Pratham Chhabria | 1:27pm BST 26 May 2025
Part 6
Pratham: So in that vein, you’d beaten England, you’d beaten India in the series before, you’d
lost to Australia was close. Were you disappointed there wasn’t a series that was scheduled till
1965?
Lance Gibbs: Well, there’s a group of teams and all of them had to be considered. And if they
weren’t considered (keeping in mind their own schedules) early on they’d never have come
down (to the Caribbean) later.
Pratham: I see.
Lance Gibbs: You got to give them a chance.
Pratham: So there’s that gap between ‘63 and ‘65. And Australia finally filled that gap. They tour
the Caribbean in ’65.
Pratham: We talked about how Charlie Griffith had been accused over his bowling action by
members of the Australian team. Them saying he potentially chucked and all.
Pratham: You mentioned to me earlier like you couldn’t tell for certain whether he chucked or
not…
Lance Gibbs: No no no…If I’m fielding in the gully I can’t really tell for sure…unless it’s taped
and you look at it over and over and over…
Pratham: Fair enough.
Pratham: Well, the First Test actually saw you bowl very little…because Wes Hall had one of his
best ever games. He took 9 wickets. He did incredibly well.
Pratham: What were his main skills as a fast bowler?
Lance Gibbs: He would just run in and bowl, over and over.
Lance Gibbs: I remember him…Kanhai dropped a catch. Wes Hall was bowling at Leeds? And
Kanhai was at midwicket. And Wes Hall run, deliver the ball. And (The batsman) hit it up in the
air to midwicket. And Wes Hall run all the way from where he was and ended up where Kanhai
had been! You remember that?
Pratham: I don’t! I’m hearing it for the first time actually.
Lance Gibbs: Out of Kanhai’s hand – a sitter!
Pratham: So as a fast bowler, his main skills were what – the stamina aspect of it.
Lance Gibbs: Yeah yeah.
Lance Gibbs: Early on in the innings he could swing it – get it to go away from the batsman. But
after that, he can’t do anything with the ball.
Pratham: So basically he’d move the new ball upfront and swing it – but he wasn’t much of a
swinger of the ball when it was old…
Lance Gibbs: That’s right – he would tell you in person.
Pratham: Well, you ended up taking your 100th wicket in the Third deciding Test of that series at
Bourda. And you took 9 wickets in that game. What do you remember about achieving that
landmark?
Lance Gibbs: It doesn’t come back to me at all, the memory.
Pratham: All righty, well, not a problem.
Pratham: Then there was the Test after that – the Fourth Test. That was the Test where famously
Bill Lawry and Bob Simpson in the first innings…the score 650 for 6 declared, both of them
scored double centuries followed by Bob Cowper who scored another 100.
Pratham: And in that 4th Test in the first innings, you bowl 73 overs!
Lance Gibbs: How much?
Pratham: 73 overs. Which is a lot!
Pratham: 73 overs would be a lot to bowl over the course of a whole match…
Lance Gibbs: By the end, I had a bruised finger.
Lance Gibbs: Yeah, my fingers you used to eat off, man!
Lance Gibbs: Show me something else, man (Both chuckle a bunch)!
Lance Gibbs: I bowled 73 overs for how much?
Pratham: 73 overs for 168 runs. With 2 wickets to your name.
Lance Gibbs: Jesus.
Pratham: Well, I was going to ask you just in general?
Pratham: When you have a situation where you have batsmen on a flat pitch – these two were high quality batsmen, averaged 45 in Test match cricket, the both of them.
Pratham: And you have just an absolute, you know, pancake of a surface, right. There’s a little
bit of bounce to it – but there’s pretty much nothing for the bowlers in terms of movement or
anything.
Pratham: When you’re in that kind of zone where the pitch isn’t doing anything for you and
you’ve got two batsmen who are dominant, how do you look to try to stop them?
Lance Gibbs: You have to try doing various things. I’d go to the captain and tell him to try this
and try that and try this and try that. And if he’s sensible, he’ll agree with you because you can’t
do anything else.
Pratham: So do you think actually at times if you keep trying things in those scenarios its better
then just bowling consistently one line & one length?
Lance Gibbs: Yeah, yeah.
Pratham: That performance aside, the West Indies did end up winning that series at home and
defeated Australia for the first time in a Test series because of that.
Pratham: You’ve beaten Australia at home, you’ve beaten England in England, India you’ve
beaten before home and away. South Africa you didn’t play for obvious reasons.
