Sonny Ramadhin obituary

Sonny Ramadhin, the West Indies cricketer, who has died aged 92, was immortalised as one of “those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine” in a calypso by his fellow Trinidadian, Lord Beginner. With the lefthanded Jamaican Alf Valentine, Ramadhin, a right-hander, was one part of the most famous West Indian spin bowling duo – perhaps the most famous in all cricket.

He made his Test debut at Old Trafford in 1950, the year when West Indies first beat England at Lord’s, and also won their first ever away series against the “mother country”.

Prior to the trip, Ramadhin had only played two first-class matches, and to select both him and that pal of his, Valentine, also a complete novice, for a full Test tour was a daring gamble. But it paid off: they dominated the series as dramatically with the ball as the Three Ws – Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott and Frank Worrell – did with the bat, Ramadhin playing a pivotal role in the second Test at Lord’s which turned the tide of the game and the series towards West Indies. After his first year of first class cricket Ramadhin was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1951, and he went on to have a highly successful career across 43 Tests, with 158 wickets at an average of 28.98. In all first class matches he took 758 wickets at an average of 20.24.

Even more significantly for the development of the game, Ramadhin was the first East Indian – a West Indian of Indian extraction, so called to distinguish them from Indians native to the Caribbean – to play for West Indies, and for more than 10 years he was the only one. In the 1970s Alvin Kallicharran (66 Tests), Rohan Kanhai (79 Tests) and the Trinidadian spin bowlers Inshan Ali and Raphick Jumadeen (12 Tests each) followed.

Rama