After the 1979 World Cup ??the?? teams were rated as shown below:-

RATE TEAM
142 West Indies
108 England
108 Australia
80 Pakistan
72 New Zealand
29 India

The next major ODI tournament was the World Series Cup beginning in November 1979 and which featured Australia, England and West Indies, which naturally was won by West Indies though not before overcoming difficulties facing the home side who, according to Wisden, ‘bowled for wickets instead of adopting the run-saving line and length approach of England’. England did make its mark on the tournament, however, first when Geoff Boycott turned his reputation for slow play on its head with some sparkling performances, including a magnificent 105 at Sydney. The second noteworthy event involving England was during a match against West Indies when, with West Indies requiring three to win off the last ball, Mike Brearley stationed all of his fielders, including wicket-keeper David Bairstow, around the boundary. This action would lead to subsequent fielding restrictions – and where would we be without baseball-inspired phrases like “power play”?

The Australians visited England in the summer of 1980 to compete in the second Centenary Test, while tagging on a couple of ODIs, in both of which the hosts were victorious. As Wisden noted, ‘limited-overs cricket is something at which the Australians have yet to excel.’ And when the Indians toured the Antipodes, the Almanack noted ‘There were clear signs that the excess of one-day cricket at international level, which limits the appearances of Test players in Sheffield Shield matches, would, if continued, be to the detriment of the rising generation.’

But it was the ODI series involving Australia and New Zealand that winter which would really bring ODI cricket to the public forum with a bang. Australia captain Greg Chappell had made no bones about his dislike for the short format, claiming to dislike the defensive nature of it and the need for negative bowling. Yet with New Zealand requiring a six off the last ball to force a tie in a best of five Benson and Hedges Cup match, the skipper instructed brother Trevor to bowl a sneak. As Wisden opined in a piece entitled Sharp practice in Melbourne, ‘For too long the Australian Cricket Board have been over-tolerant of indiscipline and actions of dubious intent.’

England’s tour of India in the winter of 1981/82 saw England lose the ODI series 2-1, where the attendances in India indicated the growing popularity of the one-day game as compared to Test cricket. The ODI team ratings following that series looked like this:-

RATE TEAM
146 West Indies
123 Australia
103 England
95 New Zealand
77 Pakistan
62 India

Though still ranked bottom of the pile, India were clearly starting to get the hang of?? this one-day thing.

For the 1982/83 World Series Cup, coloured clothing and the white ball were introduced for the first time outside of Packer World Series Cricket – horror of horrors. As Wisden huffed, ‘There were times during the World Series Cup when the game that was being played bore little resemblance to the more sophisticated and skillful form of cricket which had preceded it in the Ashes series…the atmosphere seemed at times more like that of the Colosseum than a cricket ground.’

The 1983 Prudential World Cup

A perfect time then for the next instalment of the Prudential World Cup during the summer of 1983. The tournament underwent its first expansion, as the number of games increased from 15 to 25, though these were played in more or less the same timeframe as previous contests. The tournament began in grand fashion as first little Zimbabwe humbled the mighty Australians with one Duncan Fletcher being named Man of the Match, before the previously invincible West Indians were knocked off by the lowly ranked Indians. Pakistan was without Imran Khan and Australia seemed to be unable to shake off the shock of that first defeat, and the semi-finals featured England, India, West Indies and Pakistan. India saw off hosts England in the first semi-final while Pakistan, mis??sing Javed Miandad with flu, were beaten by West Indies to set up a rematch of the early shock. In perhaps an even bigger shock, the Kapil Dev-led Indian team beat the only team to have won the World Cup since its inception eight years before.

The ratings table fol??lowing the tournament looked like this:-

RATE TEAM
133 West Indies
106 New Zealand
104 India
103 Pakistan
101 Australia
98 England
31 Sri Lanka

India rocketing up the table then, as a result of that momentous World Cup win, with West Indies slipping in ratings points but still well ahead in the rankings. New Zeal?and had defeated both England and Australia to climb up to second.

