The West Indies will enter the first Test against England at Lord’s on Wednesday as the underdogs, with many new faces that will be hard to identify for the British fans. However, this was not the case forty years ago.
During their 1984 tour of England, when they played a Test series against England, the West Indies greats of the ‘80s and ‘90s often played in English county circuit and their second test of that tour at Lord’s is still remembered for an amazing 200 by Gordon Greenidge.
In that period (the 1980s), West Indies remained unbeaten by England; they won seventeen out of twenty-four games while others ended up in draws. Nevertheless, Lord’s Test Match prove to be a closely contest game in 1984.
England’s Graeme Fowler and Allan Lamb both scored centuries against a fearsome West Indian bowling line-up that included such legendary fast bowlers as Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner. For England all-rounder Ian Botham picked up eight wickets apart from scoring 81 runs.
On the fifth morning of play , hosts declared their innings in what some experts describe as an overly cautious decision on behalf of captain David Gower who called his batsmen off for bad light on the fourth evening ensuring a stalemate.
However, before limited overs cricket transformed Test match run-rates those days, Windies made it seem like a piece of cake scoring these 342 runs, finishing on 344-1 with about twelve overs remaining in day’s play.
Barbados opener Greenidge ended up unbeaten on 214 off 242 balls including twenty nine fours and two sixes after coming out all guns blazing .
AFP interviewed Greenidge here: “Well it’s certainly not something you can sit down in the dressing room and plan”, he told AFP during an interview at Lord’s.
“You just go out there to bat…watch what is happening and so on…You get one or two that hit the middle of the bat and feel good about it, you feel comfortable with it, then things just flow from there, so much so that you cannot account for how well it is going – you just want it to keep going”.
To this day, no batsman has come close to equalling Greenidge’s remarkable five-hour innings of 214–the highest individual score in a successful fourth-innings chase in Test history. His prolific show helped West Indies set a record-breaking total of all time highest ever achieved by a team batting in the fourth innings to win at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
West Indies’ success was also due to Larry Gomes who played significant role in the victory. The left-handed batsman made an unbeaten 92 runs as he supported Greenidge consistently through his unbroken partnership of 287.
“I was very sad that he (Gomes) didn’t get his hundred also,” said Greenidge, now aged 73. “People were saying we should let him get his hundred but he wasn’t worried about that at all.
“He wanted to finish the game off and make sure you’re on the winning side.”
Greenidge and Gomes demonstrated their superiority so much in fact that Viv Richards, arguably the greatest batsman of his era did not make a single run during their nine-wicket thrashing of England.
“Greenidge said, “Obviously, it was good to have guys in the background there that, should you lose a couple of wickets, they were good enough to hold up the innings and not lose the game.” England’s only success on that day was to run out Desmond Haynes.”
Greenidge spent much of his early life in England and became a regular at Hampshire. He says that Clive Lloyd, who was West Indies captain and also an attacking batsman himself, allowed him to play with freedom of expression.
“He did not inhibit the players in any way,” Greenidge explained. “The players were allow to play as free as they possibly want to. But not to say if they made a mess of it, he didn’t have strong words.”
“The innings he played at Lord’s live long in my memory.” This is how Christopher Martin-Jenkins describes Greenidge’s performance: “Greenidge pasted the ball about Lord’s like a gifted artist pouring out his soul onto canvas using every colour in his collection of oils.” The analogy couldn’t be more appropriate for Greenidge’s masterly display on the cricket field.
English all-rounder Derek Pringle gave an interview to ‘Cricketer’ magazine where he shared what he had thought during that time. He let Larry Gomes down by failing to catch him off first slip even though he wasn’t sure whether it would affect the result or not. Pringle admitted that it was truly Greenidge who dominated the game and caused most damage towards England chances.
“He hit the ball very hard…and very often…he played magnificently well.”
Lord’s was no flash in the pan as Greenridge scored another double century at Old Trafford in fourth test match. They won all five games meaning Windies dominated this series.
