07 September, 2000

Some years back, Clive Lloyd was in Bombay for the first of the Old Masters tournaments. The practise sessions, and actual matchplay, was at the Brabourne Stadium -- a more relaxed and congenial place than its cousin, the Wankhede.

The best part of covering that series was that the past-masters (in more sense than one) of the game were, unlike the present lot, very unhurried, always ready and willing to pull up a chair and chat about anything and everything under the sun.

It was then that I got to chat with -- more accurately, ask questions of, then listen wide-eyed and open-mouthed to the answers -- the likes of Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock, Garth Le Roux, Sir Garfield Sobers and a few others.

The readiest of all to chat was Clive Lloyd -- a journalist's best friend, not simply because he was approachable but because interviewing him was an unplanned, frenetic voyage of exploration. Lloyd would, at the drop of a cue, start off, then quickly branch off on a tangent, which in turn would take him up a conversational cul de sac, and so on... until you ended up with so much material on hand that you felt you could write a book.

One part of that long ago conversation returns to mind today. We were discussing captaincy, and after a hilarious dissertation of the style of Gary Sobers (who, reportedly, once led his team out into the field, tossed the ball to one bowler, and said, 'You bowl, the rest of you guys scatter!'), Lloyd talked of his own captaincy. And, typically, underplayed it.

It was, he said, easy to lead a side with four tremendous pace bowlers, and with the likes of Viv Richards, Alvin Kallicharan et al in the batting lineup. But, said Lloyd then, what made a captain's job easiest was having one Mr Roy Fredericks walking out to open, in tandem with Gordon Greenidge and, briefly, with Lawrence Rowe.

Lloyd's argument was simple: Generally, if you win the toss and are faced with a fast track, the temptation is to put the opposition in and unleash the might of the West Indian pace battery on them. But, he pointed out, there are times when a captain wishes he had the option of batting first, for strategic reasons.

That involves an element of risk -- what if your batsmen are skittled out by the opposition quicks? But with Fredericks in the side, said Lloyd, that was never a worry. 'When he is out there, those of us back in the dressing room put up our feet and relax,' Lloyd said. 'He made it all look so easy and by the time he was done, the best of quicks had lost their sting.'

Perhaps no innings of his exemplified this trait so much as the one he played in Perth, in 1975. The ground, at the time, boasted the fastest pitch in the world. And the Australian attack was led by Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thompson, Gary Gilmour and Max Walker -- each faster, and more furious, than the other (Australia in fact won that series 5-1).

Time and again, I've read references to that pitch, and that innings, whenever great batting deeds are spoken of. The statistics are stunning -- 169 off 145 balls, the century coming in just 71 balls (this, mind you, in a Test, with a full house egging Dennis the Menace and Tornado Thommo to draw blood.

Lloyd talked of that innings with awe, rating it one of the best he had ever seen played in Tests. A year or so ago, Dean Jones and Allan Border referred to it in course of a chat (we were talking of Lara's stupendous batting feats, and an innings of Sachin Tendulkar, when Border chipped in to say that the one Fredericks had played then surpassed every other innings he had ever seen, or heard of, on Australian soil.

It is, and will remain, a lasting regret, that I never got to see two opening batsmen play in their prime -- Barry Richards is one, Fredericks is -- was -- the other.

But there is yet a sense of loss, at the news that Fredericks is now no more. As with Malcolm Marshall, your first thought when you hear it is that increasingly, the game is being shorn of its giants. Time is carrying away the supermen -- and all that remains are pygmies, puffed up by hype into parodies of the greats we were unfortunate to have never seen.

Spare Roy Clifton Fredericks a thought, and a prayer -- you aren't likely to see his kind again.

Prem

Mail Cricket Editor