5 minute read

Garry Sobers was made for cricket. More specifically, having been born with six fingers on each hand, he was made to be an umpire. It was odd then that he should spurn the world of ball counting, jumper carrying and light meter wielding in favour of mastering pretty much every other aspect of the game.

A good few of you know that this website got its name from the first feature we ran at the start of January 2006. There wasn’t much cricket going on at that time, so we did a countdown of the 10 most ludicrously excellent and colourful active players and crowned our winner ‘King Cricket’ – which we felt was a sufficiently overblown title that no-one would ever mistake it for anything other than a joke.

We put Brian Lara at Number 1 – we’re still in love with that backlift – but a week later that post had scrolled off the front page and, to our ongoing anguish, confused readers began calling us King Cricket – a name no-one would self-apply where we come from. By the time we moved to this domain a year and a bit later, we’d given up arguing – we were, alas, King Cricket.

Except we weren’t, because a few years later we discovered that not only had the name already been deployed, Cy Grant had written a whole damn song.

It’s an okay slong – perhaps a bit too catchy, to the extent we worry you’ll unsubscribe from our email once it’s lodged in your brain for unwitting, reflexive retrieval.

It’s better and more complimentary than any songs that’ll get written about you though. Clearly Garry Sobers impressed people.

One of the final pieces we published on the old domain was the old Don Bradman v Garry Sobers thought experiment. Our not-too-subtle point was that Sobers was a way better cricketer because cricket does actually involve bowling. A team comprising only Don Bradmans would spend an awful long time in the field.

You can also run this sort of made-up match against other all-rounders. While there are certainly circumstances where other players might be able to win a (most likely timeless) Test against Sobers, it’s impossible to imagine he wouldn’t come out on top overall were you to continue playing matches across all the various conditions that are thrown up in the longest format.

For example, while Imran Khan and early Botham were superior bowlers, they were inferior batters and certain conditions could really neuter their bowling. It’s a lot tougher to corner Sobers that way.

It’s a cliché to talk about how an all-rounder allows you to balance the side, but Sobers delivered so much more than viable batting and bowling. We used to joke about Moeen Ali’s willingness to plug almost any gap for England, but the Sobers sealant was way, way, way more thorough than that.

Left-arm bowlers are hugely desirable. Simply through offering a different angle, they become more valuable than a right-arm bowler of similar skill. Sobers was first picked for the West Indies to bowl left-arm finger spin. If you can do that pretty reliably and also make a few runs, you can often carve yourself quite a lengthy Test career.

But there was more. A little while after that, he started bowling capable wrist spin as well. Left-arm wrist spin is the most unusual form of bowling there is. Just about nobody has done it for any length of time in Test cricket. Sobers did it well enough that he could wheel it out whenever it seemed helpful to do so and fall back on the finger spin the rest of the time.

That is already a pretty handy secondary bowling skill, but then, a mere decade into his Test career, he began opening the bowling.

That is just madness. Sobers had been bowling a bit of medium-pace for a while and apparently swung the ball both ways, but plenty of people said he could really get it through as well when he wanted to; that he had a pretty mean bouncer. At a certain point, the West Indies assessed Sobers tertiary bowling style and concluded that he should probably take the new ball ahead of Charlie Griffith.

Now think about the downstream ramifications of all this. Sobers wasn’t an all-rounder who was asked to bowl only when conditions were in his favour – which is how the likes of Jacques Kallis kept their bowling averages down – he was an all-rounder who was called upon at every stage of the innings, on every pitch, in all conditions. In fact the harder things got, the more appealing he’d surely become. “Let’s try a bit of left-arm wrist spin” kind of thing.

Not every player who’s labelled an all-rounder shoulders the same workload. Jarrod Kimber happened on a magnificent fact last week, which is that Sobers bowled the same volume of overs each match as Kallis and Ben Stokes combined.

If a bowler like that could average, say, 30 in Test cricket, he’d have a strong case to be considered the most useful cricketer of all time, but Garfield Sobers was also – just by the by – one of the greatest batters there’s ever been.

For almost a decade, he remained the heaviest run-scorer in Test history, while his average of 57.78 is still right up there, beyond any current player who’s played anything more than a handful of games.

But against all odds, that’s still not the full story, is it? Because there are different ways of scoring runs. Teams need slightly different things from their batters at different times and here too Sobers’ talent was almost laughably broad.

Could he go big? Mmyeah. His first Test hundred broke a record that had stood for 20 years and that 365 not out would remain the highest Test score for 30-odd years afterwards.

Could he score quickly when necessary? Well… yeah… You’d think an extra finger on each hand would be a guy’s most obvious association with the number six – but no, it’s not even close.

“My goodness, it’s gone way down to Swansea!”

Every team wants a left-arm opening bowler with a wicked bouncer who can swing it both ways with new ball or old.

Left-arm spinners are valuable too. Wrist spinners doubly so.

Batters who can hit triple hundreds? Handy.

Hitters who can launch every single ball of an over for six? Even in this day and age when people are specifically training to do precisely that, those sorts of players aren’t exactly ten a penny.

Imagine having every single one of those roles covered in your team. And then imagine that you can still pick another 10 players after that.

Oh, and he was an incredibly decent fielder too.

The whole point of ‘King Cricket’ was that it was supposed to be a ridiculous, overblown title; a silly joke label that no cricketer could ever possibly justify.