Cricket’s Antihero: A Tribute to Tony Greig

There is a grim inevitability about terminal illness. Then again, isn’t there often such a pall surrounding life itself?

That it came as a surprise that Tony Greig passed away tells us plenty about our perceptions of the man; that we expected him to shrug it off as if it were a nasty bout of flu. Deep down we knew it was a losing battle, yet we still selfishly longed to hear his voice commentate on a Sachin masterclass or “those little Lankans” fighting against the odds.

His life was never destined to be smooth sailing. Born in apartheid South Africa, he went on to captain England, and later settled in Australia (in between copious extended sojourns in Sri Lanka, where he was an ambassador for tourism, seafood, and king coconuts).

Greig led a life as a cricketing devil’s advocate, and was a key catalyst in the advancement of the game becoming the corporate behemoth that it is today.

Always divisive and often contentious, it is bizarre to look back upon Greig as a chief ambassador within cricket, for he was the antithesis of a diplomat. Proud and argumentative to the point of belligerence, Greig seemed destined to make enemies wherever he went. As such, it was requisite that he possessed skin far thicker than his woollen V-neck.

He was never one to mince words, but in his most infamous attempt at verbal jousting, Greig uttered a sentence that will perhaps prove to taint his legacy even beyond death. About to lead England in a Test series against the West Indies in 1976, Greig said:

“But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend, with the help of Closey and a few others, to make them grovel.”

One word is all it took.

Using the word ‘grovel’ might not have swelled accusations of xenophobia, had Tony Greig been anybody else. It might have been forgotten; shrugged off as a slip of the tongue, a forgivable faux pas.

What was intended to be an intimidatory pin-prick in fact turned out to be the most motivational words in sporting history – even if they were for the opposition.

However, as a particularly abrasive white South African emigré, and with apartheid the prominent social issue at the time, Greig made himself an easy target. Connotations of slavery were bandied about, to the extent that his legitimate criticism of any country would later provoke lazy claims of racism. The vitriolic backlash in India in response to his 2012 MCC Spirit of Cricket Lecture, heavily critical of the BCCI, is testament to this – though by now, it was nothing that Greig was not used to.

In 1977, Greig joined forces with Kerry Packer to form World Series Cricket, a watershed in cricket’s history. Realising that cricketers had a commercial value to be exploited, Greig could not digest the logic in county cricketers stacking shelves in the off-season. It would become the episode that exemplified him as a man and cricketer, as he accelerated his path to being ostracized by fans, players and boards.

Greig left little room for such sentimentality. Ultimately, he realised that he was the pariah that cricket needed to shake it up.

An ever-present on the field and in the commentary box for over four decades, Greig was a fixture in Cricket’s landscape. It would be disingenuous to rat out the old cliché of it feeling “empty without him”, but it will feel different.

Greig was one of the first voices I heard as a schoolboy, as I watched Sachin Tendulkar annihilate all comers in Sharjah’s famous ‘Desert Storm’ series. I will forever remember Greig’s booming voice exclaiming: “There is Sachin, there is daylight, then there’s the rest!”

And so, Greig’s South African drawl always evoked happy memories in my mind. He was the soundtrack to my schoolboy days, and to put things into perspective, I’ve probably spent more time listening to Tony Greig than I have to many relatives of mine.

In every sense, Greig was a cricketing antihero. A part of cricket has died with him, and we will be forever poorer for his loss.

However, let it never be said that we were not richer for his presence.