The resurgent Indians beat the Pakistani tourists 2-0 the following winter, but it was another limited overs match which caught the imagination of the public, when a match played for the Prime Minister’s Fund was attended by over 100,000 fans. India was now up to second in the rankings and clearly becoming a force in one-day cricket:-

RATE TEAM
133 West Indies
110 India
106 New Zealand
101 Australia
98 England
96 Pakistan
31 Sri Lanka

This didn’t last long though, as the very next campaign saw India given a 5-0 trouncing at the hands of the West Indians, who also handily beat the Australians in April of 1984. Traveling onto England the home crowds were treated to some of the most magnificent batting ever from Viv Richards, in particular his ODI century at Old Trafford, with 21 boundaries and five sixes including one hit right out of the ground. West Indies were by now a fully formed unit with no flaws, as apart from their batting and bowling heroics their fielding was at a level seldom seen before – witness the run out by Eldine Baptiste of Geoff Miller at Lord’s, when an 80-yard throw took out the middle stump as Miller, considering himself safe, sauntered into the crease.*

India would suffer another whitewash at the hands of Australia in the winter of 1984/85, 3-0 with two matches rained off, but the tour would not be a happy one as Kim Hugh?es subsequently resigned in remarkable fashion, while the clandestine talks began which would ultimately result in rebel tours to South Africa. India also lost heavily to England as the heady days of the World Cup triumph receded into the dis??tance.

At the end of 1984 the ratings table l?ooked like this:-

RATE TEAM
136 West Indies
122 England
111 Australia
105 Pakistan
96 New Zealand
89 India
58 Sri Lanka

Tests vs ODIs

As the 1980s began, it can be seen that there was a vast difference in quality between the Test-p??laying nations as?? regards ODI capability. However, by the end of 1984 they had matured somewhat and it can be seen that the end-1984 ODI ratings are comparable to the end-1984 Test ratings. Of course, West Indies were miles ahead in both formats.

Next time we’ll look at the second half of the decade..

* The Baptiste run-out can be seen at around 3:30 of the YouTube clip below:-

Some years later, I moved away from Series Points as a way to rate players as that rating was based on performance in the series as a whole, rather than in actual matches, preferring instead to find the actual match impact, but in any? case the historical ratings have proved useful in helping to rate players time and time again, as it enables taking into account the strength of the opponent faced.

As regards the Test team ratings I did actually suggest a revision to how they are derived in an effort to have them also take into account success away from home, as well as the degree of dominance, and that effort at “improving” the ratings can be found here.

Moving on to ODI ratings
What I’m going to do now is to develop impact ratings for individual ODI performance which will complement the Test player impact ratings, and the first step to achieving that is to find the historical ODI team ratings. Accordingly, this first feature looks at the 1970s. Hopefully arriving at ODI player impact ratings won’t take eight years, as the Test ratings did.

From classical to pop – the development of ODIs
Cricket in the 1960s was very different from the game we know today. There was basically Test matches and domestic championship cricket, and that was it – no one-day competitions, no T20; there had been for a long time the Gentlemen vs Players fixtures in England (actually since 1806) but the distinction between amateur and professional was formally abolished in 1962. There had been a number of attempts to make the game more attractive, including a committee formed near the end of the war in 1944 and led by Sir Stanley Jackson, which talked in grandiose terms about attacking play and a dynamic attitude to the game, though offered no real solutions for either and indeed rejected limited overs cricket and Sunday play; the Findlay report of 1937 had also warned against too much cricket. Proposals for restrictions on play in the county championship left open the possibility of a knockout competition, which got the press very excited, however nothing came of it.

Gentlemen and Players
As regards the distinction between Gentlemen and Players, this was increasingly becoming a grey area, with the appointment of Len Hutton as England sk??ipper, the comments in Jim Laker’s outspoken biography, as well as the admission that amateurs like Ted Dexter were financially doing quite well from the game. Even though the MCC were trying to keep amateurs in high profile within the game at the end of the fifties, even stalwart Yorkshire had by 1960 appointed a professional, Vic Wilson, as captain. There had been talk about compensating amateurs for ‘broken time�? although in 1958 Raman Subba Row was the first amateur to be censured for this.

As far as the match itself, a combination of dwindling attendances from a high of over 20,000, a? change in the social mores, and the recognition of the lack of a distinction between amateurs and professionals in terms of their attitude to playing, meant that the fixture, standardized as two matches a year at Lord’s and Scarborough, was by 1962 of only passing interest. The MCC added some spice to the 1962 Lord’s fixture by usi?ng it as the forum to announce the team and captain for the forthcoming Ashes tour, but the Gentlemen not having won in the past 18 fixtures it was decided to up stumps and call it a day.

