Peerless Viv Richards

Adrian Murrell/Allsport

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

The cricket World Cup starts tomorrow, hosted this time by Australia and New Zealand. India, the holders, beat Sri Lanka in a pulsating final in Mumbai four years ago. Under no pressure whatsoever from an estimated Indian television audience of 400 million, their nerveless captain MS Dhoni promoted himself inthe batting order as India chased an imposing target. He finished the game with 91 runs and a six, sending the ball soaring into the Mumbai night sky.

There appear to be no clear favourites this time around – Australia maybe, New Zealand, or South Africa? – but it would be nice to think that the victorious captain will dedicate his team’s victory to the memory of Phillip Hughes, the talented and popular twenty-five-year-old Australian batsman who was tragically (and freakishly) killed by a short ball that struck him in the neck, in a match last November. 

The West Indies won the inaugural World Cup in 1975 and its follow-up four years later, beating Australia and England respectively (in 1983 they rather complacently lost the final to India).The first three competitions were held in England, the final at Lord’s, of course, and the West Indies captain on all three occasions was the formidable Clive Lloyd, seen below receiving the trophy in June 1975, from Prince Philip – or Sir Prince Philip as we should perhaps now call him since the Australian prime minister Tony Abbott recently decided to bestow a knighthood on him.

 Patrick Eagar/Patrick Eagar Collection via Getty Images

Lloyd was man of the match in the first final for his sublime match-winning innings of 102, but a significant contribution was also made by a young Viv Richards, who ran out three Australian batsmen with his lightning-fast fielding. Four years later Richards scored a majestic 138 not out against England (in 1983 he was carelessly out for a rapid 33, precipitating the West Indies’ totally unexpected collapse against unthreatening Indian bowling).

A devastating one-day batsman (and one who would surely have taken eagerly to Twenty20 cricket), Richards was of course peerless in Test cricket. He made his Test debut in November 1974, scoring 192 not out against India in Delhi in his second game, but it was against the fast bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in Australia in the winter of 1974–5 that he truly advanced his reputation, moving up to the top of the batting order and successfully taking on the fearsome duo. By the time the West Indies came on tour to England in the summer of 1976, Richards, with a further three centuries against India in the Caribbean, was the team’s main man. And he confirmed it that summer with a mountain of runs on England’s drought-parched wickets. West Indies won the series 3–0 but it could easily have been 5–0 (and Tony Greig, the South African-born England captain ended up both physically and metaphorically on his knees on the outfield at the Oval, having earlier unwisely asserted that he intended to make the West Indies “grovel”).

It’s a truism to say that there will never be another cricketer like Viv “the Masterblaster” Richards. With his aquiline profile set off by a proudly worn maroon West Indies cap (never a helmet), Richards would saunter out to bat with intent – to impose himself on the opposition’s bowlers. Indeed, many bowlers have attested  to the “eerie” feeling of preparing to bowl to him, as he stood stock-still at the crease and stared them down. Richards trusted his eye to play shots that were beyond lesser mortals: the casual flick across the stumps of a straight and fast ball through mid-wicket, the step-away to the leg side to launch the ball sailing over cover.

In his profile of Richards in the Millennium Edition of Wisden (where Richards was voted one of five cricketers of the century), his Somerset county colleague Vic Marks summed him up thus: “Bowlers had to be subjugated, to recognise that he was the master. There were occasions when he might sleepily tap back some medium-pacers from a novice who had just graduated from the second team – for Richards was not primarily an avaricious gleaner of runs. But he would always launch a fearsome assault on anyone with an international reputation  . . . .  It was a compliment to be on the receiving end of an onslaught from him”. 

Richards inflicting further punishment on an England bowler, this time his old Somerset mucker Ian Botham, at the Oval, August 1984   Getty Images

If Richards seemed to reserve his best (or worst) for England’s hapless bowlers this probably had a lot to do with wanting to get one over the old colonial masters. A proud man from the small island of Antigua, he saw the West Indies’ unprecedented run of cricketing success from the late 1970s to the early 90s as a defiant political act. As a captain he was ruthless, to the point where he had to contend with charges of gamesmanship on one occasion against England. And he had little time for those who chose to go and ply their trade in apartheid South Africa.

Later in his career Richards’s run-scoring tailed off. It was almost as if he would content himself with a brutal century at the start of a series to make a statement before letting others around him do the bulk of the run-scoring (and the West Indies batting was so strong that this invariably happened). But he never shirked a challenge and when the young and powerfully built Jamaica-born England fast bowler Devon Malcolm was picked to play in Richards’s last home series (in 1990), the Masterblaster took him on spectacularly (you can see it on YouTube, along with several other of his most thrilling moments at the crease). Malcolm once got his man – a triumph to be cherished indeed, but he could be sure that Richards would seek redress. And in his last series, in England in 1991, with five half-centuries in five Test matches, Richards was a model of consistency. Maybe he did go out at the top then. Certainly undefeated.