How Gordon Greenidge saved my bacon — a second dispatch from the Duchy of Dopamine Deficiency

There are times when you forget who you are and what you are, and then you lose a sense of where. That is when you need some help to help yourself…

SOME THINGS JUST bob to the surface unaccountably, as if suddenly released from a tangle at the bottom of a filthy old pond.

I suffered badly with depression during my late-twenties and early thirties, roughly 1989-95. Awful, it was. Intractable. It very much felt at times how I imagine it must be at the bottom of a pond — though I do recognise that as similes go, that’s a pretty feeble one. A doctor who was trying to help me find a therapist — my GP, I suppose he was — asked me a question that I found hard to answer. In fact it was close to unbearable to even consider it.

“But surely, Nicholas,” he said (I’ve always been Nicholas to the NHS), “surely there must be something you’ve done in your life you feel proud of.”

I shook my head. “Nuh,” I said.

“Why don’t you just think for a moment and see what you can come up with,” he said, patiently, trying to be kind.

So I thought hard, probably for less than a minute, and I did come up with something.

“It’s a bit silly,” I said, “but I did feel proud for a while about one thing. But you’ll probably laugh…”

He promised he wouldn’t laugh, so I told him.

THE SUMMER OF 1976 was very hot. Everyone who was around then remembers it. Boiling, it was. You could fry an egg on your head if you were bald enough — but I was not yet there. The grass was yellow from July onwards.

But I didn’t care about the weather. I was in love. Not for once with a girl but with the touring West Indies cricket team, led utterly ruthlessly by their deadpan captain Clive Lloyd. They were talented in the extreme. They were also more charismatic than any rock band I’d ever goggled at. And they traumatised, utterly, a generation of England players sent out to play King Canute to their incoming tsunami of fast — really fast — bowling. I can remember their preferred batting order. Roughly reversed they were: Wayne Daniel, Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Deryck Murray, Collis King, Lloyd, Larry Gomes, IVA Richards, RC Fredericks and CG Greenidge. I think that’s right. They are certainly inked into my mental scorebook that way — a longish tail, but that hardly seemed to be a handicap to them. And one dreadful afternoon, I watched them spend the best part of a two-hour session pulverising two English veteran tough-nuts, Edrich and Close, with bowling pitched short of a length and aimed without compunction at the body and head. The two Englishmen stood and took it, or ducked, puffing out their cheeks and buckling at the knees as delivery after delivery rocketed off the parchment-coloured strip and smacked into forearm and ribcage. Edrich chewed his gum faster and faster. I can remember thinking, “I wonder how grateful these two old men are to their captain, the South African Tony Greig, for suggesting beforehand that his all-white England team were going to make the Windies’ ‘grovel’?” This was one of the violent mid-’70s Test series that precipitated the arrival of the protective helmet for batters.

Funnily enough, my spindly frame knew what it was like to take a hit from a 6oz hardened leather projectile (albeit probably at 75mph rather than 90), because I was quite good at cricket. At 16, in the year of my O levels, I’d graduated with a couple of classmates — the mighty Newton and Whitehead — to a regular berth in the First XI of the self-admiring independent grammar school we attended, a direct-grant institution that had given the world FR Leavis, Peter Hall and David Gilmour.

I hated it. I did no work whatsoever and was viewed by the headmaster as a danger to shipping because … because I was hairy and hangdog as a matter of style. But I was good at cricket and the surface the Firsts played on was manicured perfection, of a sort. It sat on a chalk base so utterly deadening that supposedly quick bowlers, now reduced to near impotency, cursed their mothers’ eyes to heaven. But, as always with clouds, there was a tissue of silver to be unfurled in due course: the pitch did offer increasing dusty turn as the summer wore on. Hence, we were the only posh school team out there that would conventionally field an attack composed of one fast bowler (Newton), one medium pacer and always four (FOUR!) spinners, one of which was often Titch Whitehead also from my year. I batted at three or (preferably) four and sometimes scored runs in decent-sized chunks while peering out furtively between curtains of long greasy hair. I was rather pleased that I could play every single shot in the book — even if it wasn’t always to the right delivery — but I also knew I was very vulnerable in the as-yet-unnamed “corridor of uncertainty”: that would be four to six inches outside the line of off stump, reader — snick! “And he’s gone… Having a feel, gobbled up by second slip again. Perhaps this unusually spindly young batsman might score more heavily were he to suffer a trip to the barber. Perhaps he might then see the hurtling pill…”

We were quite good but we weren’t brilliant. The West Indies however were busily redefining notions of sporting brilliance and one was only too cognisant of the intergalactic distance that separated them from us. I thought they were the best sport thing ever.

As did the bible-almanack of cricket, Wisden, when it came out the following year, as it did every year, in its yellow livery and absurdly small print. Indeed Wisden expended a huge number of its airmail-thin pages in its 1977 edition on debating that very question. Were the Windies the greatest thing ever to befall sport of any kind, or were they a menace to civilisation, with their minatory barrages of ultra-fast bowling and the jackhammer forcefulness of their batting?

Say goodbye to the blues: it’s the great Gordon Greenidge

I bought that 1977 edition when it came out because I wanted to read about Richards, Holding and the great Gordon Greenidge, splattered English stumps and how Tony Greig’s pie of humbleness tasted. And this tattered volume was the very item that this week bobbed to the surface of the turbid pond in which I abide. A book so precious to me that I felt more than shame this week that I had let it get away from me in the silted depths for so long.

I intend to re-read all of those thousands upon thousands of words written by a variety of excellent writers on the subject of the greatest team ever, and it’ll be a joy. But first I’ll be turning to page 850 — possibly the only page-number of any book I have committed to memory — to check that all is as it should be. Yes, there I am: NE Coleman, fourth in the averages, but the highest for any specialist bat, youngest too, written out for all time in cricket’s statistical and literary organ of record, a mere 700 pages away from the splendour of the 1976 West Indies, far distant from them in so many ways yet here, in this surely important case, also contiguous. Well, about an inch away. We shared a field that year, Gordon Greenidge and I, in the way cricket tells its story, and posho independent grammar school or not, that was for me the only thing in the grip of the terrible folds of 1989 that I could think of that made me feel proud.

“Silly, I know,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the doctor, quite softly. “Silly is a such an inadequate word.”

And reader, I can still feel the progress of the single fat tear that worked its way to the surface of my face that day and then made good its escape down my cheek before detaching and falling into oblivion.

Nick Coleman is the author of three books, published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage: ‘The Train the Night; a story of music and loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and a novel, ‘Pillow Man’