One Day Cricket Begins
The following year the Gillette Cup was launched, being the world’s first knock-out competition competed for by first-class teams. In the 1964 edition of Wisden, while commenting on the success of the tournament, editor Norman Preston noted that there had been calls for a knock-out competition for some years. However, a review of Preston’s editor notes from 1959-on shows no reference to this by him in Wisden, at least – in 1960, he noted that English cricket had “thrived again” during the previous summer, though in the following edition he bemoaned the falling attendance at county cricket matches (down almost 60% from the heady days of 1947), and also mentioned an MCC Committee which had been formed to look at the structure of cricket. In fact, in that same 1964 edition where he had applauded the success of the Gillette Cup, he also referenced a competition launched by the Daily Express, the Better Cricket Competition in which readers were asked to make their suggestions to improve cricket; some of these were indeed prescient, such as bonus points for faster run rates, Sunday cricket, restricted first innings, immediate admission of overseas stars to the counties, limitations on bowler run-ups and minimum over rates – clearly the spectators knew what they wanted and the game needed, even if the authorities didn’t.

In any case, it’s fair to say that the introduction of one-day cricket was not widely celebrated by the traditionalists. The title of this feature is a reference to comments in the 1974 Wisden by Gordon Ross in his piece entitled “Cricket’s Strongest Wind of Change”, in which he sniffily stated

“this type of cricket has become a family occasion; it is certainly not a connoisseur’s day. On this basis you would expect large crowds just as a Festival of Popular Music would considerably exceed a Mozart concert in attendance though the aesthetic qualities of the two types of performance would differ immeasurably in the mind’s eye of a genuine musician.”

In 1983, Wisden published an Anthology of the years 1963-1982, however editor Benny Green stated that he had included only as much one-day cricket that, in his opinion, merited inclusion, i.e. “not much”. This, despite his opening prologue including the words

“After all, argued the sophists, almost all the cricket ever played in this world has been one day cricket. Clubs everywhere have been contrasting one day cricket happily enough for centuries without ever blemishing the game or their own relish for it.”

Neverthele??ss,?? Green exhibits a little too much glee that the first ever one-day match between first-class teams, the Gillette Cup match between Lancashire and Leicestershire, was rather ironically spread over two days due to rain.

The issue of falling attendance was revisited later in the decade, when it was noted that in 1967 the total attendance at county matches was by then only half a million, or just 20% of the 1947 total. That was certainly helped a little in 1968 when overseas players were at last allowed to play county cricket without having to wait for county qualification – the likes of Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Mike Proctor, Barry Richards, Greg Chappell et al certainly made for a more exciting spectacle than previously.

However, the change which might have been the most impactful to the future of cricket was the introduction of Sunday league cricket, which began on the fledgling channel BBC2 in 1969. While the Gillette Cup was fought out over 60 overs, the John Player League featured teams locking horns for 40 overs only. Then, two years later the Benson & Hedges Cup was introduced, pitched somewhere between the existing competitions at 55 overs (later reduced to 50). In the following year’s Wisden, the editor lamented the poor state of England’s batting in the previous year’s Ashes campaign:

“The limited-over games are a worse hindrance when playing down the line is frowned upon, and even for a seasoned campaigner the long wearisome Sunday journeys on our crowded motorways and side roads, are surely no help towards freshness and eagerness to continue a three-day Championship match on Monday morning. The John Player Sunday League matches should not entail tedious travel in the midst of other engagements.”

This despite the fact that the attendance at the Sunday league matches had been almost 90% of that which the six days of county cricket could engender. Which of course was tolerated as it swelled the coffers, but it couldn’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously, thought the likes of Gordon Ross and EW Swanton, not to mention the ruling bodies.

One Day Goes International
As regards the international game, One-Day Internationals were first introduced, somewhat surprisingly, as a result of bad weather in Australia. In 1971, the Ashes Test at the MCG was rained off, following which a hastily arranged one-day match was played out over 40 overs. When the two teams next met, in 1972 in England, a three-match ODI series known as the Prudential Trophy was part of the schedule, d??uring which series Dennis Amiss became the first player ever to score an ODI century. It would be another four years and 14 more ODIs before the first five-fer was registered, during the first ODI World Cup.

The First Prudential World Cup
 There had been 18 ODIs prior to th?e 1975 World Cup, broken down as follows:-

MATCHES TEAM (RECORD)
15 England (7-5)
7 Australia (4-3)
7 New Zealand (1-3)
3 Pakistan (2-1)
2 West Indies (1-1)
2 India (0-2)

An excellent discussion on the First World Cup and the build-up to it can be found in Martin’s excellent piece. As can be gleaned from the discussion above, it’s fair to say that by the time of the World Cup, England players, and to a certain extent players in England, had by far more experience of one-day play than overseas players (witness Peter Parfitt’s pocket computer – Parfitt had been the first captain to note the scoring progress of the opposition and to then ensure that his team maintained at least that rate of progress, so that in the event of postponement due to rain his team would be victorious).

