SPECTATOR SPORT
West Indies walloped
Frank Keating
STRAIGHT up to Headingley from Epsom, I was tuned into the conspiratorial mutter of serious punters, and though you read it here first two weeks ago (England are going to wallop the West Indies'), the idea seemed much less whimsical as early as the middle of Friday afternoon when shrewd oddsmen of the cricket pressbox like the toff, John Thicknesse, of the Evening Standard, and that main-chance enthusiast, Graham Otway, of Today, paraded purposefully around to plonk handfuls of dough through the betting-tent window only moments before the odds on England winning were slashed in panic from 7-1. So it was an extremely healthy win for more than Gooch's England XI.
During epic matches like this, at which you sit entranced at each bump of the seesaw, one tends to mark down every 20 minutes or so (and underline and asterisk in your notebook) the definitive incident that unquestionably turned the whole game. Till the next frantically underlined scrawl scrubs it out. And so it goes on, until the reporter is in far more of a whirl of confusion than the reported, who are ad-libbing the actual crazy improvisations out there.
But the final, final underlined asterisk that turned it all for certain was Richards' self-inflicted regicide on Monday morning. Two-and-a-half sessions to get only 193, with seven wickets standing and the monarch's Antiguan protégé, the nicely named Richardson, going like a train with the brakes off. A gentle look-see till lunch, and England could have been in a heap of trouble thereafter.
The emperor swaggered slowly to the wicket, eyes sleepy, mouth casually rotat- ing the spearmint cud. Watkin, medium- fast and nervous as a debutant should be, had just come on to bowl. He had played, in awe, alongside Richards at Glamorgan last summer. He is a softly charming Rhondda boy who was once married to a girl called Bronwyn and whose mum still brews the pavilion urn on Saturdays for Maesteg CC. Richardson creamed the first two balls of the over skimmingly for a four and a three. Thus Richards, challenged, would have even more cruelly to put the apprentice in his place. Up came Watkin, straight-backed and his feet like Under- wood's used to be, splayed out at a Chaplinesque 10-to-2. Richards disdainful- ly put a leg down the pitch and aimed for Doncaster, which is way beyond long-on. The ball missed the meat of the blade — as it tends to when the batsman has been in only a minute — caught the top of the arrogantly flailing edge, and steepled high above mid-off where Gooch (who else?) ran gleefully to pouch it.
The final asterisk. A one-off boaster's aberration? Or has Viv declined, like Othello, into the vale of years? We shall see, starting next Thursday. Under (surely) bluer skies at Lord's, we will also see young Hick in better light. The pressures on his batting at Headingley were over- whelming — manacled by reputation, caged in by expectation — and he was out both times to leaden 'front-on, no-foot shots' as Mr Grouser Illingworth never tired of telling us each night at the splendid parties thrown by the sponsors, Cornhill. Hick knows the brightest aspect of both innings was the gaudy puce-pink rubber of his bat handle. Ramprakash chose powder- blue, much more Corinthian, and in con- trast his two knocks were riveting prophe- cies of things to come. When England last beat the West Indies at home (captained by Illingworth in 1969), Hick was three years old and Ramprakash minus two months, still in his Irish mother's womb (his father is Guyanese).
If I were a betting man, I'd wager them both for centuries at Lord's. Mind you, while I was at it, I'd slap the mortgage down for an atoning double one from Richards.
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