Cricket legend visits Halstead CC
Sir Garfield Sobers, one of the greatest cricketers of all time, visited Halstead Cricket Club this week.
Sir Garfield, 81, in Essex to promote cricket tours to his home island of Barbados, watched Halstead’s youngsters train and play an Under-13 fixture against Colchester before entertaining club members with tales of his illustrious career.
He had earlier visited Felsted School, and it was through the club’s connection there that the legendary West Indian visited Star Stile.
After the training session, Sobers, the veteran of 93 Test matches – who was knighted for services to cricket in 1975 – told of his mammoth maiden Test hundred, 365 not out against Pakistan at Sabina Park, Jamaica, in 1958.
On breaking Len Hutton’s record for the then highest Test score, he said: “I never thought about the record, I was just delighted to get my first 100. Clyde (Walcott) told me after I got 300 that I needed 64 for the record.”
On his six sixes in an over, for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan at Swansea in 1968, he said: “Six sixes were never on my mind. I never thought of it until I’d got five.
“I got so far and thought I might as well do it. I knew what Malcolm Nash (the unlucky bowler) was going to do (with the final delivery) and I just went with it.”
He emphasised the importance of hard work and practice to the Halstead youngsters. “The nets are where you learn, not in the middle. That is where you go to execute it,” he said.
“You see a lot of cricketers go in the nets and play around because they know they can’t get out. You don’t get runs in the nets, you go in there to learn. No-one worked harder than me on a cricket field.”
Club chairman Mark Surridge, who put together the evening, said: “The great man was in his element with a fund of amazing memories, and I could see the focus and concentration in the eyes of every one of our young lads, listening to someone who’d played the game before and done the hard work.
“There was no end of good advice on the importance of nets and practice.”
