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Another Windies star, Sylvester Clarke dies

Sylvester Clarke, a feared fast bowler who played 11 Tests for the West Indies, collapsed and died suddenly at his home in Bridgetown on Saturday.

It was not immediately clear what caused Clarke's death. The Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation based in Barbados confirmed his death by speaking to his wife Peggy.

Clarke was the third former West Indies and Barbados player to die in the past five weeks. He would have been 45 on Saturday.

On November 4, another former fast bowler and then West Indian national team coach Malcolm Marshall succumbed to colon cancer at the age of 41.

On Friday, former opening batsman and Barbados Cricket Association president Conrad Hunte, 67, died of a heart attack in Sydney, where he was attending a conference.

Clarke's career corresponded with a period when the West Indies dominated world cricket with a plethora of outstanding fast bowlers. It restricted his appearances in Test cricket and prompted him to join the so-called West Indies' rebel teams that broke the international sports boycott and toured South Africa in the 1982-84 seasons.

He and the other rebel players were barred from representing the West Indies for their actions.

But Clarke made his reputation as a bowler of genuine pace and hostility playing for Surrey, in the English county championship, from 1979 to 1989, and for Transvaal, Northern Transvaal and Orange Free State in the South African championship.

He took 42 wickets in his 11 Tests at 27.85, but his first-class record was a fairer indication of his quality. In 238 matches, his 942 wickets cost him 19.52 runs each.

In the 1984-85 season, he set a record in South Africa's Currie Cup with 58 wickets at fewer than 13 runs each.

On the 1981 West Indies' tour of Pakistan, Clarke responded to a volley of objects thrown at him on the field by spectators by hurling a brick, used as a boundary-marker, back into the crowd. It seriously injured a student leader, an incident for which he was suspended by the West Indies Cricket Board. West Indies team manager Clive Lloyd said in Taupo, New Zealand, that the news of Clarke's death had shocked the touring team.

Lloyd captained both Clarke and Marshall in Tests and began his Test career alongside Hunte in the late 1960s. He said the deaths were being felt by the team and coach Viv Richards, a former Test teammate of Clarke and Marshall.

"The only thing we can do now is try to do well here and give everyone a bit of a lift," Lloyd said. "The fellows are feeling it, losing three great players like that. They would be quite saddened by it all."

EXTERNAL LINK

Sylvester Theophilus Clarke