A look at the historical ODI ratings at that time supports this; at the end of the previous summer England was rated significantly higher than the other nations:–

RATE TEAM
114 England
97 West Indies
91 Australia
83 India
63 New Zealand
50 Pakistan

South Africa, the best team in cricket at the time, had been banished from international competition after the D’Oliviera affair and would not feature again in international cricket until 1992. West Indies had at that time only appeared in two ODIs. However two emphatic victories over England by Pakistan in August, by seven and eight wickets respectively, meant that West Indies defaulted to the top ranking, which state of affairs was maintained going into the World Cup.

Further to the previous comments on Benny Green’s proclivities as regards ODI cricket, though the annual Wisden reports did include summar?ies?? of the matches, I could find in the 1963-1982 Anthology only a very short discussion of the first World Cup from 1975, in a piece on the West Indies by Henry Blofeld.

In the tournament itself, despite their relative one-day inexperience the West Indies side held all before them in storming to the final against Australia, who had murdered England in the semi-final, and which was watched by a large crowd of 26,000 at Lord’s. India, not helped by the sluggish batting of Gavaskar in the first match against England, when he allegedly got in a net rather than chase a demanding total, finished the tournament as the lowest ranked nation. Not surprisingly, after Clive Lloyd’s Man of the Match-winning century in the final West Indies had consolidated their lead over the rest, with England by now also leap-frogged by World Cup runners-up Australia:-

RATE TEAM
128 West Indies
114 Australia
91 England
89 Pakistan
68 New Zealand
56 India

By comparison with the ODI ratings, at the beginning o??f 1976 the Test ratings looked like this:-

RATE TEAM
139 Australia
123 West Indies
112 Pakistan
104 England
80 India
76 New Zealand

Although the relative team positions are similar in the rankings of Tests and ODIs, the ratings totals ar?e significantly lower for ODIs, which is partly due to the smalle??r number of matches played in total, but mainly due to the lower number of matches per series for ODIs as compared to Tests.

Onwards to 1979
In the four years between the 1975 World Cup and the 1979 tourna??ment there were then 27 mor?e ODIs played:-

MATCHES TEAM (RECORD)
17 England (9-7)
10 Australia (5-4)
10 Pakistan (3-7)
7 West Indies (5-2)
5 New Zealand (3-2)
5 India (1-4)

The relatively small number of matches played by some nations confirmed the feeling of traditionalists; as Bishen Bedi had noted “We weren’t used to the concept at all. We were brought up to believe this one-day nonsense wouldn’t last long “.

Two Men named Dennis
At this time I’d like to indulge in a small digression. As mentioned earlier, in the second ever ODI between England and Australia Dennis Amiss had become the first player to score an ODI century. In the sixth match, against New Zealand, he knocked up his second century; nobody else had managed the feat. In the match against India on the first day of competition of the first World Cup, Amiss notched up his third century, no one else had more than one at that point. And when he hit his fourth, again against Australia, only Glenn Turner could boast two, and one of those had come against an East African select team. While I appreciate that there were different levels of opportunity at that time, I’m not convinced the genius of Dennis Amiss has been adequately celebrated (except of course by our own Martin Chandler, who was privileged to co-author a piece with the great man for Masterly Batting).

Another famous Dennis recorded the first ever five-fer – Dennis Lillee took 5/34 vs Pakistan on the first day of the 1975 World Cup. By the time of Amiss’ fourth ODI ton, which was the 14th scored to that point, there had been just six ODI five-fers, which is of course much more difficult to achieve with the limited overs for each bowler than is an ODI ton. Gary Gilmour was the only bowler by then to have taken two ODI five-fers, and he also had the only six-fer, 6/14 when Australia trounced England in the 1975 World Cup semi-final.

The ODI ratings ?going into the second ??World Cup looked like this:-

RATE TEAM
121 West Indies
119 Australia
106 England
79 New Zealand
63 Pakistan
43 India

Pakistan had dropped significantly, as had India, these being the only teams with a losing record in the meantime. Once again, West Indies was looking like the team to beat and, once again, it would seem ODI experience wouldn’t be a factor.

