That '70s show

The recent debates (here and here) about Jacques Kallis and an earlier thought-provoking piece about comparing players of different eras threatens to steal boyhood dreams that began in the 1970s. I keep trying to compare different players from different eras but the harder I try, the more confused I get. I might devote my next few posts to defining the last four decades and the great comparisons within.

To the 1970s then: little did I know then that cricket would become the single most defining influence in my life. The players from that era still evoke a kind of magic that comes from a childlike awe.

The West Indies were the glamour side of that era, perhaps because they were so tall and so cool. Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Lawrence Rowe and Alvin Kallicharran stick in my mind as flamboyant geniuses. My father’s hushed tones when describing the fearsome pace quartet still frightens me slightly – Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Sylvester Clarke and Wayne Daniels were almost the stuff of fairy tales. How fast they must have been!

County cricket of course was almost the modern-day equivalent of the Indian Premier League. Reading the detailed scorecards of the Championship brought great players like Glenn Turner, Majid Khan, Mike Procter and Derek Underwood to life in my scrapbook. Was this where Fantasy Cricket was born, watching global marriages like Gordon Greenidge and Barry Richards (Hampshire) taking on Imran Khan and Garth Le Roux (Sussex)?

Australian champions like Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and the Chappell brothers were similarly god-like. Sunil Gavaskar’s brilliant innings against the West Indies still sticks in my mind, as does my father’s reverent worship of the Indian spin dynasty of Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna and Bhagwat Chandrasekar. I never quite understood why he was so enchanted by these mysterious slow bowlers when there were all these fearsome fast bowlers to imitate. I put it down to a ‘grown up thing’ so I pretended to understand and was allowed to stay up late and listen to the commentary.

Perhaps the sheer statistics and averages of the players of the 1970s don’t really stack up today but they still seem impossibly heroic to me, even thirty years later. Was it the romance of radio and newspaper that created legends where only mediocrity existed ? Does television sometimes spoil that aura and mystery?

Funnily enough, I remember more individual details from Test matches that I listened to on the radio, smuggled under the blankets, than later matches I watched on TV. Maybe the lack of vision led to a greater sense of imagination because I had to create the scenes myself. The beautiful commentary allowed me to form my own impression of what Holding must have looked like, gliding in off the long run or how Zaheer Abbas was meant to be a ‘touch player’ or the impregnability of Geoff Boycott’s defence. Why was Lillee’s action so classical? Why did Collis King seem to hit every ball for six?

It’s a tough task, comparing Kallis or Brian Lara to those of a different era.To a little boy, huddled next to a barely audible radio in Colombo, listening to wondrous accents from faraway places, the 1970s seemed full of the greatest players that ever strode the Earth. It was a decade of the quickest bowlers, fearless hookers (the batting kind!!) and Asian players whose wristy strokeplay and teasing flight conjured up images that I barely understood but was told repeatedly was pure magic.

Was this really the decade of innocence and greatness before the pragmatism and hard graft of the 1980s? Were these players really as good as they were made out to be? They must have been! Is it any coincidence that only little children believe in giants?

In an era before averages and strike-rates were the barometer of greatness, my first experiences of cricket were painted by uncles and grandparents who vividly described players whom they had never even seen. It almost spoils it when I see archive footage and realise that Jeff Thomson wasn’t really faster than a rocket! Mind you, Sir Viv is still the ‘King of Cool’.