April 30, 1983. Gordon Greenidge, unbeaten on 154, left his innings unfinished and rushed from Antigua to Barbados to be beside his ailing daughter. Arunabha Sengupta looks back at the day the gravest of tragedies overshadowed the on-field brilliance of the great West Indian opening batsman.
The series had already been decided. West Indies had won the first Test at Kingston and the fourth at Bridgetown.
The pitch at St. John’s was true and easy paced. The game was a gift from heaven for the batsmen. Six of them posted hundreds, two scored blistering 90s. Yet, for one of the noblest and best batsmen of all, this divine bounty came with the cruellest curse of God.
No one scored more than Gordon Greenidge in the match. But the blow that followed shattered the brave heart of the opening batsman into infinite fragments of grief.
Greenidge had not scored a century in Test cricket for six years. His last hundred had come against Pakistan at Kingston in 1977. His celebrated partner, Desmond Haynes, had not scored one since June 1980. Now, after India had piled up 457 on the most benign of wickets, both the men fancied their chances as they batted out the few remaining minutes of the second day.
The attack consisting of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall and newcomer Winston Davis had looked less than threatening. The Indian batsmen had made merry. Dilip Vengsarkar had launched an audacious attack to score 94 from just 103 deliveries. Kapil Dev had blasted and bludgeoned his way to an even quicker 98 from 97. Alongside, Ravi Shastri had provided the calm backdrop for the fireworks with a hundred compiled over six hours.
Now, on the third day, a stiff neck restricted Kapil to just 4 overs. Greenidge and Haynes made merry against a rather toothless offerings of Madan Lal, Shastri, 17-year-old debutant Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and 38-year-old veteran Srinivas Venkataraghavan.
Runs were plundered with consummate ease. The two maestros cruised to yet another hundred run partnership, and posted their hundreds without raising a sweat. At 134, Greenidge passed his previous highest score in Test cricket. It was nearing the end of the day’s play when India claimed the second new ball. In the absence of Kapil, Yashpal Sharma was asked to use it with Madan. And Haynes swung him into the hands of Ravi Shastri at long-leg, gifting the Indian middle-order batsman his only wicket in Test cricket.
Haynes walked back for 136, and the score read 296 for 1. Only once in the course of their lofty collaborations would Greenidge and Haynes ever put on more — adding 298 on the same ground against England seven years later.
With the day coming to an end, Winston Davis came out to join Greenidge at the wicket as the night-watchman. Stumps were drawn with West Indies on 301 for 1, Greenidge unbeaten on 154 made in 375 minutes with 14 boundaries and a six.
Tragic tidings
However, when the home side resumed their innings on the following morning, it was the local hero Viv Richards who walked out alongside Davis. Greenidge had departed to his native Barbados, where two-year-old daughter Ria was critically ill with kidney infection.
Greenidge became the first and only person in the history of Test cricket to register on the scoreboard as ‘retired not out’.
The show, following the dictates of the old cliché, had to go on. West Indies continued their innings, losing 4 quick wickets, before Clive Lloyd and Jeff Dujon got hundreds to secure a 93-run lead. The match ultimately petered out into a high-scoring draw. Greenidge was adjudged Man of the Match, but he was not there to accept the award.
He sat with his young daughter, whose condition slowly turned critical, beyond the ability of the best of doctors. Life slowly ebbed away from the girl as she lay in the hospital. Two days after the end of the Test match, her tender soul departed the earth. On May 5, 1983, in one of those inexplicable tales of fate, little Ria Greenidge breathed her last.
Years later, Greenidge recalled: “It was another grey area of my career and life.”
What followed
Grief can be crippling — especially the untold grief of losing a child. Yet, as Marcel Proust said, it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
A mere 20 days after the tragedy, Greenidge turned out for Hampshire against Worcestershire at Southampton, scoring 116 in the successful fourth innings chase. Three days later he made 68 against a Kent attack, consisting of Derek Underwood, Graham Dilley, Richard Ellison and Chris Cowdrey. In just about a month, he was playing in the Prudential World Cup.
The year that followed was the best in the distinguished career of the maestro. In the 16 Tests that subsequently took place till the end of the summer of 1984, Greenidge amassed 1,197 runs at the average of 63 with 5 hundreds.
(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry.He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)
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