Prosper Utseya remains focused

When you've been a sport's whipping boys for years, you must sustain yourself during those long days in the field by imagining what it will be like when you start to win, how it will feel to mount that dias and give your little speech to Athers or Mikey Holding or Tubby Taylor or whoever's got the mic that day, what it is you'll say when you finally get your say.

So it was for Prosper Utseya yesterday after the win over West Indies, and he played the proverbial blinder, opting for a withering reversal of the words he must have heard so often: 'West Indies are still a good side,' he said. 'We still respect them. For us to beat them we need to make sure we play hard, remain focused, pay attention to the small things and remain disciplined'.

Oh yeah baby. No wonder Chris Gayle looked pissed off...

NB: West Indies needed 15 from the last over. The first three balls went 6, 4, 1. They lost. The next three went w, w, 1. The game itself can mean only one thing: They'll hammer in England in their first game of the of the World T20 and reach at least the semi-finals.

The Don: not done yet

Found an old piece of Frank Keating's for Wisden on Bradman's pre-eminence that mentions the research of Charles Davis, the mathematician who found a method of calculating the Don's domination.

Davis came up with a table that gave a numerical rating to the stats of great sportsmen. Pele rated 3.7, Nicklaus 3.5, Michael Jordan 3.2, Bjorn Born 3.15. Then he worked out Bradman - 4.4.

Statistically speaking, Davis said, Bradman's career 'should not have existed'. To top him, a footballer would have to score in 100 consecutive internationals, a tennis player win 15 singles titles at Wimbledon, a golfer 25 majors.

It would be interesting to have Davis go back again now that the careers of Roger Federer and Tiger Woods have evolved. Woods may be serving his time in the doghouse, but at one point a couple of years ago he was so far ahead in the world rankings that the number two player, Phil Mickelson, was statistically closer to the man ranked 999 than he was to Woods. Tiger needs another eleven majors to reach 25, but he has a lot of years left. Federer may not make 15 titles at Wimbledon, but what's so special about that one major? He has 16 already, and may play for another five years. 

But there are other miracles to consider too. Bradman is remarkable, but is he any more unlikely, statistically, than the outliers of the great West Indies sides? Representing a nation that exists only notionally, from a few small islands [and a thin strip of mainland], came the great men of the 60s and early 70s. Amazing enough. Then consider the next few years: Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Desmond Haynes, Gordon Greenidge, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft, Andy Roberts, Sylvester Clarke, Wayne Daniel and more, plus, at the tail end of the comet, Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose and Brian Lara. Per head of population, what are the odds of that?

And then there is Sachin Tendulkar. He has scored 90 hundreds in international cricket. Ten more, and how do you compare?

Come back Charles Davis. You're needed here...

Song for clay

Today I had the pleasure of talking to a Professor of Caribbean Studies for an hour or so about West Indies cricket. His understanding was so acute, his arguments so lucid that if the region's administrators had been in the room they may have emerged to find the path forwards illuminated a little more brightly.

The Prof is Guyanese, and as I left I asked him why their batsmen mark the crease by banging a bail into the ground.

'The land is Amazonian clay,' he said. 'There's very little sand. In the dry season, it's as hard as concrete. Most of them don't have spikes. They wear soft shoes. Banging the bail in is the only way you can make a mark in Amazonian clay'.

NB: He also gave me a copy of his latest book, which I look forward to.

Soft trumpet and a bell

If the great West Indian fast bowlers were boxers, Malcolm Marshall would have been Ray Robinson, a talent beyond compare. Michael Holding was Ray Leonard, balletic and pure; Andy Roberts Marvin Hagler, immutable and ruthless. Joel Garner was as gangly and as lethal as Tommy Hearns, Colin Croft as vicious as a prime-time Mike Tyson. Patrick Patterson was George Foreman, relying on his muscle, Ian Bishop, pre-injury, was deadly, a young Duran.

Like Wayne Daniel [a street-bruiser on the Nigel Benn scale], Sylvester Clarke was born in the wrong era. He played only 11 Tests, but down at the Oval, where he spent nine seasons, he was a brooding and saturnine presence [to batsmen at least], a cold-eyed killer who took 591 wickets at 18.99 and who, more than that, chilled the blood of anyone who faced him, and half of those who watched him, too.

Reminiscing on TMS, Alec Stewart said that Clarke was physically incapable of bowling slowly, whether he came in off his full run or off two paces, if he was wearing squash shoes, as he once did when taking five wickets in four overs, or his giant boots. 'He couldn't bowl medium pace,' Stewie said. 'He could only bowl slowly if he bowled leg spin'. Stewart was 16 years old when he first encountered Clarke in the nets at Roehampton. When Sylvester found out he was just a schoolboy, he would shout 'bouncer' as he was about to deliver one just so that Stewie had a chance of getting out of the way.

That courtesy didn't extend to the middle. He had shoulders like railway sleepers, and his power seemed to come from nowhere, certainly not from that ungainly run. Yet to see him bowl in the flesh was to feel awe and no little terror at the capacity of the human body.

He died at home in Barbados just a few weeks after Marshall, and a few weeks shy of his 45th birthday. Sonny Liston once said, 'someday they'll write a blues song for a fighter. It'll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell'. That fits Sylvester, too. He would have been Sonny, a man out of time.