Sixty years on, historic Test ties still bind

The edge might have dulled since their respective heydays, but the mateship and memories born from Test cricket's first tied match remain as genuine and as heartwarming as it was when the game was so fundamentally changed six decades ago.

To honour 60 years since the opening Test of that West Indies tour that sparked a renewed passion for cricket among disillusioned Australian fans, former rivals and close friends Alan Davidson and Neil Harvey (in Sydney) caught up with Lance Gibbs (Miami) and Peter Lashley (Barbados) today.

The chat was virtual, employing the online conference call mechanisms made popular by the pandemic, which proved handy given the Australian pair are both in their 90s and their younger Caribbean counterparts are 86 (Gibbs) and 83 (Lashley).

But their recollections of that famous game at Brisbane's Gabba in early December 1960 are as sharp as their minds, while the mutual admiration and respect that characterised that epochal tour was palpable through the vast distance that separates them and the fickle technology that brought them together.

"It was probably the greatest series I've ever been involved with," said Gibbs, 12th man in that match but whose Test career spanned almost 20 years during which he became the first spin bowler to reach 300 wickets.

Harvey, who earned his first Baggy Green Cap as a teenager on the 1948 'Invincibles' tour of the UK led by Sir Donald Bradman, was equally unequivocal when asked to evaluate the game that remains an indelible chapter in cricket folklore.

Image Id: 0D13746B655D47FB92C19C797BDB74B7 Image Caption: Neil Harvey made his Test debut on the 1948 Ashes tour // Getty

"I don’t think you'll get a better Test match than the tied Test match," he said during today's global conference call.

"I played in 79 of them, and the tied Test was easily the best cricket match I ever played in."

Details of the match itself are so familiar to the participants they recall them with alacrity despite the fog of time.

Sir Garfield Sobers' 132 on the first day (still rated by Davidson as "one of the best innings I've ever seen in Test cricket"), and then the late Norm O'Neill's 181 that carried Australia to 52-run lead in reply.

Davidson's 6-87 in the West Indies' second innings swung the game in the home team's favour, and he retains pin-sharp recall of the delivery that accounted for Lashley – making his Test debut at age 23 – for a duck on that fourth afternoon.

"It was from the pavilion end, from wide of the crease and it was an out-swinger to him as a left-hander," said Davidson, who also revealed he played the Test with a fractured middle finger on his bowling (left) hand suffered during catching practice with skipper Richie Benaud on Test eve.

"Unfortunately for Peter the ball went past the outside edge and knocked over his off stump."

Davidson's memory of that moment was corroborated by Lashley, whose admiration for his opponent clearly overshadowed any personal disappointment wrought by failing to score in his second Test innings.

"It was a very good ball, and as you said you moved to the edge of the crease and bowled a slower ball that swung bigger and I was completely at sea," Lashley responded, his voice rich in the rhythm of Bajan patois before adding with a laugh: "Although the ball was good, if you bowled it again to me I don’t think you’d get the same result."

Image Id: 8249FD174B6C4F0AB6E9A3B01886AB7A Image Caption: Sobers is considered one of Test cricket's greatest allrounders // Getty

Lashley also believes he might have altered the outcome of the game, that finished in Test cricket's first ever deadlock and one of only two tied results to this day, the other being the 1986 match between in India and Australia at Madras (now Chennai).

As the junior member of the West Indies outfit led by Sir Frank Worrell, Lashley took a deferential role to teammates including Joe Solomon who is seven years his senior and whose two direct-hit run outs defined the chaotic final overs in the lengthening Brisbane shadows.

As Lashley tells it, on both occasions – the first when Benaud knocked Sobers to mid-wicket and called for a run, the second providing the climax for which Solomon is forever remembered – he might have got to the ball before his older teammate, but was curtly instructed to "move, move".

