by Arunabha Sengupta
Measured from its oceanic base to apex, Mauna Kea stands at 10,200 metres — considerably taller than Mt Everest. Yet, with much of it submerged under the Pacific Ocean, the world does not recognise this volcanic island as the highest summit. Only 4205 meters rise above sea level.
In many ways the career of Barry Richards is analogous. Only his staggering achievements were even less visible to the world.
Just four Test matches. It should have been 100 or more.
Those four Tests saw him plunder 508 runs with two centuries of pedigree and portent.
In 1968, his first full season for Hampshire, he hit 206 off Nottinghamshire. Hampshire secretary EDR Eagar, former captain of the county side, observed, “I have never seen better driving since Hammond.”
Don Bradman himself said that he was at least as good as Jack Hobbs and Len Hutton. Wisden agreed that young Barry Richards resembled Hutton.
There was perhaps a genuine reason for these multiple comparisons to Hutton. While a student at Durban High School, Richards pored over the action pictures of Hutton with intense interest. “I think his technique was the best I have ever seen,” he recalled.
Other high and mighty voices vouched for his greatness (not the least of those which still echo today is, of course, his own).
The world acknowledged that along with Graeme Pollock, he was another supreme loss to the cricketing world. But, Pollock at least had the opportunity to score more than 2,000 runs in Test cricket. Barry Richards managed a fourth of them in his 4 Tests.
Those four Tests remained the tip of a phenomenal iceberg. Unprecedented mountains of runs were promised to be revealed if ever the murky waters of the South African situation dried up and the splendour of his batting was once again allowed to project itself in international cricket.
From time to time the volcanic eruptions from his blade were momentous enough to shake the earth up and make it take notice. From the county grounds of England, the Sheffield Shield games Down Under and the Currie Cup matches, enormous ripples did splash across the sphere of attention. Yet, most often Barry Richards had to make do in lesser arenas, the breath-taking brilliance that should have been lapped up by the world watched by a few hard-core enthusiasts in Southampton.
Thereafter he ruled over the First-Class scene, vanquishing the most formidable of bowlers till no challenge remained.
Indeed, things got so monotonously easy that he created his own curious contests with himself. He decided, for instance, to turn his bat sideways and play an over using just the edge of his bat — in those days when edges were actually edges.
There was also the occasion when he imagined the ground to be the face of the clock and struck six boundaries in an over, traversing the time around the dial in clockwise order.
He often got bored, threw his wicket away when twenty or thirty away from yet another regulation, regal hundred.
Yet, when he retired, he finished with 80 centuries from 339 matches, amassing 28,358 runs at 54.74.
From 1968 to 1977, Richards piled up 15,843 runs in England at 50.94. His association with Gordon Greenidge at the top of the order for Hampshire became stuff of legend.
Today Barry Richards is a tad prone to being the grumpy old man of world cricket, too frequently lamenting about the raw deal meted out to him by the hands of fate, finding flaws with more or less every aspect of modern cricket and the current day cricketers.
Yes, he was hard done … and so were some other great talents of South African cricket. But even harder done were some of the non-White cricketers who never saw the light of the day from the dark pits of apartheid, and of course there was the case of the long-subjugated people of an abnormal society where normal sport was not possible.
A big part of his complaints, however, is that World Series Cricket of the Packer Circus has never got official or first-class status from the cricket authorities, even though it was some of the toughest cricket of the highest quality ever witnessed. That, in my opinion, is a genuine cause for discontent.
With the greatest players of the world assembled together, Barry Richards played 5 World Series SuperTests, amassing 554 runs at 79.14. The next best averages were Greg Chappell, with 56.60 and Viv Richards with 55.69.
If proof of quality is ever required, one just has to look at those figures.
Barry Richards was born on 21 July 1945.