Former West Indies cricketer Brian Lara. File
| Photo Credit: AP

It was 25 years ago that Mark Butcher scored a monumental 173 not out in England’s successful chase against Australia in the Headingley Test. He scored seven other Test hundreds, some of them against the most fearsome attacks. He is now a popular commentator and sharp analyst of the game. Excerpts from Butcher’s exclusive interview with The Hindu at Lord’s:

Your comparison of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi with Garry Sobers earlier this year got a lot of attention. It was fascinating, how you proved, through the help of visuals, the similarities in the bat swing, hand speed…

I watched him make that 175 [off 80 balls] in the Under-19 World Cup final [against England at Harare]. I was struck by that incredible, long, high backlift, the huge follow-through, the complete circle almost where the bat finishes around, tapping him on the spine. You know, Sobers used to hit a lot of shots with his feet together. He would play full balls almost off the back foot. And Sooryavanshi can hit them like that too.

Even if his career ends up not reaching the expectations that other people have, which I think is very unlikely, he has still in the IPL done something that all of the greatest players up until now have never, ever done: none of them have managed to score at a strike-rate of 230, hit that many sixes, be that consistent in the entirety of the IPL. It is still one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen.

Today’s youngsters are exposed to T20 from the beginning, whereas when I was very young, it was Test matches. They grow up thinking about batting very much in a hyper aggressive mode. These younger guys can do things at their age that we wouldn’t have dreamt of at ours.

ALSO READ | Garry Sobers: cricket’s greatest — a legacy beyond numbers

Yes, even Sachin Tendulkar didn’t hit as many sixes, for all his genius. Sooryavanshi is a product of the T20 era of cricket.

Correct. So he will have to learn the game the other way around. He will have to learn how to bat time, to defend. In our generation, it was the opposite. We would have to spend a lot of time learning how to hit the ball.

How do you recall your masterpiece — 173 not out in 2001?

My main memory is about that summer, really. I wasn’t expecting to play Test cricket again. I got an opportunity and I played 42 Tests in a row. I had completely changed my game.

Your father helped, didn’t he?

That is right. The biggest thing I remember is the relationship I had with my dad in the winter of 2001. I called him and said, ‘Dad, I am hating playing cricket.’ Something that I had always loved. Now I was hating it. And I said to him — ‘Treat me as though I have never played the game before.’ So we went right back to the beginning. He really taught me how to hold the bat, how to stand, the whole thing. We changed my grip. We changed my stance. We changed my backlift. Everything. We went back to zero. Like I was five years old. And we worked like that for about three months. And then I luckily got back into the team. I had made a few runs playing for Surrey. A few injuries in the England camp before the Ashes started, and I got in.

How much does that knock, which came against Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie, mean to you?

Ah, it was huge. You wouldn’t be talking to me if it hadn’t been for that. And I wouldn’t be working in TV either. So that innings changed everything. It was the greatest day.

And how was the coach’s reaction?

I know my dad was in tears when [BBC] Test Match Special called him up.

The players you like to watch these days?

I actually love watching K.L. Rahul. I think he is a sensational player. Really classy. Harry Brook is fabulous to watch when he is in. Joe Root, too. And Travis Head — you can’t take your eyes off the screen when he is batting.

You have played against some of the greatest bowlers in history. Who were the most challenging among them?

Blimey! Curtly Ambrose. Him and Courtney Walsh. And then you had, obviously, Shane Warne. Glenn McGrath. Murali [Muttiah Muralitharan].

Among the Indians?

Harbhajan [Singh] and [Anil] Kumble, on those tracks.

And the batters you admired?

[Brian] Lara was sort of the king around about those times. Fellow left-hander, so I greatly admired him. Then the guys like [Ricky] Ponting, Sachin [Tendulkar], obviously. I remember applauding Ricky from second slip at the WACA, much to the annoyance of Nasser Hussain, who was standing next to me at slip. He glared at me. I was just standing there going, ‘Oh man, that’s good’. There were a lot of great players around, like the South Africans, Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith.

Is there cause for concern about the future of Test cricket?

Yeah, of course, there is. What you would like is to have eight to ten teams who are competing on a level playing field. If only England, Australia and India are playing each other, the game is starting to eat itself, you know.

Eventually, one of the great things about all of the series that go around is that you are anticipating and you are excited about the idea about playing this team at this venue. But if it is the same three teams the whole time, it is not that exciting.

What has happened in the modern era is that the gap between the countries that have plenty of finances and the rest has got wider. The competition has perhaps thinned out a little bit in recent times. And that is a huge shame, that finances have meant that a lot of countries, the West Indies, being the most obvious example simply because of their dominance [in the past], have suffered.

