Editorial | Why we celebrate Ramadhin

Ricky Skerritt, the president of Cricket West Indies (CWI), the governing body, and Wavell Hinds, the head of the players’ union, are right to have hailed Sonny Ramadhin’s contribution to West Indian cricket as pioneering and to have called him “a true legend of the game”.

However, neither tribute appears to have contemplated Ramadhin beyond his achievements on the field. This misses part of his context and partially underlines the long, seemingly rudderless, sometimes convulsive drift of West Indies cricket, the curative efforts of a string of recent administrators notwithstanding. They mostly miss cricket’s soul and history.

There is no doubt that Ramadhin’s performances within the boundaries are insistent of praise. In 43 Tests for the West Indies, he took 158 wickets at 29 runs apiece. His economy was 1.97. He would have been excellent in any era.

But there is a fuller context to Ramadhin’s performance. When he went with the West Indian team to England in 1950, Ramadhin was a shy 20-year-old, the first player of East Indian descent to play for the regional team. That has since become a long and continuous line.

Ramadhin, who died in England this week, at age 92, was primarily an off-break bowler. But in England that summer, he gained a reputation as a mystery spinner. He bowled off and leg breaks. Batsmen could not pick him.

THE DOOSRA

From this distance, it is not unreasonable to assume that Ramadhin bowled what decades later was called the doosra, which the Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan was credited with developing – a delivery that spins to leg, but bowled with an off-break action.

In the four Tests of the 1950 series, Ramadhin teamed up with another young bowler, the Jamaican left-arm orthodox spinner Alf Valentine, who was 19, to run rings around the Englishmen. Their combined haul in the series was 59 wickets – Valentine, 33, and Ramadhin, 26. That was 76.6 per cent of the English wickets that fell to bowlers in the series. They might have had even more, but for the English tactic of confounded batsmen of padding away deliveries. The technique was especially obvious in the final Test and contributed to the changing of the leg before wicket (LBW) rule to penalise deliberate padding.

In that Test, Valentine’s match haul was 10 for 69. Ramadhin returned with four for 101. But writing about the match decades later, Trevor Bailey, the England all-rounder, said: “Although Valentine took 10 wickets in the match, for me it was the silent Ramadhin who got us.”

England’s defeat, by 326 runs, confirmed the West Indies’ victory in the series and inspired Lord Beginner’s calypso, Victory Test Match, which is widely known as ‘Those two little pals of mine’ – a part of the chorus referring to Ramadhin and Valentine.

SPIRIT OF THE REGION

For many people, West Indies cricket evokes more than cricket. It invokes the spirits of the region’s history and people’s aspirations. Recall the iconic photographs of West Indian crowds, led by Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner, running on to the pitch of Lords after the West Indies beat England by 326 runs in the second Test. The crowd was, literally, the Windrush generation, the first group of Caribbean people who sailed to England in 1948 on the Empire Windrush to be part of Britain’s post-war rebuilding effort and to seek better lives in the ‘mother country’.

Lords, in cricket’s lore, was hallowed turf. Beating England on that ground, and seeing West Indians dancing on the field to calypso, was liberating – a coming of age of sorts. The subjects came to Empire and prevailed.

In the Lords Test, Ramadhin bagged five for 66 and six for 86. He was the last of the West Indian team of 1950. The West Indians who sang and danced at Lords were not merely celebrating cricket, but affirming self and declaring aspirations. Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyds, Richards, Roberts, Holding, Garner and others of the great team of the 1970s and ‘80s were the inheritors of the mantle of Ramadhin and Valentine.

More than seven decades after Windrush and Lords and the Oval, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the immigrants who celebrated with “those two little pals of mine” and the rest of the team of 1950 still struggle against their outsider status. And in the Caribbean, West Indies cricket has lost its way – too ignorant of itself, its history. Our play epitomises this ignorance. It’s without obligation, but of self.

Yes, Ramadhin was “one of the great pioneers,” as per Skerritt. He has a legacy that this newspaper, like Wavell Hinds, salutes. But Ramadhin’s legacy is more than doosra, or his version of it, or that he mystified batsmen. He inspired hope. Win or lose, his cricket was responsible. Instinctively, to paraphrase James, he more than cricket knew.

We commit Sonny Ramadhin to West Indies cricket.