Pratham: So, West Indies had a very good claim at this point that they were the best team in the
world, for sure, right. Cause you beat Australia.
Pratham: Moving on from this Australia West Indies series, you revisited England in a series that
was decided by the same margin that you toured when you went in 63.
Pratham: Which is to say, West Indies won in ‘63 by 3-1. In ‘66, you also won by 3-1, the West
Indies.
Pratham: But, my understanding is that even though Wes and Charlie were very big in ‘63 – they
were at their peak or close to it. They had been really significant threats.
Pratham: For this tour (1966), they weren’t as much of a threat, particularly Charlie. Wes still
had some moments but…
Lance Gibbs: Everybody was telling him he was a chucker.
Pratham: And so you think it got to him?
Lance Gibbs: I think it got to him, yeah.
Pratham: So you think he deliberately dropped his pace?
Lance Gibbs: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Pratham: I see.
Pratham: Now their decline didn’t factor as much into the result, thanks to Sobers who had one
of his best series ever both with the bat and the ball and in the field too.
Pratham: In this ‘66 tour, was he at this point entirely bowling left arm pace? Did he alternate
much with spin at this point or was he just bowling seam?
Lance Gibbs: He was half and half (bowling pace and spin).
Pratham: Now there is one thing about this series that was reminiscent of the previous one, not
only in terms of the result, but also how the first match went.
Pratham: The first match at Old Trafford was again played on a good pitch to bat on. Conrad
Hunte again scored a century.
Pratham: And then there was a 10 wicket haul that you had, like in the First Test of the ‘63 tour.
On a wearing pitch that you used to bowl out the opposition.
Pratham: I have some footage of your bowling in that ‘66 series actually.
Pratham: And one of the things that is very striking to me is how you were varying your pace a
lot.
Pratham: On surfaces like this, where there’s more wear and tear, did you try to deliberately
vary your pace a little bit more to sow more doubt in the batsman’s mind?
Lance Gibbs: Yeah.
Lance Gibbs: Also, if I see a spot somewhere along the line, I can use it.
Lance Gibbs: If there’s more pace off the pitch from outside the off stump, I’ll start from the
outside. If it’s at the middle stump, I will start in the middle.
Pratham: Now one thing I noticed in this tour and also in ‘63 was that Colin Cowdrey, who was a
very famous batsman from England…
Lance Gibbs: Good player of spin.
Pratham: Good player of spin, yes – and yet you were able to dismiss him consistently.
Pratham: In ‘57, Ramadhin got that 7 wicket haul first up and then Peter May and him
(Cowdrey) put on a very big partnership in the second innings. It was a 400 run stand to save
them after they had been earlier bowled for cheap.
Pratham: From that, he had developed a reputation somewhat of engaging in what is known as
“pad play”
Lance Gibbs: Pad first and bat behind the bat?
Pratham: Yes, yes. If you took a decent enough stride, if you were on the front foot, the umpires
wouldn’t give you out.
Pratham: So he exploited that a ton in ’57.
Pratham: Did he try to pad play you a lot? Like would he place his pad in front and basically try
to counter your threat in ‘63 and ’66?
Lance Gibbs: No, he didn’t try to do that to me a lot. Cause he knew that I would master that!
Pratham: He’d also developed a type of sweep shot, a paddle sweep, to play against spinners.
And he’d often kind of just delicately nudge it to toy with them.
Pratham: Did he try to play against you a fair amount?
Lance Gibbs: No.
Pratham: Do you suspect that it was because of the bounce you were generating that he didn’t
feel comfortable doing that?
Lance Gibbs: The bounce that I would get, and I was trickier than a lot of the other fellas that
were gonna bowl at him. He wasn’t going to risk having me get him off the top edge.
Pratham: Fair enough.
Pratham: So that ‘66 series happens, and then you go to the subcontinent.
Pratham: And you face India this time -‘66-’67 in India.
Pratham: There were some figures from the past that were recognizable.
Pratham: Chandu Borde was a batsman who had toured the West Indies 6 years back. Farokh
Engineer, the wicketkeeper batsman.
Pratham: They both scored centuries – and Farokh in Madras ended up scoring one almost by
lunch. He played a very aggressive knock.
Lance Gibbs: Was he getting into the fast bowlers?
Pratham: Largely! He took a liking to Wes and Charlie in that particular series. (Note: While ball
by ball records do not exist for this Test, the 35 runs conceded by Wes Hall & 46 runs conceded
by Charlie Griffith in each of their respective first spells in the Third Test at Madras where
Engineer only played in as opener gives some indication of this aggression).
