Jack Noreiga, born April 15, 1936, was drafted into the West Indies team due to sheer desperation and depleted resources. However, the only series he played in was a successful one. Arunabha Sengupta looks at the life and career of the only West Indian bowler to capture 9 wickets in an innings.
Desperate Times
“The lean years”. In Michael Manley’s A History of West Indies Cricket that is the title of the chapter dealing with the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The great side of the early to mid-1960s had plummeted fast to the very rock bottom. They were in the midst of a period of 7 years without a series win. More remarkably, it was a period of11 years without a series win on the flat wickets at home.
After April 1965, the cricket crazy fans would have to wait till February 1974 for their next Test win at home.
After the 2-0 win in India in 1966-67, the Caribbean cricketers were going through the bleakest of streaks. In the next 31 Tests they played they won only 2 and lost 10.
The chief detriment was the bowling.
Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith had overstayed their careers for a considerable while and gradually limped to retirement.
The fast bowling coffers had been shorn off these riches, and in return all that had been added amounted to loose change.
Vanburn Holder (career Tests 40, wickets 109, average 33.27) was, at best, a medium-pacer.
Uton Dowe (Tests 4, wickets 12, average 44.50) was quicker, but ordinary enough to provoke the crowd commandment, “Dowe shalt not bowl.”
In the words of Manley, Grayson Shillingford (Tests 7, wickets 15, average 35.80) was ‘equally below Test standard’.
Added to that the great Garry Sobers was finally feeling the effects of age. At 34, his knee problem was getting increasingly serious. Besides, a floating bone in his left-shoulder ensured that, among other things, he had to give up his back of the hand style bowling. His batting did not really suffer, but he was considerably less effective as a bowler.
And finally there was Lance Gibbs. When India toured in 1971, the great off-spinner was left out of the West Indies side for the first time in 13 years. With valid reason too. The last three years had seen him pick up 38 wickets at 42.15 apiece, with 116 deliveries spent over each wicket.
When Sunil Gavaskar, the man who blazed through the 1971 tour scoring 774 runs, later spoke about the other great hero of the series, Dilip Sardesai, he remarked, “He showed us how to play fast bowling and in doing so gave us the confidence we needed to beat the West Indies.”
In reality, there was no fast bowling to be faced. In fact, there was hardly any sort of decent bowling on offer.
The West Indian selectors were desperate for options. And there were not many.
They looked in all nooks and crannies, in the hope of unearthing someone who could send down a few decent deliveries. And they zeroed in on an unassuming Trinidad tweaker in his mid-30s called Jack Noreiga.
From Club Cricketer to Test star
This tall off-spinner was at best a long-serving reliable club cricketer of the 1960s. He had played just a handful of First-Class matches. To be precise, before the 1971 season, he had played 3 matches, two of them way back in 1962.
Curiously, he had made his First-Class debut for Trinidad against the touring Indians of 1962. Bowling 44 overs in the match, he had picked up one solitary wicket, that of Nari Contractor.
Before 1971, his career had been limited to 10 First-Class wickets at 32 apiece.
And then he bowled for Trinidad and Tobago in early 1971. A bag of 6 wickets against Windward and Leeward Islands, with 4 for 28 in the second innings, was a promising start for this aging spinner. The following match catapulted him into limelight.
It was against the strong Barbados batting line up including the likes of Seymour Nurse and Sobers. However, the wicket of Queen’s Park Oval was helpful. Noreiga picked up 6 for 67 in the first innings, including Nurse, as Barbados were knocked over for 178. In the second innings, Sobers hit 76 but ultimately Noreiga snared him. He got Nurse again, and his final figures read 47-13-86-5. That meant 11 for the match, and the demonstration of an ability to bowl endless spells.
That was all the West Indian selectors were looking for. Someone who could bowl plenty of overs, simply because there were not too many people to do that in a Test.
With 5 First-Class matches under his belt, Noreiga was called up for Test duty. He was just a couple of months shy of his 35th birthday.
The 9-wicket haul
The first Test was at Sabina Park. Water seeped through the covers at one end of the wicket and that meant that Noreiga spent the entire first day of his Test career waiting for the game to begin.
When the match started on the second morning, Sobers considered the moisture on the track and opted to field. It was naturally up to the pacemen to provide the breakthroughs. Holford and Shillingford did strike and India were soon reeling at 75 for 5.
The recovery led by Sardesai is an oft-repeated story. Noreiga bowled most of the second and third day into the broad blade of the Indian stalwart as he compiled a superb double hundred. The only wicket the offie picked up was when he bowled the Indian wicketkeeper Pochiah Krishnamurthy. His figures read 1 for 69.
West Indies followed on before a 173-run partnership between Sobers and Rohan Kanhai took them out of the woods.
The initiation into the top level of the game was thus disappointing. However, for the second Test Noreiga was back in his home ground. Queen’s Park Oval once again responded to his offerings. And even as West Indian cricket plumbed new depths by losing their first ever Test match to India, Noreiga etched his name in the annals of Caribbean cricket.
The name is still there. In spite of the many, many great bowlers who have followed from the islands, the haul Noreiga managed in the first innings still stands as the best ever by a West Indian bowler.
The wicket was tailor-made for spin as Sunil Gavaskar made his debut. On the first day, it was made more difficult by uneven bounce. Bishan Bedi captured 3 wickets, EAS Prasanna 4, Srinivas Venkataraghavan one. West Indies were bowled out for 214.
