Garry Sobers and the life lessons of being hit for a barrage of sixes

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“You’re just not a killer …”

Brian Cox’s Lear-esque Logan Roy drawls to his son Kendall aboard a super yacht somewhere off the south of France. The words come out of his craggy, ursine features like a bullet.

“You have to be a killer.”

This quote from the end of series two of Succession, while pivotal, prophetic and downright chilling for many reasons (no spoilers here) gnawed away at me after the first watch. Not because it unearthed some latent patricidal feelings or because I could massively relate to being asked to be a blood sacrifice in order to cover up a corporate scandal, but in a cricketing sense.

Let me explain.

As a kid I used to bowl slow left-arm spin, with an action that made South Africa’s Paul Adams, the “frog in a blender”, appear the height of orthodoxy. I looked weird, sure, but crucially could turn the ball, sometimes dramatically so. I had a growth spurt in my teenage years and my new height coupled with the aforementioned action led to a sort of adolescent mortification at my own bowling.

This only got worse as I began to suffer from a version of the yips, making every over I bowled an anxiety-ridden exercise. Being able to “get out” of an over was to escape without bowling into my own toes, unleashing a pathetic beamer or (the worst) physically not being able to release the ball.

It wasn’t long before the ball stopped being thrown my way and I decided to “focus” on becoming a batter, but there was one final embarrassment to come. I was asked to play in a tournament at the local club against a few touring