South Africa are kind of hanging in there. They are still producing a lot of players and they still manage just about to keep enough of their most talented players to play Tests. But in places like Sri Lanka and the West Indies, they find it very difficult to keep their best players who disappear off to earn more money playing T20. And that is a problem for the world game.

The First Class game and the structures that produce Test Match cricketers are strong in some places and not very strong at all in others.

Your thoughts on Bazball?

I have been critical of it at times. In the game of cricket, the Test match is the game. And they tried to do something that was going to take the game to a different place. But Test match cricket kind of fought against it a little bit. Because when it came down to it, in the big games against the likes of India and Australia, it didn’t work. And so, Test match cricket is kind of greater than any idea that people might have around how you play it.

And Test cricket is the greatest form of sport.

It is. The sport itself dictates to you what is necessary. And if you push too hard, the game will bite you back. And that is what happened. There is as much pleasure to be taken from a really hard-fought draw sometimes as there is from smashing it all over the park.

ALSO READ | Cricket World Cup – Will expansion lead to elevation?

The women got to play a Test at Lord’s, finally.

This has come about because the world has decided, well, you know, this is a great game of cricket, right? Why would we want to stop 50% of the world’s population from enjoying and playing the sport that we think is a great sport? And so that opportunity is now there and what you are seeing is a product of that.

Players in the women’s game that you enjoy watching?

I like Smriti Mandhana’s batting. She is just an incredibly graceful player. So easy on the eye. Very, very lovely to watch. She plays pace and spin equally well. She reminds me of David Gower, in fact. Harmanpreet Kaur is very good to watch, too. And Jemimah Rodrigues is a fine technician.

Besides cricket, music is your other passion. And you had the opportunity of performing with Sarah Brightman, one of the greatest voices of our time.

It was good fun, singing some of Sarah’s favourite songs on live television. It was kind of nerve-racking, but it was good.

Former West Indies cricketer Brian Lara. File
| Photo Credit: AP

The legacy a celebrated, high-profile achiever leaves behind isn’t defined merely by awards and accomplishments, no matter how staggeringly impressive they might be, but equally — if not more — by how many people they have touched, how many lives they have impacted, how much joy they have provided.

The unchecked outpouring of grief at his passing, followed almost immediately by tales of his kindness and generosity, are testament to the standing Sir Garfield Sobers enjoys in the cricketing ecosystem, of which he was the unquestioned emperor for the longest of times, and beyond. Sobers was ‘the greatest’ long before hyperbole took root and even the commonplace was labelled ‘great’. He was cricket’s Muhammad Ali. Scratch that. Ali was boxing’s Sobers, if that makes sense, given that the Sobers aura had pervaded the sporting world long before Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.

In the three days since Sobers shuffled off the Shakespearan mortal coil, the tributes have come thick and fast, from those who played with and against him, from those who were fortunate enough to be the recipients of his wisdom and goodness, and from those who have heard of his exploits from others and have had to reconcile to watching his genius on YouTube. That he was universally adored was obvious long before he left us for what is certain to be a better world merely because he is inhabiting it. His demise has rekindled old memories and enveloped his peers and juniors in a sea of nostalgia, which remains the overwhelming theme that has accompanied any mention of Sir Garry since Friday night (IST).

Sobers’ international career spanned 20 years, his first-class stint 22; he didn’t play competitively after July 1974. But even 52 years on, the stirring deeds are spoken about with awe and reverence. In his final representative outing, for his beloved Nottinghamshire against Worcestershire, he unleashed 84 in an 18-run loss at Worcester in the quarterfinals of the Gillette Cup 60-over domestic tournament in England.

It was his 95th List-A match, of which only one, against England in September 1973, was an international fixture. The legend was dismissed without scoring, caught behind off by Chris Old, as West Indies went down by one wicket in a low-scoring thriller.

Imagine that – Garry Sobers, Test average 57.78, 8,032 runs, 26 centuries and a highest of 365 not out, averages 0 in ODIs. Oh, the wicked humour of the one above us. On the face of it, given his exceptional versatility and the multiple skillsets that allowed him to dominate the longer version as a bowler alone or as a batter alone – not to mention his terrific fielding or his sensational catching which netted him 109 grabs in 93 Tests, mostly close in – Sobers ought to have been a natural fit in limited-overs cricket.

He didn’t reproduce his lofty First Class deeds in the shorter format (there was obviously no 20-over games in his playing days) but no one is really complaining because his one-day career ended nearly a year before the first of three Prudential World Cup (60 overs a side) was staged in England in the summer of 1975.

