Larry Gomes was one of the unsung heroes of the great West Indies teams of the 1980s. His efforts on the 1984 tour of England earned him a Wisden Cricketer of the Year honour.
Larry Gomes’s Test career continued until his 60th match in 1987. He made 3,171 runs at 39.63 with nine hundreds
Just prior to the West Indians’ tour of England in the summer of 1984, Larry Gomes’s future as a Test cricketer appeared at an end. At the age of 30, he had been dropped from the West Indies’ team in the home series against Australia after 15 consecutive Test innings without a half-century. The young Antiguan, Richie Richardson, had taken his position in the order at No.3 and seemingly clinched it with two successive centuries against Australia. Other new challengers for batting places had also emerged in the Shell Shield tournament.
Such pressure was nothing new for the left-handed Gomes, who has been generally underrated by the public and frequently rejected by the selectors. But each time he has seemed down and out, he has had the strength of character to re-establish himself.
Far from depressing him, his omission on this occasion merely strengthened his resolve. “It was probably a blessing in disguise that I was dropped,” he said after scoring the second of his two Test centuries in the series in England last summer, which brought him firmly back to his familiar role as a steadying influence on the West Indies’ batting. “It made me concentrate on what I was doing wrong, on why I wasn’t getting big scores any longer. I decided to go into the nets and work on it before the tour.”
By then, his long-term future had been settled by the guarantee of a contract as coach with the Trinidad & Tobago government and a benefit year which raised almost £50,000, a measure of Gomes’s popularity with the sporting public. For several weeks prior to that, Gomes and his family had agonised over the enticement of a place in the unsanctioned and widely questioned West Indian rebel team to South Africa, but he turned it down after advice from many close to him.
One who figured prominently in these discussions was Hugh Henderson, a business executive who had helped guide Gomes’s career like a godfather since his early days. Henderson listed 15 goals for the promising young cricketer when he was only 16, and some still lay ahead when the South African offer, which did not figure among them, was made. One of the goals which had proved elusive, but has now come his way, was, he says, to be chosen as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year.
