Sonny Ramadhin, the West Indies cricketer, who has died aged 92, was immortalized as one of “those two little fellows of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine” in a calypso by fellow Trinidadian Lord Beginner. Left-handed with Jamaican Alf Valentine, Ramadhin, a right-hander, was part of the most famous West Indian spin bowling duo – perhaps the most famous in all of cricket.
He made his Test debut at Old Trafford in 1950, the year West Indies defeated England for the first time at Lord’s, and also won the first away series against the “mother country”.
Before the trip, Ramadhini had only played two first-class matches, and picking both him and his friend Valentin, also a complete debutant, for a full Test tour was a bold move. But it paid off: they dominated the series as dramatically with the ball as the Three Ws – Everton Weeks, Clyde Walcott and Frank Worrell – did with the bat, Ramadhan playing a pivotal role in the second Test at Lord’s, which turned the tide and series to the West Indies. After his first year of first-class cricket, Ramadhin was named the Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1951, and he went on to have a highly successful career spanning 43 Tests, taking 158 wickets at an average of 28.98. In all first-class matches he took 758 wickets at an average of 20.24.
Even more significantly for the development of the game, Ramadhin was the first East Indian – a West Indian of Indian origin, so named to distinguish them from Indians native to the Caribbean – to play for the West Indies, and for nearly 10 years he was the only one. Alvin Kallicharran (66 Tests), Rohan Kanhai (79 Tests) and Trinidadian spin bowlers Inshan Ali and Raphick Jumadeen (12 Tests each) followed.
Ramadhin’s grandparents had immigrated to Trinidad from India to work as indentured labourers. He was born in the village of St Charles, about 15 miles south of the capital, Port of Spain, but after both his parents died when he was young, he was raised by Uncle Rock in the village of Esperance in the south of the island. Cricket was the only benefit he derived from attending – or more often, not attending – a Canadian missionary school, where he was called Sonny to go along with the name he arrived there with, Ramadhin. His birth was not registered and he only adopted the initials KT when he was told that a cricketer could not tour without them.
Although spinners generally need years of first-class exposure to mature, Ramadhin bowled spectacularly from his first match, for Trinidad against Jamaica, in late January 1950, taking five wickets for 39 runs in his first innings and three for 67 in his innings. The second. That match was also Valentine’s first-class debut, although he did not take a wicket and conceded 111 runs. Ramadhin had never left Trinidad before the 1950 tour of England, and although enthralled by the novelty of his experience—he was delighted by the “up” buses, for example—he was not entirely unsophisticated. Called to order dinner for fellow players at an Indian restaurant in London, he not only assured them of a good spread, but quietly left the table unattended during dessert and settled the bill, successfully avoiding all the contributions attempted by the West Indian gentlemen players much more. richer than himself.
Before leaving Trinidad, he had only bowled at the island’s makeshift wickets. However, in that first tournament he took 135 first-class wickets at an average of 14.88 from more than 1,000 runs. He took 26 of the available 80 wickets in four Tests at an average of 23.23, playing 377 overs in total. In the critical game at Lord’s he took 11 for 152 from 115 overs, 70 of them maidens. It was he who made the breakthrough on the final day, bowling Cyril Washbrook after spending more than five hours at the crease, and finishing with six for 86 from an astonishing 72 overs.
Ramadhin’s early stats show how impossible he was to play. Even his regular keeper Walcott, looking down on Ramadhin’s diminutive 5ft 4in frame from his formidable 6ft 2in, 15 stone vantage point, admitted he was unable to predict which way he would take it. Sonny returned the ball. With his cap and long sleeves rolled up at his wrists, he swung the ball both ways without a discernible change in delivery, either from a conventional flick of the fingers or a barely perceptible twist of the wrist. . His skills impressed most teams he played against, especially the first time they had to face him.
However, after seven years of dominating international cricket, Ramadhin’s prowess with the bats came to an end in dramatic and rather unseemly circumstances. During England’s tour of the West Indies in 1957, in the first innings of the first Test at Edgbaston, he was as dazzling as ever, taking seven for 49. But in the second innings he was first neutralized and then destroyed by a approach still considered in the West Indies as unsporting as Bodyline.
After Ramadhini had taken the wicket of Peter Richardson to have England struggling at 113, still 175 runs behind with just seven second overs remaining, Peter May and Colin Cowdrey, facing mainly Ramadhini, took the score to 524. Playing Ramadhini as a player out of the rotation. they just put their left feet well under the keeper, stuffing the ball too short to drive. At that time, leg-before-the-counter law stated that if a batsman was hit on the pads outside the line of the stumps, then he could not leave the umpire, even if he did not play a shot.
Ramadhin bowled a record 98 overs in that soul-crushing encounter, and had countless lbw appeals turned down, most of them against Cowdrey, who was the main perpetrator with his pads. The West Indies drew the game and lost the series, fortunes turning to the highlight of Ramadhin and Valentine as surely as they had seven years ago – but negatively this time. The lbw rule was later changed to prevent the spirit and spectacle of the game being destroyed in such a way, but it came too late to protect a dejected and exhausted Ramadhan. CLR James described him as “particularly harmless” for the remainder of the England series.
Although he had a good season against England at home in 1959-60, taking 17 Test wickets at 28.88, he continued to play until the end of 1960 (his last Test was against Australia in Melbourne on 30 December that year), his era had effectively ended at Edgbaston, not at the hands but at the feet of Cowdrey.
Ramadhin played for Trinidad and Tobago from 1950 to 1953 and had some success for Lancashire in 1964. He played minor county cricket with Lincolnshire from 1968 to 1972, and Lancashire league cricket at various times, first signed for Crompton in the Central Lancashire League. 1951 and ending his league career by scoring a hat-trick in his last game for Daisy Hill, in the Bolton & District Association, at the age of 50. He was awarded Trinidad and Tobago’s highest honor, the Gold Hummingbird Medal, in 1972.
From 1965 to 1990 he and his English wife, June (nee Austerberry), ran the White Lion public house in Delph, Saddleworth, north-east Manchester, until they were forced to withdraw when beer monopoly rules would have necessary for them to buy pubs directly. Their daughter Sharon married Lancashire fast bowler Willie Hogg, and grandson Kyle Hogg, a sportsman, played for the county from 2001 to 2014.
June and Sharoni predeceased Ramadhi. He is survived by their son, Craig, two grandchildren, Natalie and Kyle, and two great-grandchildren, Nancy and Fifi.
Sonny (KT) Ramadhin, cricketer, born 1 May 1929; died on February 26, 2022