By allowing Solomon - who later claimed his dead-eye was a product of hurling objects at mangoes in trees to try and dislodge the fruit during his Guyanese boyhood - to field the ball and throw down the stumps as Australia's lower-order panicked, Lashley secured his own place in immortality.

"I often wondered why he did that because it was that easy for a youngster, given a chance, to be in the limelight," said Lashley who noted he was faster across the ground than Solomon who owned the deadliest throwing arm of his era.

"But I just moved out of the way, and by moving out of the way it probably caused the match to end in a tied Test and obviously that's why I'm here today."

Davidson admits not even Jamaican sprint king Usain Bolt would have safely completed the run Benaud called, and which precipitated the frantic finish whereby Australia's final four wickets fell for six runs inside the Test's last two overs that also included a dropped catch and a missed run-out.

And asked if he could shed some light on the team talk within the players' huddle as wickets tumbled in those frenetic final minutes, Lashley deadpanned: "I'd have to make it up because we never used to huddle in those days."

While the West Indies could rightly claim to have snatched a dead-heat from the jaws of likely defeat, it soon became clear those few minutes of mayhem, and the five days of captivating cricket and collegiate camaraderie leading up to it, resonated much more deeply.

Initially, it was the bond formed between the teams that had contested just 15 Test matches over the preceding three decades.

In the hours after creating history at the Gabba, they sat around tables at the Queensland Cricketers' Club sharing tales and forging friendships until the manager had to boot them out at 9pm.

Image Id: B3A132864BBC4A56B0C069C7AAF0AEC2 Image Caption: Davidson and Harvey at the SCG on Wednesday // Getty

"The camaraderie of the whole series was just incredible," said Davidson, who has maintained a lifelong correspondence with former West Indies opener Cammie Smith to this day.

"We played hard on the pitch but were wonderful mates off the pitch."

It rewrote the rules of engagement for rival Test teams who had rarely spent time in each other's company up until then, and ignited a surge of interest in the game that had become forgettably moribund in Australia following Bradman's retirement in 1948.

The captivating final session in Brisbane was followed by a dominant performance by Australia in the second Test at the MCG, then a reversal of fortunes in Sydney where the West Indies levelled the five-match series.

The fourth Test in Adelaide produced another memorable final session as Australia's last pair Ken 'Slasher' Mackay and Lindsay Kline defied the Caribbean bowlers for almost two hours to secure a draw, before a then record cricket crowd of 90,800 turned out for day two of the deciding Test in Melbourne.

In the wake of another nerve-tingling, last-gasp win by Benaud's team to claim the series, a perpetual trophy struck in the name of the hugely popular West Indies captain was accepted by the equally charismatic Benaud.

Such was the appreciation of reborn Australia cricket fans, Worrell's team were driven through Melbourne in open-top cars where huge crowds lined footpaths to bid them farewell before they flew home to the Caribbean.

Image Id: 923292B1FD25442898F2836991EFEDA3 Image Caption: Benaud with Harvey in 1961 // Getty

"Commerce … stood almost still as the smiling cricketers from the West Indies, the vanquished not the victors, were given a send-off the like of which is normally reserved for royalty and national heroes," Wisden reported in their annual cricket almanack the following year.

The acclaim the West Indies touring party received in a country that had long practiced institutionalised racism through its White Australia policy saw Sobers, Gibbs and fast bowler Wes Hall later return for playing stints in the Sheffield Shield competition.

And the flair they brought with bat and ball triggered a renaissance in cricket, not only in Australia but throughout the game worldwide which the West Indies then came to dominate for around 20 years from the mid-1970s.

"It was a tremendous impact on cricket here, because before this (1960-61) series our cricket was getting a little bit low in public appeal, and we were getting a bit worried about it," Harvey said today.

"But this great Windies side came along and we didn't quite know what to expect, we'd had a visit in 1951-52 from the West Indies and that went very well but after that things got turned down a little bit.

"This return visit in 1960-61 did so much for cricket here.

"I don’t think a series has done as much in this country as that series did."