Sir Garfield Sobers, who has passed away less than a fortnight before his 90th birthday, was unquestionably the greatest all-round cricketer of all time.
His 8,032 Test runs at an average of 57.78 would, by themselves, have been enough to make him one of the game’s immortals. Add to that 235 Test wickets, taken with both left-arm medium pace and left-arm wrist spin, and you have a cricketer whose all-round package has never truly been equalled.
Sobers was the first man to hit six sixes in an over, achieving the feat against Malcolm Nash in 1968. His world-record score of 365 not-out against Pakistan in 1958 stood for almost 36 years before Brian Lara finally surpassed it.
His batting was emblematic of the Caribbean approach to cricket – full of joy, adventure and attacking intent. It took a lot to rattle Sobers, but when someone did, they usually paid the price.
The Australian team discovered that the hard way during the 1971–72 series against the Rest of the World. After Sobers made a duck in the first innings of the third Test in Melbourne, he was subjected to a few unflattering remarks from the Australian fielders. They had poked the bear. In the second innings, Sobers responded with a magnificent 254, studded with 33 fours and two sixes. Watching from the stands, Sir Donald Bradman described it as “perhaps the greatest exhibition of batting seen on Australian soil”.
What made Sobers’ career even more remarkable was that, for much of it, he believed he was playing for two people. On 7 September 1959, Sobers and fellow West Indian cricketers Tom Dewdney and Collie Smith were travelling to London for an exhibition match when the car, driven by Sobers, was involved in a serious accident. Smith, a gifted spin-bowling all-rounder and one of West Indies cricket’s brightest young talents, suffered spinal injuries and died days later.
Sobers often said that from then on he played not only for himself but also for Smith, who remains so beloved in Jamaica that his name is still spoken with great affection more than six decades after his passing.
Great judges of the game such as Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell were among Sobers’ biggest admirers. Chappell frequently remarked that One-Day Internationals and T20 cricket arrived a generation too late, because Sobers would almost certainly have dominated those formats as well. Such was the purity of his strokeplay and the extraordinary range of his bowling.
With his passing, cricket has lost another precious link to an era when the West Indies set the benchmark for world cricket and inspired millions across the globe, including in countries as far away as India.
There has never been a cricketer quite like Sir Garfield Sobers. It is difficult to imagine that there ever will be again.
For More Exciting Articles: Follow RevSportz
The post Sir Garfield Sobers: Cricket bids farewell to its greatest all-rounder, a man who played for two appeared first on Sports News Portal | Revsportz.
