Frank Worrell is the most important West Indian cricketer of all time – and arguably surpassed only by Usain Bolt and Bob Marley as an icon of the Caribbean.
He was born 100 years ago today, on 1 August 1924. It’s therefore timely to acknowledge his significant legacy and contribution to cricket, both in the West Indies and worldwide.
The Player
“He never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke.” Neville Cardus
Worrell was a right-handed middle-order batsman and left-handed bowler.
His batting was effortless and graceful, and he always appeared to have plenty of time in which to play his shots. He also bowled medium-pace with the new ball, and finger-spin with the old one.
He played his first Test against England in Trinidad in 1948, and his last at The Oval in 1963.
In 51 matches he scored 3,860 runs at an average of 49.48 including nine centuries, took 69 wickets, and claimed 43 catches.
After scoring 97 on debut, he followed up with an innings of 131 not out in his second game. His batting average then stayed above 50.00 until his forty-second match.
Worrell’s series highlights included 539 runs at 89.83 in England in 1950 and 398 runs at 49.75 against India at home in 1952/53.
His highest innings were 261 at Trent Bridge in 1950, and 237 against India in Kingston in 1952/53, an undefeated 197 against England in Bridgetown in 1959/60, and 191 not out at Trent Bridge in 1957.
As a result of his feats in 1950, he was named one of Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Year.
With the ball, he took 17 wickets at 19.35 in Australia in 1951/52. His returns when opening the bowling included 7/70 at Headingley in 1957 and 6/38 in a six-wicket victory in Adelaide in 1951/52.
The latter match was most notable for its fourth day being played on Christmas Day.
Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott were collectively known as “the three Ws.” Remarkably, the trio was born within 18 months and two kilometres of each other on the tiny island of Barbados, which at the time had a population of just 155,000.
The three were even delivered by the same midwife.
Collectively they played 143 Tests and scored 12,113 runs including 39 centuries. On two occasions, the trio scored centuries in the same innings.
However, Worrell was far more than a talented batsman and bowler.
The Captain
“[Worrell] was possessed of an almost unbridled passion for social equality.
“It was the men on his side who had no social status whatever for whose interest and welfare he was always primarily concerned. They repaid him with an equally fanatical devotion,” CLR James recalled.
Before him, the only black man to have led the West Indian side had been George Headley.
Headley had done it just once, following inter-island horse-trading which saw the team’s leadership change for each match of a home series in 1947/48.
By being appointed captain, Worrell made history. For 32 years since the side’s admission to Test cricket, its administrators had considered that only a white man could be worthy of the role.
His appointment was the culmination of many years of advocacy by numerous influential West Indians, most notably Marxist and ‘The Nation’ editor James.
Worrell assumed the captaincy in 1960 when the side was struggling for success, and he was aged 36 and past his best as a cricketer.
His dignity, tactical skill, man-management and calmness under pressure transformed the side.
Sir Learie Constantine wrote that “his greatest contribution was to destroy forever the myth that a coloured cricketer was not fit to lead a team.”
Under his leadership, a team comprising new players from many different nations, that had not played to its potential for a number of years, became arguably the strongest in the world.
Where once cricketers from Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago had generally remained in separate groups, now they were unified both on and off the field.
The side also played an attractive brand of cricket far removed from the attritional and cautious one that had characterised the 1950s.
Worrell would lead the West Indies in three series and 15 matches, for nine wins and just three losses. His team lost 1-2 in Australia in 1960/61, then won 5-0 at home to India in 1961/62, and 3-1 in England in 1963.
His appointment was also critical to the side subsequently becoming a powerhouse in the late 1970s.
The 1960/61 series in Australia has gone down in history as the most exciting one ever contested. It commenced in Brisbane with the visitors defending a 233-run target, and tying the game by taking Australia’s last four wickets for six runs, three of them with run-outs.
Then in Adelaide, the home side’s last pair forced a draw by somehow surviving the match’s last 283 deliveries.
In Melbourne, a world-record 90,800 spectators attended the second day’s play, before Australia claimed the series with a two-wicket victory.
After the ‘Melbourne Evening Herald’ announced that the West Indies party would travel by car to a civic reception before returning home, a crowd of 500,000 lined the streets to farewell it.
Following the series, it was also announced that each future contest between the two sides would be played for the Frank Worrell Trophy.
The West Indies’ home series against India in 1961/62 included one particularly noteworthy incident when a short ball delivered by Charlie Griffith fractured the skull of visiting captain Nari Contractor.
Worrell was the first person to donate blood for the transfusion that saved the batsman’s life.
His side’s 1963 series victory over England featured much exciting cricket. When the match at Lord’s entered its final over, any of four results was possible.
It would ultimately end with England just six runs short of victory, but eight wickets down and with non-striker Colin Cowdrey’s broken left arm encased in plaster.
Subsequently, the West Indians, who had toured England only five times in 35 years, would be invited by public demand twice as often.
However, Worrell was far more than an on-field leader.
The statesman
Worrell’s dignity, charm and political skills, and the affection in which he was universally held, transferred directly to his post-cricket life.
Constantine wrote that he “saw the many diverse elements of the West Indies as a whole, a common culture and outlook separated only by the Caribbean Sea”.
While he had grown up in Barbados, his interests would take him around the world. He moved first to Trinidad, and later to Jamaica. Even before making his Test debut, he had signed a contract to play with Radcliffe in the Central Lancashire League for 500 pounds per season.
In both 1949/50 and 1950/51, he toured India with a Commonwealth XI.
After the West Indies’ tour to England in 1957, he remained there to undertake an economics degree at the University of Manchester. As a result, he missed the side’s next three-Test series.
In England in 1964, following his retirement, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and a street in Radcliffe was named Worrell Close in his honour.
In the Caribbean, he was appointed a Senator in Jamaica’s Parliament, and a Warden at the University of the West Indies.
He continued to serve the West Indian team as a manager and selector and as a mentor to new captain Garry Sobers.
He also accompanied the side to India in 1966/67.
His continuing involvement played an important role in the team subsequently becoming one of the greatest of all time.
Worrell was a federalist who had always strongly supported autonomy for each of the Caribbean’s British colonies.
Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago duly gained nationhood in 1962, followed by Barbados and Guyana in 1966. Most of the other island colonies had also become independent nations by the early 1980s.
What might have been
Worrell was a national hero destined to achieve great things for the people of the West Indies, as a politician and diplomat.
Unfortunately, his life was cut tragically short. In 1967, just three years after his retirement as a player, he fell ill and was forced to return home from a West Indies tour to India.
Diagnosed with leukaemia, he would die one month later aged just 42.
However, his legacy has not been forgotten. He was the first sportsman to be honoured with a memorial service at London’s Westminster Abbey.
Australia and the West Indies still contest the Frank Worrell Trophy – and first-class grounds in both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have been named after him.
When Wisden Cricketers Almanack invited 100 experts from around the world to name their five greatest cricketers of the twentieth century in 2000, Worrell claimed the sixth-highest number of votes.
Only Don Bradman, Garry Sobers, Jack Hobbs, Shane Warne and Viv Richards polled more strongly.
Clearly, the support for Worrell was based on far more than his batting and bowling exploits. Then in 2009, he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.
The state of West Bengal in India celebrates ‘Frank Worrell Day’ annually when hundreds of people donate blood at Eden Gardens in Kolkata.
The University of the West Indies hosts an annual Sir Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture, and also named a Hall of Residence after him. And in Barbados, his face has appeared on both a banknote and a stamp.
The current-day West Indies could well use a leader like Frank Worrell, both on and off the field.
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