The making of a ‘world cricketer’

It occurred to me after last week’s tribute to the cricketing genius of Sir Garfield Sobers to wonder how he would have viewed the state of the game today.

In his era, between 1953 and 1974, the strongest national teams were Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. Although India’s national cricket team had played its first test match in June 1932, it was not until 1952 that a first test victory was claimed. In its first 50 years of international cricket, up to 1982, India won only 35 of the 196 test matches it played. Pakistan was inducted into the governing body, the Imperial Cricket Conference, in 1952, becoming the seventh test-playing nation. It, too, took its time to become established, winning 11 of its first 72 matches, seven of those at home.

In 1964, the name of the Imperial Cricket Conference was changed to the International Cricket Conference in recognition of shifting geopolitics. The first non-test playing nations were admitted as associate members. Ceylon, later becoming Sri Lanka, Fiji and the US were the first ones, joined in 1968 by Bermuda, Denmark, East Africa and the Netherlands. This eclectic bunch of countries must have had some logic at the time, but only Sri Lanka has achieved success at the top of the international game since the 1960s.

These first stirrings of formal recognition of international cricket outside the seven full members may not appear to have much relevance to Sobers. However, between 1960 and 1974 he came to embody the image of an international cricketer. In his tellingly titled autobiography, Cricket Crusader, published in 1965, Sobers uses the term “world cricketer,” as in someone who has reached a world-class standard. He aspired to be one,