When Harmy had them on the hop at Sabina Park

Garfield Robinson relives the carnage at Sabina Park of 2004 when Steve Harmison gave the Windies some of their own medicine

On his best days, Steve Harmison was more than a handful. Bequeathed many of the gifts almost every fast bowler would pick were they asked to choose from a menu, the Durham man was often a frightening prospect.

He was quick, capable of propelling a cricket ball at a foreboding velocity.

Standing at 6ft 5ins, he elicited steep bounce from all but the most docile pitches, and his Cricinfo profile refers to his “painful capacity for jamming fingers against bat-handles”.

Few bowlers could be as devastating as Harmison. Had he possessed the wherewithal to operate at, or even close to, his optimum capability for extended periods, he’d have constructed a statistical edifice comparable to those of Malcolm Marshall, Dennis Lillee and Curtly Ambrose. Sadly, for England, for cricket fans in general, and for the bowler himself, he was never able to shine brightly for too long. Renowned as a troublesome traveller, he was the subject of endless conversations in cricket circles: would he ever overcome the fragility that plagued him and grow into one of the best bowlers of his time?

It is generally accepted that Harmison ended his playing days as one of cricket’s great unfulfilled talents. And yet it would be unfair to off-handedly label him an underachiever. What was not widely known at the time is that he was plagued by depression so crippling that only sporadically did it allow his talent to burst through.  Were his true ailment revealed then, it would likely be taken as evidence of weakness, especially unbecoming of an uncompromising fast man trading in pace and intimidation.

Speaking shortly after Jonathan Trott’s revelation after flying home from a very difficult 2013/14 Ashes series, Harmison spoke about his reasons for not revealing the exact nature of his trials during his career: “At the time, nobody did that. It was not that I did not want to be the first one, I just did not believe I could say anything about how I was feeling. Somehow I managed to struggle through. For the best cricket odds visit bestbetting-sites.com.

“I said I was homesick and that was actually used as a stick to beat me with. It was not just homesickness, although that did not help. It is a chemical imbalance in the brain and it is something I battled with for years. It tended to be inflamed when I was away from home because I did miss people, I was lonely and I did not have my support network around me.”

We should all be thankful nowadays for the candour of players like Trott, Marcus Trescothick and Graham Thorpe, who have been forthcoming in discussing their problems, thereby diminishing our general ignorance of the issue, prompting a more sensitive viewpoint.

I first set eyes on Harmison when I watched a day – I don’t remember which – of the tour match against Jamaica on their 2003/04 West Indies visit. The track appeared lifeless, hardly a delivery rose over stump height, and I remember thinking that if the Test match pitch was similar in nature then the batsmen would not be overly troubled.

But then Harmison came on. Suddenly the game was transformed. The playing surface now seemed full of life and batsmen, who were playing deliveries just short of a good length comfortably around stump height, found that they now had to be protecting their ribcage.

Harmison didn’t take a wicket in the game, but I came away thinking he would be the bowler to watch when the real battle began in a few days’ time.

Only 28 runs separated the teams on first innings of the first Test. Opener Devon Smith’s 108 had led the West Indies to 311, and England responded with 339. Chris Gayle and Smith then survived three overs to close the third day with the West Indies on eight and the match intriguingly poised entering Sunday’s fourth day.

I was a few minutes late getting to Sabina Park that morning. The loud roar while I stood at the turnstiles meant that a batsman had fallen. It was Gayle. He was Harmison’s first victim, caught behind flashing at a delivery he could well have ignored. The crowd was disappointed that their Jamaican favourite had gone so early and so needlessly, but with the meat of the batting still to follow they wouldn’t have been overly perturbed.

Before I was properly seated, however, another wicket fell, Ramnaresh Sarwan this time, LBW to Harmison, and by the time Shivnarine Chanderpaul diverted the gangly pacer onto his stumps, the floodgates had truly been blasted open. West Indies were then 15 for three.

Next it was Lara’s turn, and it was clear that total capitulation was a real possibility. Surely, one of the greatest batsmen the game had known could beat back the rampaging pacemen and prevent a complete overrun.

He had done it before. His 213 on the same ground in 2001 stopped the advance of the marauding Australians and, in the company of Jimmy Adams, erected a platform from which Courtney Walsh and Nehemiah Perry wrought an unlikely victory. The West Indian captain was accompanied to the middle by the riffs of Caribbean cricket anthem, ‘Rally round the West Indies’. The crowd, though stunned, remained hopeful.

That hope crashed after exactly five deliveries. Matthew Hoggard ran one across the left-hander and had him caught behind.

Meanwhile, the vendors in the stands were in a quandary. They came amply stocked with supplies, expecting a full day. It soon became apparent, however, that the end would come earlier than imagined, leaving them stuck with most of what they had brought, much of it perishable. The upshot was that prices began tumbling in sync with the West Indian wickets – each wicket had an accompanying price drop. Spectators, too, had to make adjustments to accommodate the looming early finish. Many who had come armed with strong liquid refreshments to enliven the proceedings could be seen sharing with their fellow mourners, both as a means of treating the dejection, and also to lighten the load they would need to take back home.

All this time, wickets were still going down. First innings centurion Smith was caught and bowled by Hoggard, who himself was well into an impressive spell.

A snorter from Harmison took care of Ridley Jacobs. Leaping at him from just short of a length, he could do no more than glove it. Nasser Hussain, at short leg, ran to his left and accepted the catch behind the wicket. In the circumstances, it could probably be said that the 15 he scored was a reasonably good innings, especially since it turned out to be top score.

Another screamer would have removed Tino Best’s head had he not hurriedly removed it from the delivery’s path. But, his instinctive jab left his bat in the way for the ball to graze on its way to the keeper. Adam Sanford was then caught by Trescothick, the first of the six – yes, six – slip fielders that were lined up alongside the wicketkeeper. Trescothick was the catcher again to end the massacre when Harmison took Fidel Edwards’ edge for his seventh wicket.

The West Indies innings had collapsed in a heap for 47 and Harmison’s 7 for 12 was the cheapest seven-wicket haul in history. Five batsmen failed to score, only two reached double figures, and all the doubters were convinced, for the moment at least, that Harmison was now the fast bowling heavyweight they all thought he could become.

And for a while he remained a formidable force. The New Zealanders tasted his fire soon afterwards with many batsmen feeling the agony of the ball smashing into ribcage or fingers pinned to bat handles. But he was still unpredictable; sometimes downright horrid, and the match-winning performances became scarcer and scarcer. His nadir was probably the first delivery of the 2006/07 Ashes series that was collected by Andrew Flintoff at second slip. A delivery the English press dubbed the worst ball in Test history, and a far cry from his incredible performance at Sabina Park, one his then captain, Michael Vaughan, called “one of the best spells by an England bowler”.

How differently it all could have turned out had he managed to consistently perform at that level.

This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, December 9 2016

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