This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
“The West Indians, these guys, if they get on top, they are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend … to make them grovel.”
It’s 50 years ago this June that the then England captain, Tony Greig, said these words, and, in doing so, sparked one of the most seismic Test series in history. The word “grovel”, with its echoes of slavery and servility, was inflammatory enough, but its use by a tall white South African at the height of apartheid made it exponentially worse.
“We took that seriously,” said Viv Richards. “Very, very seriously.”
The West Indies had been beaten 5-1 in Australia the previous winter and were tired of being derided as calypso cricketers, happy-go-lucky entertainers who couldn’t stick it when the going got tough.
The long hot summer of 1976 was a chance to put this right. It was a time of febrile racial tension: unrest in Southall following the stabbing of a Pakistani man, riots at the Notting Hill Carnival and Eric Clapton, of all people, launching into a bigoted tirade at a Birmingham gig. It was, in Richards’ words, “a step beyond the sport, where a whole lot of things needed defending rather than the cricket ball itself”.
Two memories above all endure from the West Indies’ 3-0 victory. The first comes from the final Test at the Oval, the outfield so parched and desert brown that the herringbones of the subsurface drainage system were visible. Richards — memorably described by DJ Trevor Nelson as “the Malcolm X to [captain] Clive Lloyd’s Martin Luther King” — flayed the England bowlers to all parts of SE11 on his way to 291. Many of those runs came from what West Indians call “not a man move” shots, the ball hit so hard as to be past the fielders before they could react.
The second was from the third Test at Old Trafford. Mike Selvey, making his England debut, described the Saturday afternoon as having “a really heavy, overburdening atmosphere. All day there had been this incessant noise from the crowd, cans banging. It was mesmeric and quite threatening. You could feel it winding down into you.”
Brian Close was opening bat for England: 45 years old, no helmet, arm guard or thigh pad. Michael Holding was bowling: the long, rhythmical run-up, head held high like a cobra, so smooth and quiet to the wicket that the umpires nicknamed him “Whispering Death”. As reggae star Prince Far I sang: “Him full of bowling. Heavy, heavy bowling.”
Close’s view was that “A cricket ball can’t hurt you. It’s only on you a second. Pain’s all in the mind” (to which Ken Barrington had replied “Yeah, but it still fucking hurts.”) Holding would now give Close plenty of opportunity to test this theory out. First, a blow to the chest: Close taking a few steps away, patting down the pitch. Then a 90mph bouncer which would have hit him straight between the eyes if he hadn’t snapped his head away at the very last moment — a ball so fast that Collis King, standing 30 yards back at first slip, dives out of the way as wicketkeeper Deryck Murray takes it high to his left.
Now a delivery which smacks Close in the ribs, and this time he does buckle, does grimace, does stagger. Another bouncer which shaves Close’s chest. A warning from umpire Bill Alley. A ball slamming into Close’s thigh. Irresistible force, meet immovable object.
At the end of the session, his torso criss-crossed by welts and bruises — Pat Pocock said it looked “as if somebody had forced handfuls of marbles beneath his skin” — Close had scored a single run in 80 minutes. He refused an X-ray, but accepted a Scotch.
Lloyd was unrepentant. “I developed the killer instinct. Nice guys never rule the world.” For his part, Greig had no complaints, saying he’d have done the same thing, and, at the end of the series, he dropped to the grass and crawled on his hands and knees towards the West Indian fans. “We were beaten by a magnificent team playing some fantastic cricket,” he said, “and I was quite happy to do the grovelling.”
The overriding consensus was that Greig, a confrontational sort, had made the initial “grovel” comment without thought but equally without malice. “It was just Greig being Greig and overdoing the relish,” Bob Willis said. Richards would later agree that “the way it came across was perhaps not the way he meant it”, and Greig himself would enjoy a long post-playing friendship with Holding in commentary boxes and hotel bars across the cricketing world.
The series had a huge legacy. On the pitch, it was a harbinger of a new force in Test cricket: after the 1977-79 World Series Cricket interlude, and a New Zealand series in 1980 marred by umpiring controversies, the West Indies didn’t lose any of their next 29 series over 15 years.
Off the pitch, it was special for the Windrush generation and their descendants, who in many cases had found life in Britain tough. “Our spectators in England struggled more than those anywhere else in the world,” said Andy Roberts. “They said to us, ‘You don’t know how we feel when we lose and have to go back to the assembly lines and the factories. When we win, we can go back and hold up our heads high.’”
