Many of the obituaries have – at last – set out the case
for Greig the player, as well as giving him the kudos he deserves for his role in
liberating the game from aristocratic cricket governance. Even so, Tony Greig is
rarely mentioned when the great all-rounders are being discussed, even though
he absolutely deserves to be. Why not?
His involvement in the creation World Series Cricket is central
to the answer. Use of the language of the time to describe his role in the
events that tore the cricket world asunder in May 1977 will illustrate the
scale of the opprobrium that was heaped upon Greig then and suggest why its
effects have continued to have an unjustly deleterious effect on his reputation
ever since.
He was Kerry Packer’s “recruiting agent”, cricket’s
“Quisling”, “tempting”, “seducing” even, his teammates into “disloyalty” and
“desertion” in favour of Packer’s “pirates/rebels/circus”. John Woodcock wrote that
Greig’s problem was that he was “not English through and through”, quite the
silliest thing that great cricket writer ever wrote.
It may astonish those unfamiliar with these events that
Greig’s role did not involve the secreting of barrels of gunpowder under the
Long Room at Lord’s, nor the planning of the assassination of the President of
MCC, but merely the promotion of an opportunity for under-rewarded cricketers
to earn more for playing the game. Even though the traditionalists’ view of
World Series Cricket has been the subject of revisionism that has exposed it to
the ridicule it so clearly warrants, Tony Greig’s enduring association with it
has continued to draw attention away from his fine playing record.
Then there was the fact that nobody ever said “when will
there be another Tony Greig?” after he left international cricket in 1977,
because as Greig exited, Ian Botham entered, a ready-made replacement, an
improvement even. Yet comparison of Greig’s record with that of Botham is
instructive. For a start, Greig’s Test batting average is 40.43, Botham’s
33.54. Greig scored 50 or more every 3.32 innings, Botham every 4.47 innings.
Of course, Botham batted with wonderful panache and daring, but if he was Errol
Flynn, Greig was at least Douglas Fairbanks Junior, as those of us who saw the
highlights of him slicing Lillee and Thomson through gully and over the slips
at the Gabba in 1974 will tell you (nobody in today’s sports-channel era could
conceive of how exciting it was to watch those nightly half-hour highlights
packages, a glimpse of the sharp light of the Australian summer bringing relief
from the December drabness of the old country). Or, once more in adversity, at
Headingley in 1976, centuries for Greig and Knott against Roberts, Holding and
Daniel (and an unbeaten 76 leading an unsuccessful run chase in the second
innings).
Greig the batsman relished the challenge of intimidating
bowling and raised his game against the best, as great players do. In contrast,
Botham’s batting average against the West Indies, the titans of his time, was
21.40.
This is not to denigrate Botham, a truly great player,
first choice for All-time England XI (well, maybe second, after Alan Knott). Botham
is a street ahead of Greig—and everybody else—as a bowler. But Greig was a fine
bowler too with 141 Test wickets at 32.20, mostly from medium fast deliveries
bowled from a loping, angular delivery, but with the ability to switch to off
cutters, as he famously did to win a Test at Port-of-Spain in 1974.
Nor should it be forgotten that Greig was only 30 when
he played his last Test, his best years, particularly as a batsman, still ahead
of him. Had he continued into the the early eighties, he would have been
bracketed with Botham, Hadlee, Imran Khan and Kapil Dev as a totem of the era
of the all-rounders. We never saw the second half of his international career.
The third reason why Greig the cricketer has been
overlooked is that he was, for more than three decades, one of cricket’s most
irritating commentators: “Got ‘im!”, “Goodnight Charlie!”, “It went like a
tracer bullet!” etc. He was always long on exuberance and short on analysis. Some
would say that the same applied to his captaincy, but it should not be
forgotten he was the first England captain since Jardine—and one of only four
in total[i]—to lead his team to a Test
series victory in India.
The case for the prosecution would conclude with his
famous “I intend to make them grovel” remark in advance of the 1976 series
against the West Indies. As I have written elsewhere[ii], for any England captain
that would have been an unfortunate and poorly judged remark; for one with
Greig’s harsh South African accent at the height of Apartheid it was
inflammatory. Yet that apart, Greig’s record on racial issues is unblemished. Some
of the obituaries say that Greig’s family was anti-Apartheid. It should be
remembered that, unlike Allan Lamb, Chris and Robin Smith et al, Greig aligned
himself with England before it became clear that South Africa was out of the
international game long-term. He made his debut in the wonderful, neglected,
series against the Rest of the World XI in which replaced the cancelled South
Africa tour in 1970 (those games were regarded as Tests at the time, but are
not so now; it was a fantastic series, and I must write about it).
One personal memory from 1976. Kent were drawn at home
to Sussex in the second round of the Gillette Cup: http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/36/36340.html.
We won the other two one-day trophies
that season, but were bundled out of the 60-over competition by a brilliant
all-round performance by Tony Greig, whose 62 and three for 45 were the best
batting and bowling of the game (he took three catches too). This against the
best side in the country. He was quite brilliant. Nobody who saw him that day
could doubt that Tony Greig was a great cricketer.
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