Paul Edwards meets Lancashire's new President Sir Clive Lloyd
01.03.26, 00:01 Updated 01.03.26, 00:05 5 Minute Read
Paul Edwards
Perhaps we should start at Buxton. It is a balmy Saturday afternoon in late May over half a century ago and I am sitting at the Bottom End of that tiny Park Ground, scarcely crediting my luck. Frank Hayes has just made a century and now Clive Lloyd is shredding the Derbyshire attack. He makes 167 in 167 minutes, an innings that includes 15 fours and eight sixes. The slow bowlers, Fred Swarbrook and Geoff Miller – almost all sides played two spinners in that era – bowl 31 overs for 205 runs. Lloyd, batting at the Pavilion End, swats their deliveries away and the ball arcs high into the woods that were once in the grounds of Normanton, a small public school. “At one stage, he hit seven sixes out of 50 runs,” reported Wisden’s correspondent.
It is more than that, though. Lloyd towers over the day, a gentle yet demolishing presence. Even his 6ft 5ins does not quite explain the way in which he seems out of proportion to the ground and dwarfs almost everyone else – a boy playing with his Subbuteo figures on green baize, moving them at his will, flicking them away.
In the tea interval, I meet my brilliant English teacher, Andy Mayne, in the beer tent. I buy him a pint. I don’t think he can believe his luck either. At least one spectator will remember that game for more than Monday’s snow.
Bigger stages awaited Clive in 1975. A week later, he would be captaining West Indies at Old Trafford on the opening day of the inaugural World Cup; a fortnight after watching his team thrashing Sri Lanka, he will make a century in the final against Australia and will be pictured holding the trophy alongside a smiling yet upstaged Prince Philip.
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