 9. As a consolation, he gave us glimpses of his spin bowling talent with 4 for 26 and 2 for 39; West Indies coasted to a massive victory. His slip catching too was spectacular. What I vividly remember from that game was that despite the lack of runs, the Sobers persona wove a magnetic spell over me (and my friends) nonetheless.
On his next visit to Madras, when Test cricket returned to Chepauk, Sobers, this time captain of West Indies, more than whetted his fans' appetite, with two outstanding innings of 95 and 74 not out. As he had done after misreading a googly from Benaud in the famous tied Test in Brisbane in December 1960, he changed his shot at the last nanosecond to a similar delivery from BS Chandrasekhar to straight-drive him for six. On the earlier occasion, the ball had sped to the boundary for four, almost decapitating the bowler in its path. Sobers' second innings defiance - in the company of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith - of India's brand-new spin trio of Bedi-Prasanna-Chandrasekhar to draw the Test is now part of the lore surrounding him.
Australian great Sir Donald Bradman was a huge admirer of Sobers. He called his 254 for Rest of the World versus Australia in Melbourne in 1971 the best innings ever seen in Australia. Bradman said, "With his long grip of the bat, his high backlift and free swing, Gary Sobers consistently hits the ball harder than anyone I can remember. This helps to make him such an exciting player to watch because the emphasis is on power and aggression rather than technique - the latter being the servant, not the master."
Talking to us, Sobers graciously played down his achievements including his Chepauk exploits. Yet for all his modesty, Sobers confessed he never feared a bowler in his entire career, not even Chandrasekhar, disappointing the Chandra fans in his audience.
That memorable dinner was made more memorable by a hilarious incident towards the tailend of the long evening, when a somewhat inebriated fan among us fell at Sobers’s feet gripping them firmly to his utter shock. And this friend rang me up a couple of days later after reading my account of the dinner in a local daily and angrily complained that I had failed to mention his sashtanga namaskaram of Sobers. A teetotaller now, I wonder what he will have to say today should he read this piece.
Captaincy was the one aspect of Sobers's cricket that came in for adverse comment, because he tended to go for broke even at the risk of losing matches. To me, it was all part of the brand of cricket he played and believed in. He was an adventurous and positive captain who believed in declarations that gave his side - and therefore the opponents as well - a sporting chance to win. When one such declaration led to a famous England victory in Port of Spain in 1967-68, Colin Cowdrey and his men making 215 in 165 minutes, the critics trounced Sobers for his captaincy. Characteristically, he has never expressed regret for his decision.
EW Swanton once said of Neville Cardus that the great man was talking through his eminent hat when he claimed Wilfred Rhodes was a greater all-rounder than Garfield Sobers. My response to similar comparisons between Sobers and the likes of Jacques Kallis, Kapil Dev or Imran Khan will be identical, with no disrespect intended to those other great all-rounders.
To end on a sombre note, I remember once choking with overwhelming emotion while doing a semi-public reading from Sir Garfield’s autobiography. In it he says he batted for two people every time he played—for himself and for his prodigious all-rounder mate Collie Smith who died in a car accident with Sobers at the wheel.
