Famous Cricketers No 73 - Sonny Ramadhin

Introduction Sonny Ramadhin was one of the finest right-arm spin bowlers in the history of cricket. He combined with Alfred Valentine to embarrass England’s best batsmen in 1950 and played a key role in that historic West Indian triumph at Lord’s. He mesmerized opponents from several quarters of the globe during the 1950s, establishing a host of West Indian records along the way. There was always a certain mystique surrounding the tiny and inscrutable oriental cricketer who bowled with his shirt sleeves buttoned down to his wrists, with his cap perched securely on his head even in the hottest and most humid conditions, and with his off-breaks and leg-breaks cleverly disguised. He was the first West Indian to capture 150 wickets in Test cricket and only the second to exceed 500 in first-class cricket. West Indians, however, do not always treat their heroes kindly. In this part of the world, so long a colonial outpost (or series of outposts), the tradition of glorifying our heroes has not yet taken deep root. One searches in vain for the kinds of history and biography that emanate so freely from North American and European presses and communities. Even our major political leaders have found very few biographers thus far, even though internal self-government has been a reality in most of the territories for almost half a century and most of the Caribbean nations have been politically independent for close to 40 years. Not surprisingly, then, there is a sad lack of published literature on West Indian cricket stars. Even so great a batsman as Everton Weekes, the only cricketer to score five successive Test centuries, is still awaiting a definitive biography. Very little has so far appeared on such fine players as Basil Butcher, George Challenor, Jeffrey Dujon, Lance Gibbs, Gerry Gomez, Alvin Kallicharran, Seymour Nurse, Richie Richardson, Andy Roberts and Alfred Valentine. On Ramadhin, too, one searches in vain for major articles of any kind. That Sonny Ramadhin, of all bowlers, should still be searching for a chronicler, some fifty years after his magical deeds in England, strikes me as a major form of injustice. Had he been an English county bowler of just slightly better than average skills, his modest accomplishments would long since have been glorified by an endless number of fawning journalists. The most detailed treatment of him appears in Wisden 1951 , when Ramadhin was being honoured among that Bible’s ‘Five Cricketers of the Year’; in the Silver Jubilee issue of The Trinidad & Tobago Cricket Board Annual (1956-81) in a nostalgic section on ‘Cricketers Remembered’; and in Vijay Kumar’s attractive Cricket Lovely Cricket , published in 2000 to commemorate the West Indian triumphs of 1950. The result, unfortunately, is that too little has ever been known about Ramadhin’s private life, and some of his cricketing feats have already been forgotten. Yet, here is a right-arm spin bowler who took 758 first-class wickets, including 158 in 43 Test matches. When he retired at the age of 36 in 1965, no Caribbean bowler had ever taken that many in Test cricket and only one other West Indian native (Sidney Smith who had toiled for what seems like an eternity on behalf of Trinidad, Northamptonshire and Auckland) had captured more wickets. It is the main purpose of this monograph, then, to begin to fill that startling literary void. Sonny Ramadhin deserves to be rescued from oblivion. A place within this ‘Famous Cricketers’ series is his by natural right. 4