CHAPTER TWO

I WOULD HAVE SAT HERE ALL DAY FOR LLOYDY

Clive Lloyd and I go back a long way – to 1976. I was seven, he was 31. I was a schoolboy squirt from Shropshire; he was captain of the West Indies. It was at The Oval on 16 August that our paths converged: my first Test match and Clive’s 58th. I had come to see Alan Knott, Dennis Amiss and David Steele, but the West Indians – their players and supporters – utterly threw me off course. In the 1970s rural Shropshire did not really do black people. The little town I lived in had an Old Times fair in the summer, a pair of swans on the mere in the next field but definitely no black people. Yet here they were next to me in the stand, radios on, shirts off, cans open. They had come to see Roy, Viv and Mikey.

I decided in an instant to defect from England. I went straight to the top and kept my eye on Clive. He looked as if he was the tallest and, through my grandfather’s binoculars, I could make out his hat, his big glasses and his big moustache. He was in charge.

Watching the game was a thrilling sensation and gave me perhaps my strongest childhood memory. That evening, in the back garden of my grandparents’ house in Streatham, I skipped around not with a bat in my hand but with a drained beer-can full of pebbles collected from the flower beds. I shook it to the newly-discovered beat.

And that was that. I did not see Clive in the flesh for another thirty years. When we met, in a hotel off the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, it was because he had agreed to let me write this book about his life.

“What do you want to say?” I asked him.

“I want to tell people who I am, where I came from and what I believe.”

By the time of that meeting in January 2006, Clive had been immersed, saturated, marinated in West Indian cricket for more than forty years. The emergency fielder at Bourda against Bobby Simpson’s Australians in 1965 had become player, captain, coach, manager, committee man, then – a year on from our first meeting – he would be brought back once more as team advisor during the World Cup. In times of difficulty he is still the embodiment of what West Indian cricket once was – and what it would like to be again.

This book is Clive’s book. It is not so much a record of the cricket matches that he played in; it is more about the man who played in those matches. As Clive says, “If people want to see my scores, my hundreds and my noughts, they can easily look them up on the internet.”

• • •

Clive Lloyd had just become a West Indian Test cricketer when he went to Haslingden in the Lancashire league for the 1967 and 1968 seasons, and his eyes were opened to seaming green wickets and the virtues of playing the ball late. Clive became a better cricketer and was all but blown over by the westerlies from the Irish Sea and the warmth of the Lancashire people.

Forty years on, his home is still a few miles from Old Trafford. In one of Clive’s sitting-room windows there is a red rose in stained glass. He loves Lancashire, and it is a two-way thing. In 1988, Clive was voted Mancunian of the year, an award which has also been given to Sir Matt Busby and Sir Bobby Charlton. In 2002, all four of the Manchester universities awarded him an honorary doctorate. When the IRA bombed the city’s Arndale shopping centre in 1996, one of the huge murals commissioned to cover the damaged shops, and to cheer people up, was a painting of Clive.

“I’ve admired a lot of people,” says Jack Simmons, “but I haven’t admired anybody more than Clive Lloyd. He was a delight to play with, and it’s a delight to have him as a friend.”

Under another Jack, the Lancashire captain Jack Bond, Clive helped to transform the way the county played cricket. Would they have won five one-day titles in four years without the withering power of his middle-order innings? How many lost causes were turned into thrilling victories thanks to Clive’s brutal, but almost always orthodox, hitting?

Orthodox and self-taught. No-one coached Clive, and he always played the same way. His World Cup final hundred surprised none of his childhood friends watching in Guyana. “He played exactly like that with us when he was a kid,” they say now.

At cover-point, say some who fielded alongside him, he was better than the great South African Colin Bland. His example, they say, changed the way people fielded, not just at Lancashire but throughout the country.

Yet the contribution he will be remembered for above all others, the one that will one day be chiselled on a block of stone somewhere, is that he was the greatest leader the West Indies have known. By the time he retired from Test matches at the beginning of 1985, Clive had been captain of the West Indies for more than ten years, and he had turned them from losers into world champions. From March 1980 to January 1985 the side lost once. There were 11 straight victories and a record 26 consecutive Test matches played without defeat.

The triumph of his leadership was not primarily a tactical one. With his beautiful fast bowlers and his beautifully fast batsmen, there was rarely any need to out-fox the opposition. His was a captaincy characterized by a profound emotional intelligence. Through his example, his own authority and his inspiration he shepherded his men, who were drawn from territories scattered across the Caribbean Sea; he banished their prejudices and showed them how they could be peerless.

“It was Clive who let us give our best,” says Vivian Richards. “He is the calmest man I know. Never bewildered, always in control. He built us into a great team. We always knew he had the ability to lead us and so we trusted him. Because we respected him so much, we were ready to follow this man. It was a complicated thing to bring a West Indies dressing room together. Clive sent a message to the whole region, ‘Hey, West Indians can be happy together.’”

Clive’s own responsibilities started young with the death of his father in 1959, when he was forced to become his family’s provider. The leadership skills were born in those years in Georgetown and, along the way, four people in Clive’s life helped those skills to grow.

The first was his mother, Sylvia. She came to Guyana from Black Rock in Barbados when she was six years old. For a time, after the death of her husband, she was bringing up six of her own children alone, as well as several more of her sister’s. She was a strong woman – and her roots mean that Clive is half-Barbadian. “Of course he has Bajan blood!” they say in Bridgetown today. “It’s obvious! Have you not seen how he drove through mid-on off the back foot!?!!?!”