The 1979 Prudential World Cup

The second World Cup was once again hosted by England, this time adding Sri Lanka and Canada to the six Test-playing nations. Surprisingly, Australia did not progress from the group stage – less surprisingly, neither did India. This time England made it to the final, seeing off New Zealand, but would face the mighty West Indies in her quest for glory. West Indies set a target of 287, but once England openers Geoff Boycott and Mike Brearley had dawdled to 129 in 38 overs, England effectively were lost, being then required to score at greater than seven an over for more than 20 overs. Still, the loss of the next eight wickets for just 11 runs allowed the Daily Mirror headline to proclaim “Callapso!”

By the close of the competition, twice ch??ampions West Indies had extended their lead at the top of the ODI ratings:-

RATE TEAM
142 West Indies
108 England
108 Australia
80 Pakistan
72 New Zealand
29 India

India, beaten in the tournament by non-Te?st playing nation Sri Lanka, had clearly not quite yet got the hang of it.

Tests vs ODIs
As we are now at the end of the ’70s, let’s compare the ratings of each team in both formats, something which we’ve not been able to do until now. The two profiles can be seen below side-by-side.

Click to enlarge

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we see much more variation across the teams in the ODI ratings than is apparent in the Test ratings – Test cricket had been played for 100 years by the end of the ’70s, against less than a decade for ODIs. What is also apparent in viewing the Test ratings is how the impact of the Packer schism was to close the gap between the best and worst teams as the top players went off to play in the WSC.

West Indies had surrendered her lead in the Test rankings once the Packer players were lost, overtaken by England after the 5-1 Ashes victory, though Clive Lloyd’s men would soon reclaim top spot – the late ’70s West Indies ODI team was presaging the dominance to come in Test cricket in the 1980s.

While Lloyd’s vintage are lauded as being in the pantheon of truly great sides of all time alongside Bradman’s 1948 Australians, a number of Australian teams of the more recent ‘Gold and Green Age�?also vie for that honour.   But which Australian team  is best? When Steve Waugh’s 2002/03 vintage swept England aside to secure the ?Ashes in 11 days, the great Aussie all-rounder Keith Miller was moved to suggest that he had witnessed the greatest cricket team ever assembled by his countrymen. Some will, of course, take issue with the verdict of “Nugget�? although not all that many, since the great man himself had stood alongside Bradman as one of the 1948 “Invincibles�?

If we do not quibble with the wisdom of the late, great Keith Miller and go with Waugh’s 2002/03 elev??en day threshing machine as being the greates?t of all Australians teams of the modern age, which Windies outfit of that great post-Packer era stands above all others?

Conventional wisdom has it that Lloyd’s 1984/85 team was the finest assembled during the years which followed the World Series Cricket schism.  This was certainly the view of Sir Donald Bradman, who argued that the 1984/85 West Indian tourists were the greatest field?ing combination he had ever seen.  Beginning in the Caribbean in early 1984, West Indies brushed aside the touring Australians 3-0 after drawing the opening two encounters of that series.

Moving along to England, the home side were demolished 5-0 as Lloyd’s team inflicted the infamous “Blackwash�?on David Gower’s side. Arriving in Australia just weeks later, West Indies looked as if they were going to replicate their series result in England with another clean sweep Down Under when they romped to an unassailable 3-0 lead.   Only a fight back on a sluggish Melbourne pitch and   victory on a turner’s paradise at Sydney enabled Australia to salvage some respectabili?ty with an eventual 3-1 series defeat.   That 1984/85 unit had also set a Test record of 11 consecutive victories during 1984. But even so, was there a better, sharper West Indies?? side?

As awe-inspiring as they were as a unit, there is a definite case for saying that the opposition faced by West Indies during their 1984 annus mirabilis was far from the most exacting. The Australians were then a team in transition: Lillee, Chappell and Marsh having retired, with the captaincy returning to the unfortunate Kim Hughes. An unharmonious tour of the Caribbean resulted in a 3-0 thrashing as fault lines developed within the squad.  When West Indies returned to Au???stralia later in the year the paucity of talent in the Australian game was but one factor that led to the excruciating spectacle that was Kim Hughes�?resignation.

In England, the home side’s 5-0 stuffing must be placed in its proper context too. The year 1984 was the third since the ban on those players who had toured South Africa as ”rebels�?in 1981/82. If some of those undergoing the ban from the national side were past their best anyway, their absence revealed that the county? game was not grooming adequate replacements.  Fragile against pace, and with shaky techniques, the batsmen were fou?nd wanting time and time again. An ageing Willis was hammered into retirement after the third Test, while seam and spin alike was simply crushed.   In 1980 and 1980/81 England teams led by Ian Botham, although well beaten, did at least have the resolve and the experience to save games against the West Indies. The 1984 series, on the other hand, did at no point look like a contest.