Sobers and India had a strong bond shaped by mutual respect and love and respect. Farokh Engineer, that maverick wicketkeeper-batter, and Bishan Bedi, the late former skipper, were among the earliest to be blessed by the charm of Sobers, given that both were regulars in the English county circuit and often encountered Sobers’ genius from close quarters with admiration but also, one senses, a tinge of trepidation. But among his greatest ‘fans’, if one might use that word, are the two little masters who were the combined backbone of the Indian batting for nearly a dozen years, each bringing his own unique style and together producing the kind of magic that mesmerised the best, Sobers included.

Sunil Gavaskar first played internationally 55 years back, as a 21-year-old, making his debut in the Caribbean in March 1971. By then, G.R. Vishwanath had already announced himself on the international stage, with a hundred in his first Test, against Australia in Kanpur a year and a half previously. Like his future brother-in-law, ‘Vishy’ was also on his first overseas tour when Ajit Wadekar led his troops out to the Caribbean islands in 1971, little aware that the Indians were walking into history.

Almost from their first meeting, Sobers and the other great West Indian batter of that time, Rohan Kanhai, took a shine to the technician from Bombay and the magician from Bangalore. With the charismatic M.L. Jaisimha helping break the ice in his inimitable fashion – the debonair Hyderabadi and the proud Barbadian shared a wonderful bond – the two young men benefitted from the voluntary advice even during Test matches of Sobers and Kanhai. At least one of them has spoken of a gentle ‘warning’ from the slip cordon after a false stroke. ‘Don’t throw it away, you have done all the hard work. Focus. Concentrate.’ Can you imagine that? A superstar of the game, the opposition captain, no less, looking out for you in an unequal battle of two versus 11. How could they not become Sobers converts? How could they not indeed?

In his 2022 autobiography Wrist Assured, Vishwanath writes, “Sir Garry is easily the greatest cricketer I have played with and against, no two ways about it. At various stages during that tour, I had to pinch myself as a reminder that I wasn’t actually dreaming of being on the same ground as him.”

That tour in 1971 was a seminal one in Indian cricket history. India didn’t have the greatest overseas record at the time. But fuelled by the brilliance of Gavaskar, whose debut series fetched him a massive 774 runs in four Tests, the dependability of Dilip Sardesai as well as the three-pronged spin attack of Bedi, E.A.S. Prasanna and S. Venkataraghavan, superbly complemented by that affable maverick Salim Durrani, India registered a 1-0 triumph, their first series victory in the Caribbean. That was the catalyst for a similar scoreline in England a few months later when the mystery-propelled leg-spin of B.S. Chandrasekhar sparked a grand victory at The Oval.

In the West Indies, India had the temerity to enforce the follow-on for the first time against their hosts in the first Test in Kingston, where Sobers had conjured an unbeaten 365, the highest individual score in Test cricket for 36 years, in 1958. The first day’s play was washed out, and after India bowled West Indies out for 217 in response to their 387 around tea on day four, Wadekar darted over to the West Indian dressing room to inform Sobers that they would have to bat again.

“I hope you are only joking,” Sobers laughed, only to be met by a neutral, “No, not joking,” from the Indian skipper, who explained that since it was now a four-day Test, a lead of 150 was enough to stick the opposition back in. “All right maan, so we will bat again.” “Ajit had fired an unexpected salvo,” Vishwanath recalls in the book. “We feared retaliation of some sort and sure enough, Rohan and Sir Garry, did not disappoint. Almost as if they were slighted at being asked to bat again, the two virtuosos put on an exhibition on the last day.

Vantage position

“Later in that series, at the Kensington Oval in Barbados where the square boundaries aren’t too long, I was stationed at deep square-leg for the sweep with Pras bowling to him. From my vantage position, I had a fantastic, uninterrupted view of Sir Garry. He shaped to come forward. saw the trajectory was short, and quickly rocked on to the back foot. He didn’t play the pull, more a whip with the blade more vertical than horizontal. Oh, the horror… The ball crashed into the wall and ricocheted halfway back into the ground. It was a ferocious stroke played all along the ground, the control immaculate. I quickly did my mathematics; he was 34, had played international cricket for 16 years. I couldn’t start to imagine what he would have been like at his peak.”

Sobers had a kind word and a smile not just for his fellow cricketers, he also loved interacting with kids. On the rest day (yes, it was a thing once upon a time) of the Pongal Test in Madras in January 1967, despite being unbeaten on 95 at the end of the third day, Sobers was gracious enough to interact with several kids, some of whom had made the trip from Bangalore with their parents to watch the match, and fine-tune their games to the extent that it can be done in one short stint. He wasn’t expected to do anything of that sort, it was not an obligation or a social media gimmick or a sponsor commitment. It’s just something that came naturally to him, and while he might not have thought a great deal about it, it left the teenaged lads with memories for a lifetime. In the long list of people that he has touched, these kids too figure, prominently. Sobers never went out of his way to win friends and influence people; he didn’t have to, you see.