The second great influence was Fred Wills, the lawyer who was captain of Demerara Cricket Club in Georgetown; he recognised something special in Clive and in his cricket. The third was Berkeley Gaskin, the Guyanese selector who championed Clive in his early hesitant days in the first-class game.

And there was Frank Worrell.

Clive says in a matter-of-fact way, and without any flourish, that his life’s work is dedicated to trying to make the West Indies a great cricket team once again. He is a man with a providential streak and believes that he is here for a purpose. And this is it: to continue the work Worrell began.

“I want to do whatever I can to help,” he says. “And that’s why, whenever the West Indies ask me to come back, I do.”

It is an uncomplicated statement of faith, but it would be a mistake to see it as naive. The easy authority and the charm are the soft casing around a tough core of self-belief. “You don’t get to the top of the game by being a pussycat,” he says.

“Clive had to fight for everything,” reflects his old friend Ronald Austin. “I don’t think that many people know, even in the West Indies, that though he has a very calm exterior, he has a lot of steel inside. He knew what it was to be near the bottom of a society. If he hadn’t made his way in cricket, one wonders what would have happened. His family certainly didn’t have the money to send him to university.”

Ronald thinks for a moment. “You know, in all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen Clive Lloyd in a brawl. I can’t remember any sort of major misbehaviour, not when he played for DCC, not when he played for Guyana. Now, if you get to your sixties like that, it says something about the way you were brought up. One thing I do remember from the days when I watched him: he was a very quiet young man when the game was on; no noise, very studious, good powers of observation. What became clear later on was that he was able to grasp quickly the implications of certain types of human behaviour. He doesn’t miss very much. A lot of people don’t understand that. They think that, because he’s quiet, he’s not seeing or hearing.”

Ronald still lives in Georgetown. He is one of the pals that Clive seeks out whenever he returns to Guyana. Clive does not hold court from a suite at the Pegasus Hotel; he natters while snacking from a plastic basket of fried fish and cassava chips at the back of one of the city’s little bars. Over a beer, or a rum and coke, or maybe a brandy and coconut water, he will laugh with the men he has known for forty, fifty, sixty years and ask about others who aren’t there. The club cricketers, the school mates, the neighbours, the children of the friends of his mother.

The camaraderie is not difficult to understand. Clive Lloyd and his friends are the product of a particular environment, and they grew up in a particular time. Clive was born into the black lower-middle class in the last years of colonial British Guiana in 1944. He came to absorb what they call in Georgetown, for the want of a better term, British Christian values. He gives respect where it is due; he has a fondness for education and the tradition of the teacher. He believes in the commitment to excellence. He doesn’t get involved in things that don’t concern him, and he observes the requirements of different social circles. The foundation of all this was laid by his schooling and, before that, by his mother.

Clive benefited from the sudden surge of talent in British Guianese cricket. Before the mid-1950s the colony had produced few outstanding West Indian cricketers. Then in a rush came Rohan Kanhai, Joe Solomon and Basil Butcher. Lance Gibbs, Ivan Madray and Ivor Mendonca. All made their debuts for British Guiana between 1953 and 1958, and all went on to play for the West  Indies. That they did so was largely down to Clyde Walcott. Accepting a job with the country’s Sugar Producers’ Association, he nurtured and developed the cricketing talent on the plantations and in the towns. The teenaged Clive noticed these names and was encouraged to excel in his own game.

One of the Georgetown spectators who watched Clive make his way in local cricket is the academic and cricket writer Clem Seecharan. “He would always entertain you. Sooner or later the short ball would go out of the ground, but there was no ostentation to him at all. He had a great humility which I think was a great strength.”

That humility still exists today but is accompanied by a quiet certainty. Clive dislikes dogma and is happy to mix with all types. He has drunk champagne in the riverbank apartment of Jeffrey Archer, and he has prayed in the funeral congregation of the left-wing Labour MP Bernie Grant.

He has been a businessman and a freemason, and at the same time he is preoccupied with social justice. His first job after cricket was with a government-run scheme called Project Full Employ, which taught people skills to find work. There are two buildings called Clive Lloyd House, one in North London, one near Manchester; they are council developments which offer sheltered living for the disabled and for elderly people from the West Indian and African communities.

It is rare to find a photograph of Clive which includes a smile, yet the next guffaw is never much more than a sentence away. He is sensible with money, yet he can be abundantly generous. When he heard of the death of the old retainer, who for years had tended the dressing rooms at the Test ground in Guyana, it was Clive who sent the money that was needed for the funeral.

It is easy to see why people have been drawn towards Clive Lloyd; why he has made friendships from cricket that have lasted decades, why he has been able to tease the best out of men. Discipline and decency informed his captaincy. His lightness of touch freed him to manoeuvre around the big personalities of the West Indies dressing room.

His reward was loyalty: ten years of it from professional men who brought thousands of Test runs and hundreds of wickets and laid them at the feet of the West Indian people. It was a loyalty that made his side the best in the world, the best cricket team there had been. And that loyalty remains to this day.

Last autumn, inexcusably late for an appointment with Desmond Haynes that Clive had arranged, I apologised. “It doesn’t matter,” smiled Desmond. “I would have sat here all day for Lloydy.”

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