In agreeing to differ with the Don then, we will plump instead for an earlier �?perhaps even deadlier �?West Indian vintage. Still captained by Clive Lloyd, still containing Greeni??dge, Haynes, Richards, Holding and Garner, the 1979/80 West Indians were fresh from their Packer hot-housing and a second World Cup victory in that English summer. This was the first West Indian team to clinch a series victory in Australia, four years after their chastening 5-1 reverse in 1975/76. The transformation could not have been more startling. Inside four years Clive Lloyd’s men had climbed to the top of the world game, pummeling Australia on their home patch �?winning two nil in a three Test series �?after adding another World Cup to their name.

Although they were relatively inexperienced in terms of Tests played �?Garner, for instance, had placed just a handful of Test matches by late 1979 �?the experience of their being together as a unit during the two Packer seasons meant that they had hardened together in the most competitive envi?ronment of all. After all, the likes of Greg Chappell, Imran Khan, Dennis Lillee, Asif Iqbal and Barry Richards all acknowledge those Packer WSC seasons as being the hardest, most rewarding and most competitive cricket that they had ever played.

The 1979/80 team lacked Malcolm Marshall, however. Then just 21, “Maco�?was not first choice at this point in time. In his place were the original Fantastic Four version of the pace quartet. Refreshed and reinvigorated until the mid-1990s, the rotating of four quick bowlers was the Windies modus operandi during their great years.

In 1979, Andy Roberts, then 28, was the most experienced and most subtle, with innumerable variations. Michael Holding, 25, w??as the quickest. Colin Croft, 26, was the meanest, while Joel Garner, 27, was the most miserly and awkward.  The Grandad of them all, Andy Roberts, reckons the original foursome was so strong that n??ot even Marshall would have been missed. The great Antiguan mused:

“All four of us brought something different. I was the shortest and brought my experience. Michael, well, what more can you say about him? Garner and his height and unrelenting accuracy, and Colin Croft’s angle and pace – no other fast bowler ever bowled with that unique style from around the wicket, aiming to a batsman’s ribcage.

“Although Malcolm came in later and became arguably the greatest fast bowler ever, I’m not sure how he could have fit into that team, even at his best. We knew from that Australia tour that our pace strategy could dominate the world, and so it proved to be.”

What is beyond dispute is the effectiveness of that origin??al foursome as a unit.  In the eleven Tests they played together between the 1979/80 series and their return to Australia in 1981/82, Holding, Garn??er Roberts and Croft took a combined 172 wickets at 24.11.

The obvious game changer with the bat was, of course, Roberts�?Antiguan compatriot Viv Richards.  It was apparent even then that, be he the heir to Headley or a right-handed Sobers, this prison guard’s son was already one of the true greats in the game’s history.  Then aged 27, Richards had the reflexes of a gunslinger and was at the kind of peak of virtuosity that gave even Imr??an Khan recurring nightmares. Fresh from his World Cup final century at Lord’s earlier in the year, Richards ran riot in Australia that 1979/80 summer. Even his illustrious team-mates argued that they? had never seen batting like it. As Roberts remembers:

“Some of the shots he played off [Jeff] Thomson and [Dennis] Lillee, the pulls from the front foot through midwicket and straight down the ground – I have never seen a batsman play express bowling with such command before or since.”

One particular passage of play from the opening morning of the Adelaide Test reflects Richards�?dominance. Entering the fray after Lillee had snared Greenidge leg before with the score on 11, Richards embarked on a display of calculated carnage which saw him score 33, with eight fours, while Desmond Haynes scored just a single at the other end. These were not merely “champagne�?shots though, b??ut extraordinary examples of eye to hand coordination, judgement of length and acute dexterity. His 1979/80 Test series run haul amounted to one of the greatest performances of even his career. As Wisden purred in its summary:

�?/em>Few individuals have so dominated a season as Richards did this one. Statistics help tell some of the story. In the Tests, he scored 140 at Brisbane, 96 at Melbourne, and 76 and 74 at Adelaide. In the World Series Cup, his sequence was 9, 153 not out, 62, 85 not out, 88, 23 and 65. Outside the Tests he batted in only two first-class innings, scoring 79 and 127.” �?