When India batted, Gavaskar was dropped by Sobers off Holder at his personal score of 12. Thereafter West Indies had to wait and wait and wait. The breakthrough came at 68 when Ashok Mankad was castled by Shillingford for 44.
After that it was only Noreiga versus the Indian batsmen. There were quality spinners in the Indian team who were forced to share wickets among themselves. Noreiga had no such encumbrance. He bowled and bowled. With virtually no support from the other end.
The supporting spinner was in fact Jamaican leggie Arthur Barrett, yet another bowler of that West Indian team who would never rise above an occasional footnote in the history of the game (His career was limited to 6 Tests, 13 wickets, average 46.38).
Barrett sent down 37 overs without taking a wicket. Sobers too bowled quite a few overs of spin, without any success. Noreiga, on the other hand kept taking wickets. Salim Durani, curiously batting at No. 3, pushed one back to him. A solid partnership followed between Sardesai and Gavaskar. With the score on 186, Noreiga brought West Indies marginally back in the game by dismissing Gavaskar and captain Ajit Wadekar off successive balls.
The match was subsequently taken away from the hosts by a partnership between Sardesai and Eknath Solkar. India took a decisive 138-run lead. Sardesai followed up his first Test double hundred with another crucial 112. However, Noreiga dismissed him, Solkar and the rest of them. After Shillingford’s initial strike, the off-spinner captured the rest of the wickets to finish with 9 for 95 off 49.4 overs.
No other West Indian bowler has captured 9 wickets in an innings.
The success was quite remarkable, because between the Tests Noreiga had bowled against the tourists for Trinidad and had conceded over 100 runs without taking a single wicket.
The Indian spinners, spearheaded by Venkat, restricted the West Indians to 261 in the second innings. Following that Gavaskar hit 67 not out in the second innings as India cruised to a 7-wicket win. Noreiga did not manage to pick up the wicket that would have given him 10 for the match. His Herculean effort in the first innings thus came in a losing cause.
The remaining Tests
The series moved to Guyana, and at Georgetown West Indies decided to play Gibbs and Noreiga together.
The wicket was placid, Gavaskar was dropped four times on his way to 116, and the match ended in a tame draw. The two off-spinners bowled 92 overs between them with one wicket to show for their efforts. It was Noreiga who struck the first blow for West Indies in this Test, and thereafter there was no more success. Gibbs remained wicketless.
The next Test was in Barbados and both the spinners were dropped. On the quicker track, the selectors opted for a pace-heavy attack, and were perhaps justified in opting for a wrist-spinner in the form of Chinaman bowler Inshan Ali. The new debutant picked only one wicket as the match ended in a draw after the by-now regulation Gavaskar hundred.
For the fifth and final Test the series was back to Port of Spain. And predictably Noreiga was back in the side to bowl on his favourite surface.
The pitch did provide turn, but very, very slowly. The match was a marathon six-day affair. Noreiga picked up only one wicket in the first innings. However, with West Indies trying to force a win after taking a 166-run lead, he produced yet another epic bowling performance.
Once again, he bowled mostly at the resolute blade of Gavaskar. Having yet again benefitted from a dropped chance at 4, the young Indian opener had scored 124 in the first innings. In the second essay he batted for nearly 9 hours for an impeccable 220. With practically no support at the other end, Noreiga sent down 53.4 overs to finish with 5 for 129.
The match once again ended in a draw, giving India the series 1-0. Noreiga ended with 17 wickets from 4 Tests at 29, 15 of those scalps coming at Queen’s Park Oval.
He was the best West Indian bowler of the series by far. The one that followed on the bowling table was Sobers, with 12 wickets at 33.41. No one else captured more than 7.
True, as a spinner he was far from world-class. But perhaps, in that West Indian side, he came closest to being one. He had good control over line and length and was not afraid to give the ball plenty of air.
End of career
By the next season, though, Noreiga had lost the edge in his bowling. His 13 wickets in the domestic season came at over 40 apiece. That included a solitary match for Trinidad against the visiting New Zealanders. He sent down 40 overs, conceded 110 runs and did not manage a wicket.
In the Test series against the Kiwis, Sobers banked on his cousin David Holford. Gibbs was still struggling for form, and played just two Tests without much success. The other spinner’s slot was shared between Inshan Ali, Raphick Jumadeen and a one-Test non-wonder named Tony Howard. Those days saw plenty of strange names in the West Indian bowling department.
Noreiga played two matches in the 1972-73 season and one in 1974-75. His career virtually started and ended in those few months of 1971. Hence his Test career stopped with those 17 wickets in 4 Tests at 29. Curiously, his 11 runs place him in the select club of cricketers with fewer runs than wickets.
In First-Class cricket he captured 68 from 21 matches, at 29.67. Of these, 48 were captured at his favourite Queen’s Park Oval, at 20.77.
According to his mates in the dressing room, he was a jovial character with a wonderful sense of
He did have his responsibilities. Having made history with his 9 wickets, he went on to father 9 children. And bringing them up was not an easy task. But he went about it cheerfully, and coaching was one of the occupations he opted for to make ends meet.
For long, he continued to be seen in every major match played at Queen’s Park Oval.
Noreiga passed away after stomach surgery at the age of 67.