Garry Sobers: The Greatest Cricketer Ever

Young people think cricket began with Sachin Tendulkar and you can see this in all the lists that appear on the internet about great cricketers and the greatest ever teams since player like Virat Kohli is described as a Greatest of All Time (GOAT). Such is the ignorance of these analysts that inn one of these teams Sobers was the 12th man!

In fact, Sobers was the greatest cricketer that has ever played the game and the statistical analysis below proves this. There are also notable aspects of Sobers career that need to be explained and there are caveats that are important to explain certain aspects of his career.

Sobers’s Greatness

When Wisden did a poll to come up with the five greatest test players of the 20th century, Bradman came in first with 100/100 votes while Sobers was second with 90/100. One has to wonder who were the ten dimwits who decided not to vote for Sobers (Viv Richards got 25 votes)! He also made Wisden’s test XI for the 20th century and he made Sir Donald Bradman’s greatest ever team. Bradman only had five batsmen—Morris, Barry Richards, Bradman, Tendulkar, and Sobers. He had one specialist wicket keeper, Don Tallon, and five bowlers. As Bradman put it, Sobers was the game changer in the team because he brought the team flexibility of having a sixth bowler and a top rate batsman as well. When was asked why he only had five batsmen, the Don remarked he didn’t need one since, “one of us would get a big score” and then the bowlers would do the job. So, why was Sobers universally acknowledged as one of the greats?

Sobers career blossomed as a twenty-one year old when he scored 365 runs in an innings and got 824 runs in the series. From then, till he retired, Sobers was to dominate international cricket.

First, Sobers in three separate series in foreign countries scored over 500 hundred runs and in 1966 actually scored 722 in England while also taking 20 wickets. No one has ever come close to this feat. On two other occasions, both times in Australia, he scored over 400 runs and topped the batting averages. When Sobers captained the Rest of World XI against England in 1970, and these were initially given test status, he scored 588 with two centuries and took 21 wickets. In the first test he scored 183 in the first innings and then took 6/21 cutting through what was then the best test side in the world.

Second, Sobers’s all-round record is exceptional. As seen below, he took over 20 wickets in four series, three of which were in England. Thus he scored 424 and took 23 wickets, 322 and 20 wickets, 722 and 20 wickets, and 588 and 21 wickets. Additionally, in a three test series in India he scored 342 runs and took 14 wickets—second only to Lance Gibbs as they both proved that Indian teams could be vulnerable to spin. Then he scored 545 runs against England at home and took 13 wickets, again second to Gibbs and followed this up with 497 runs and 18 wickets in Australia.

What makes Sobers all round performance particularly impressive was that till about 1966, in realm of fast bowling, he played second-fiddle to Hall and Griffiths. Thus, he was a first-change bowler rather than getting the new ball. He also bowled into the wind. When he switched to spin, the favorable side of the pitch always went to Gibbs. Given these constraints, his record is quite remarkable.

When Sobers, in 1966, scored 722 and took 20 wickets, he was thirty years old but he was to take on the burden of being the West Indies’ main strike bowler (along with Gibbs). Hall and Griffiths, in an era where there was no emphasis on physical fitness and players tended to consume large amounts of alcohol, started to fade by the 1966 series against England. In fact, in the 1967 series that followed against India, Tiger Pataudi was to remark that Hall and Griffith posed few problems to the Indian team even though their run ups remained long and impressive. It was Gibbs and Sobers who bowled India out to win two tests. To cap this performance, Sobers scored a fifty in each of the five innings he played.

In the last six years of his career, while the West Indies produced a new generation of swashbuckling batsmen, the bowling cupboard was bare. Thus, Clive Lloyd, Roy Fredericks, Lawrence Rowe, and Alvin Kallicharran all emerged as world class batsmen. In contrast the West Indies produces a string of uninspiring fast medium bowlers like Uton Dowe, Norbert Phillip, and Vanburn Holder. It was only in Sobers’s last test series against England that the very fast and hostile Andy Roberts made his test debut.

The other thing to remember about Sobers’s latter test playing years is that he was playing with injuries that affected his performance. He had a floating bone in his shoulder that prevented him from bowling left arm wrist spin and his knees had started to show the stress of the years of non-stop cricket. Yet from 1966 till he retired, Sobers scored 12 centuries if one includes the three he hit in Rest of the World games in Australia and England. He also took 155 wickets (30 for the Rest of the World) and would have got many more if he had a decent pack of bowlers to support him.

It is worth mentioning, Sobers played 93 tests over a twenty year period and his one regret, mentioned in his autobiography, is that he wished he had played more tests between the ages of 17 and 26 for, as he pointed out, in today’s world cricketers get to play 15 tests and countless one-day internationals in a year. In his prime, Sobers sometimes went without having played a test in a calendar year (he played no test in 1964 and only one in 1967). One can only imagine how many more runs he would have scored and wickets he would have taken had he had a modern test schedule to contend with?

No one has matched Sobers since he retired fifty years ago and is unlikely to do so. That is why he is the world’s greatest cricketer ever.

Sobers series statistics

(Amit Gupta is a Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Deterrence Studies, USA)