Beware the quiet man

SOMETHING ODD has happened over the years to the reputation of Michael Holding and the invincible 1970s and 1980s West Indians. Holding is now regarded as one of the all-time greats of the game; he is a fixture in the Sky box, his opinion sought by the ICC and the WICB alike. Other pundits, meanwhile, lament the decline of West Indies cricket and look back wistfully to the golden age of Holding’s playing days.

But Holding has spotted revisionism at work. The West Indies side that lost just one Test series between 1975 and 1995 was not regarded at the time with any great affection, outside the Caribbean. Quite the reverse: their fearsome all-pace attacks, led by Holding and Andy Roberts, were often seen as unsporting and likely to kill off the game. “It isn’t good for the game was a regular cry,” Holding recalls
of the Windies heyday.
“I believe the criticism
of our approach was based on jealousy, pure and simple.”

Holding thinks, frankly, that plenty of observers are actually glad that West Indies cricket is now at a low ebb and quotes with a raised eyebrow a series of critical articles by former Wisden editor David Frith, one suggesting, extraordinarily, that the ’70s Windians game plan was founded on “vengeance and violence… fringed by arrogance.”

Just as you’d want, Holding also gives the notion that the Waugh/Ponting Australia team was in any way better than his legendary Windies side remarkably short shrift. There’s passion and insight here and some of the same kind of righteous anger that we have seen previously in memoirs from Nasser Hussain and Mark Ramprakash , though with more substantial, even political, grievances at its root.

Holding’s memoir goes off into lengthy column-style critiques of aspects of the modern game – but his passion and status makes these chapters must-read material. Who will provide, for instance, a better insider’s view of Sir Allen Stanford’s work within West Indies cricket? Holding’s initial suspicions of Stanford related to the latter’s newbie’s obsession with Twenty20 – a form of the game Holding professes to have little interest in.But Holding eventually spends 10 months on the Stanford Board of Legends and his rather testy account of the episode provides a fresh perspective on the affair from someone who both knows West Indies cricket intimately and has its best interests at heart. “Both Stanford and Bush were rich men from Texas,” he concludes, “and further proof that no amount of money can buy class.”

As for the reasons behind the West Indies declining fortunes, Holding thinks the old notion that American sports have somehow superceded cricket in the affections of Caribbean teenagers is entirely false. He outlines his own reasons and solutions, though intriguingly, he seems to put the original decline in Test performances partly down to the sacking of one particular coach: he maintains the catalyst for  the West Indies’ ’80s invincibility was the chance appointment of Aussie physio Dennis Waight to look after them during Kerry Packer’s rebel World Series Cricket series. Waight, coming from a rugby league background, put the West Indies fast bowlers on an unprecedented regime; his departure, after 23 years, in 2000 is put down to player power from a new squad not prepared to put in the hard yards.

Holding has strong, well-expressed views, but for one of the greats of the game, he comes across as unassuming, even humble: picked for his first overseas tour in 1975, he is more concerned at missing the family Christmas in Jamaica than elated at the chance of going to Australia (possibly correctly: the Windies lost 5-1, Holding was reduced to tears of frustration and considered packing it in.)

There’s another humble moment when, on the back of the Windies ramming Tony Greig’s ‘grovel’ comments back down his throat in 1976, Greig offers Holding a £10,000 contract at Sussex for 1977. At the time, West Indies players were making around £100 a match from Tests, but Holding turned down this lucrative contract, he says, because, “I did not see myself as a professional cricketer. “

In fact, Holding held his job in computers with the Jamaican government right up until 1981. Finally enticed into county cricket, Holding notes the overly comfy culture in county cricket, with plenty of batters happy to take an early bath against himself or Joel Garner and fill their boots against a mediocre attack the following week.

Happily, all those years of sitting next to Bob Willis for Sky seem to have rubbed off on Holding when it comes to assessing his time with Derbyshire. “The only disappointing aspect of playing for Derby,” he laments, “was the fact that our team wasn’t all that good.” Duncan Steer

Back to the future

Learie Constantine
By Peter Mason

Signal Books, £9.99

This highly readable account of the life of one of the fathers of West Indies cricket arrived in the SPIN office in the week of the Stanford 2020 and Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency. And it’s no stretch to regard this biography of Learie Constantine, whose twin passions were racial equality and playing entertaining one-day cricket for big money, as rather timely.

Constantine’s grandfather had been born into slavery but Constantine himself was to become the first black member of the British House of Lords, taking his seat shortly before his death in 1971. From the 1930s onwards, suggests Mason, Constantine was the most high profile black man in British public life, using his fame as a cricketer to advance the cause of racial equality via politics and panel show appearances.

A fast, aggressive bowler, hard-hitting batsman and – according to Don Bradman – indisputably the greatest fielder of his time, Mason credits Constantine as being the inventor of West Indies cricket as we now recognise it. Until Constantine’s time and beyond, West Indies always had a white colonial captain and the stodgy, stolid values of English cricket prevailed in the islands.Constantine campaigned against this tirelessly until, finally, Frank Worrell became the first black official West Indies captain as late as 1960.

Constantine’s reputation was first made in a Windies’ tour game against Middlesex at Lord’s in 1929 in which he scored 103 in an hour and took 6/11 off 39 balls to inspire a famous victory. His stats from the sporadic Tests played by the Windies were not all that and he eschewed county cricket in favour of playing in the Lancashire League, taking 776 wickets for Nelson at less than ten runs each.

The self-appointed guardians of cricket’s decency who sneer at the popular enthusiasm for Twenty20 would do well to read Mason’s book. Constantine believed the one-day format of League cricket, finished in an afternoon in front of a paying crowd of 10,000, reflected the true spirit of the game and that, by comparison, county cricket was stuffy and snobby and dull. Constantine, says Mason, was probably the highest-paid sportsman in the UK in the 1930s: while a footballer’s maximum wage was less than £400 a year, Constantine earned over twice as much in a season of League cricket.

Decades ahead of his time, Constantine even proposed one-day international cricket. (The fact that his entertain-at-all-costs approach was seen by many in the English game in the 1930s as rather old-fashioned muddies the anti-T20 argument still further.)

Despite never playing county cricket, Constantine became one of the most in-demand players of the day, both on and off the field. As the ‘acceptable’ face of black cricket, his 1954 book, Colour Bar, comparing race relations in the UK to South Africa and the Deep South caused a big stir; he helped set up the first Race Relations Act in 1965 and, showing the breadth of his celebrity, was in the same year a judge of the Miss World contest.

Mason’s biography – no more than 60,000 words in a neat pocket-sized format – rattles along, putting most painfully stretched accounts of modern cricketers’ lives to shame. Mason’s writing wears its research lightly to give us an intriguing insight into a packed and remarkable life, whose stories and controversies still resonate today.