The shades of 1976
Wed, Aug 10, '16
Forty years later we can understand that famous English summer in a more nuanced way
For a 16-year-old Indian obsessed with cricket, the contest between Tony Greig's England and Clive Lloyd's West Indies in the summer of 1976 was a morality play in black and white, if you'll pardon the pun. Greig, South African born and raised, and as blond and white as one can get, had rashly promised to make West Indies "grovel". That a privileged child of apartheid could use such a word when about to commence a Test series against a team comprised of the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers was breathtaking in its lack of political or historical nous. Forty years from the events of that tumultuous time, it is an opportune moment to see how things looked back then and in what ways our perspectives may have changed.
The two teams could not have been more different when it came to charisma. England was a veritable Dad's Army with the likes of Brian Close, John Edrich and David Steele manning their top order, and even their younger lot - Peter Willey and Bob Woolmer for instance - seemed stodgy and reliable at best. West Indies, on the other hand, oozed flamboyance: Viv Richards, Alvin Kallicharran, Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Roy Fredericks, Collis King and Michael Holding, to mention only some. Like most teenage fans across the world, I did not merely want West Indies to win the series, I wanted to see them annihilate England.
read more at ESPNcricinfo's Cricket Monthly
