Exactly 33 years ago on this day two young West Indian players, both in their early twenties, made their Test match debuts against India at the M Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore and went on to play for 17 glorious years since then.
Gordon Greenidge, aged 23, and Viv Richards, aged 22, walked on to pitch with a relatively young West Indies playing XI against Tiger Pataudi's side and completely blew away the hosts in the next 70 odd days in their own backyard.
Greenidge played one of the starring roles in his debut Test along with Alvin Kallicharran and skipper Clive Lloyd but Richards had a forgetful debut scoring just 7 runs in both innings.Greenidge scored 93 in the first
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Pataudi got injured during the match and Sunil Gavaskar was carrying an injury before the series started so he too missed the second match.S Venkataraghavan was handed the responsibility but failed to change the team's fortunes as India went down by an innings and 17 runs in the second Test at Delhi. Richards more than made up for his poor debut and
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Pataudi returned to the team and to everyone's surprise led India to victory in the next two games to level the series 2-2.But the Windies were just too good and too strong compared to the Indians and won the deciding Test by 201 runs to clinch the series 3-2.
Greenidge smashed 371 runs in nine innings in the series at 41.22 with one hundred and two fifties while Richards was just behind with 353 runs in nine innings at 50.42 with one ton and one half-century.From there on both players maintained a great scoring rate against India in particular. Greenidge scored 1678 runs in 23 Tests against India at 47.94 with five hundreds but Richards was even better with 1927 runs in 28 matches at 50.71 with eight centuries.
Since their debut in India, the duo went on to play more than 100 Tests each and went on to establish themselves as two of the greatest batsmen to have played the game.West Indies found an inspirational leader in Lloyd who formed the most feared cricket team the world has ever seen with players like himself, Richards, Greenidge, Michael Holding, Andy
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Many still regard Richards higher than Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar because of the way he batted in one of the toughest era's cricket has ever seen.Richards played 121 Tests scoring 8540 runs at 50.23 with 24 hundreds and 45 fifties. He also led the West Indies in exactly 50 Tests from 1980 to 1991 and became the second most successful at the job after Lloyd registering 27 wins, 8 losses and 15 draws to end up with a win percentage of 54 which was more than what the Big bear could achieve.
As captain Richards amassed 3068 runs at 45.11 with six tons in 50 Tests. Apart from his prowess in the longest format, Richards also set an example with his aggressive batting style in the one-day format for future generations.
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