“And Greig is bowled, bowled by Holding for one”.
For some reason that one line of commentary from the Tony Cozier, who died last week, has stuck in the mind. It’s from the Oval test in the long hot summer of 1976, when England were completely outclassed by Clive Lloyd’s West Indies, and Michael Holding took 14 wickets on a pitch no other bowler on either side could do anything on. We were on a family holiday camping in the North York Moors, and followed the game through snatches of commentary on the radio in between other holiday things.
Tony Cozier was the West Indian voice on the BBC Radio Three commentary team, which in those days included the very English Brian Johnson and John Arlott.
Scyld Berry’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph sums him up well.
When radio commentary took off in the Caribbean in the 1960s, with cricket binding together the region like nothing else, Tony Cozier was the man. He steered exactly the right path between the dryness of traditional Australian commentary, which focused solely on the score and play, and richer if sometimes self-indulgent English commentary where cakes and buses mattered as much as the game.
Possibly because he was a voice on the radio rather than a face on the television, and spoke with a distinctive Barbadian accent, I had never realised until this week that Tony Cozier was white.