Endearing video

There is an endearing video of Anura Tennekoon, the former Sri Lankan captain who is now a young 79, interacting with the 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi during the triangular ‘A’ series in Sri Lanka last month. Tennekoon made the 161-kilometre drive from Colombo to Dambulla merely to offer the young man words of advice and encouragement.

Sobers was like that too, turning up mainly at Bridgetown to catch up with young batters who fired his imagination, batters like Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid and Virat Kohli. He was a giver in the truest sense. He gave the bowlers great grief though he did so with such class and elegance that they almost didn’t seem to mind. He gave his teammates, the connoisseurs and the fans the ultimate joy. He gave West Indian cricket, at the time divided by regional considerations, a sense of pride and identity. The Big Man upstairs broke the mould after he made Sir Garfield Sobers, the original Champion of Champions.

West Indies cricket legend Garfield Sobers, also known as Garry Sobers, died in Barbados on Friday, July 17, 2026. Garry is seen with former Indian cricket player Ajit Wadekar during a press conference in Mumbai, in this file image dated Wednesday, March 3, 2010.
| Photo Credit: PTI

Major sports tend to run on parallel tracks — one for nation-teams like at the Olympics or World Cups, and the other for club and non-nation competitions. The latter is becoming more popular. Formula One, the fourth most watched sport in the world was ahead of the curve, competition being between cars and mixed teams rather than based on countries ever since its inception in 1950.

Perhaps all sports tend to move towards such mixed teams, aspiring, like the IPL, to rid sport of jingoism and waving of national flags. This is not a planned, thought-out strategy, merely one that has evolved. Playing for the country is still the highest aspiration for many young cricketers, but players are coming through who might be happier if their careers began and ended with the various T20 franchises.

World XIs and all that

Cricket tried to marry the two strains — country-wise competition and the mixed team one — with series like the ‘Rest of the World’ versus England or Australia.

In 1966, the year England won the football World Cup, they also won a cricket ‘world cup’; except that the latter was a 50-over tournament among the West Indies, England and a World XI chosen by the readers of the Radio Times. The team had Bob Simpson, Hanif Mohammed, Graeme Pollock, Colin Bland, Tiger Pataudi, Bapu Nadkarni.

Both England and the West Indies beat the World XI, and then England beat the West Indies in the final at Lord’s. This match might have been officially recognised as the first one-day international; it took nearly another decade for the format to earn such recognition. Two years later, England beat a World XI in a three-day match. This team, chosen by BBC viewers and readers of Radio Times, was to be led by Pataudi, but he fell ill and the captaincy passed to Garry Sobers.

But an idea had taken root, so when the South Africa tour of 1970 was called off following protests against apartheid, a World XI was quickly assembled to play a five-match series originally designated ‘Tests’. The status was later revoked by the International Cricket Council. Sobers scored more runs (588) and took more wickets (21) than anyone else, and World XI won 4-1.

England skipper Ray Illingworth described the World XI as “the best ever side to take the cricket field, stronger than the 1948 Australians, man for man.” Consider the batting order: Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow, Rohan Kanhai, Graeme Pollock, Clive Lloyd, Garry Sobers.

Yet, Mushtaq Mohammed probably summed up the feeling of the players when he said, “After it all finished I was left with a funny feeling because we weren’t playing under a flag. Despite the victories, there wasn’t the ‘feather in the cap’ feeling when I was winning with Pakistan. It had been an honour, but at the same time the inner satisfaction was missing.”

It was a thought echoed by John Benaud following the next ‘World XI’ series in Australia, 1971-72, put together for the same reason, a cancelled tour by South Africa.

“Because we were playing the Rest of the World, and not England or South Africa, there wasn’t a real Test match feeling for me as a player making his debut,” he said. “It didn’t have the sort of effect it would’ve had if I were playing a country.”

Again, the World XI was led by Sobers who again finished the top scorer thanks to an innings of 254 in Melbourne which Don Bradman called the finest seen in Australia. Again it was the World XI who won, 2-1, and again the Test status initially granted the series was withdrawn later. Three Indians played in that team: Bishan Bedi, Farokh Engineer and a young Sunil Gavaskar. Dennis Lillee announced his arrival with eight for 29 which dismissed the World for 59 in an innings defeat.

Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket had a Rest of the World team in it, and in the new century, the ICC decided to have a world champions (Australia) versus the Rest, a ‘Super Test’ in Sydney which Australia won comfortably. Crowds stayed away and the concept was never repeated.

England’s Andrew Flintoff was among those who were opposed to it from the start. “I can’t think of anything worse,” he said, adding, “I’m only here for the food.”

Yet, had Muttiah Muralitharan not played that match, his tally of Test wickets would have fallen short of 800.