Pratham: He did bring up his 100 with a single off your bowling.
Pratham: What was your impression of Borde vs Farokh? In terms of how they combatted your
spin?
Lance Gibbs: They played against me in a different way. They didn’t play a lot with the pad.
Pratham: So their bat was…
Lance Gibbs: Way, way in front.
Pratham: And were either Farokh or Borde mainly playing you off the front foot or were they
trying to go back?
Lance Gibbs: They played me off the front foot.
Pratham: That ‘66-’67 series was also the first time you saw a bunch of new bowlers.
Pratham: Now, they didn’t play all together as one, but they were 4 young spin bowlers from
India. It would have been the first time you’d seen them and played against them.
Pratham: Those were Bishan Singh Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Erapalli Prasanna, and
Srinivas Venkataraghavan.
Pratham: What were your recollections of them as bowlers? How would you rate the 4?
Lance Gibbs: They were useful…but sometimes they were afraid to take chances.
Pratham: In terms of that, who exactly would you refer to as more cautious of the 4?
Lance Gibbs: Bedi was not afraid at all – the rest at times were.
Pratham: Bedi would give it a lot of air, a lot of flight.
Lance Gibbs: Bedi would take chances.
Pratham: Chandra took a 6-fer in that series, actually. Googly was difficult for a lot of your
batsmen, according to Sobers.
Pratham: Very quick in the air, was he not?
Lance Gibbs: Yeah, yeah.
Pratham: Did any of them come to you for advice?
Lance Gibbs: Oh yeah – man, all cricketers talk, man. I couldn’t remember in my mind what I
exactly said to them – but I do remember having a chat.
Pratham: After this, you had a series at home in ‘68 versus England.
Pratham: One of the main partners in terms of bowling long spells, David Holford, was paired up
with you.
Pratham: Now, he was a leg spinner – and we discussed in part 1 (of this interview) how you
bowled some leg spin when you were much younger and how you’d occasionally…
Lance Gibbs: Bowl one in Tests, yeah.
Pratham: So you both were different styles of bowlers – but did you try to mentor him given you
were now the senior spinner on the side? And if you did mentor him, what were the kind of
things you were telling him?
Lance Gibbs: I liked bowling leg breaks. I think you beat the batsman more often then the
off-spinner as mostly you’d have right handers. If you’re bowling for your team, you’re generally
pitching outside off. If you’re a leg spinner, you can pitch it anywhere.
Lance Gibbs: (On Holford) He wasn’t a bad bowler but…
Lance Gibbs: He’d become successful before he really pushed on, you know?
Lance Gibbs: I come on to bowl, I’m coming to bowl right away at somebody I know that I can
be able to out.
Lance Gibbs: You can’t be scared when you’re playing Test cricket. Some fellas, they hear
about this batsman and that batsman – and they allow that to destroy the mind.
Pratham: And you felt Holford…
Lance Gibbs: Yeah, yeah. Once he was hearing things, he’d lose it.
Pratham: Right, right.
Pratham: In that ‘68 tour versus England, Gary was the captain at that point, Garry Sobers.
Pratham: And he made a decision that was a little bit baffling for a lot of people. It was the 4th
Test and he declared a little bit earlier than anticipated. And that declaration resulted in going
aggressive and chasing down the target in the 4th innings.
(Note: In that 4th Test of the 1968
home series vs England at Trinidad, West Indies scored 526/7 declared in their 1st innings.
England responded with 404 all out, with the part-time leggie Basil Butcher triggering a collapse,
taking a 5 wicket haul in the process. His wickets alongside fellow leg spinner Willie Rodriguez
taking 3 convinced Garry Sobers that England were susceptible to this type of bowling. After the
West Indies made 92/2 in 30 overs, Garry Sobers declared the innings. This left England with a
target of 215 to chase down inside 2 ¾ hours or 54 overs. They won with 8 balls to spare.)
Pratham: Did he consult anyone before making that decision? Did you feel it was the right call to
declare that 3rd innings a bit early?
Lance Gibbs: I don’t recall being consulted.
Pratham: I see.
Pratham: They ended up winning it, and then the fifth Test was a draw. Speaking of that Test,
you took another 5-fer in Guyana, your home ground. And there was a famous last wicket
partnership where Alan Knott and Jeff Jones and they blocked out the time against you to save
the Test match.
To be continued ……….
