The Independent Voice of West Indies Cricket

The prime of Richie Richardson

Wed, Apr 8, '20

 

Media Watch

There’s solace in the old clips, especially of cricket. It’s not that they’re all that comforting, as such – not if you followed England, anyway – more they carry you back to a time when your biggest worries were wondering when Mike Atherton’s back would give in, why the selectors insisted on making Alec Stewart keep wicket and whether Mark Ramprakash would ever make a Test century.

Less the stress, this time around, of fretting. I was watching some the other day and there was Richie Richardson heaving Australia’s attack all around the Bourda. Lord, did anyone ever hit the ball through the off like Richardson? He went for the ball as if he caught it stealing from him. That was in the early 1990s, when he was in his prime. Viv Richards was on the way down, Brian Lara on the way up, and Richardson was the one you wanted to watch. “One of my all-time favourite batsmen,” says Mike Selvey, the Guardian’s former cricket correspondent. “One of the few batsmen worth forking out money to see.”

The hat was part of it. Watching a man bat in a sun hat, the past never looked so much like another country. If you were going to tell the history of cricket in a handful of objects, Richardson’s hat would be one of them, the maroon one, with the broad brim. If you can remember Richardson, you’ll picture him wearing it. So it’s almost surprising to find he ever went without it. But he did. For the first few years of his career he batted in a cap, just like his captain Richards. It was in the late 1980s, during a one-day tournament in India, that one of the sponsors sent the team a box of maroon sun hats they’d made.

Read more at The Guardian