India’s tour to the West Indies in 1971 was special. It was historic as an unfancied Indian team played exhilarating cricket to defeat a much-vaunted West Indies team 1-0 in the five Test series to record their first ever series win in the Caribbean.
At the heart of that incredible series victory was a young batsman named Sunil Manohar Gavaskar. At the age of 22, Gavaskar made his debut in the second Test at Trinidad where he scored 65 and 67 not out respectively. He finished the series with an awe-inspiring tally of 774 runs at an average of 154.80. Undoubtedly his best performance came in the final Test, again in Trinidad, where he scored 124 and 220 to become only the second Indian batsman to score a century in each innings.
Then, calypso-singer Willard Harris, famous as Lord Relator, composed a song (video below) on India’s conquest that soon become iconic. The line “We couldn’t out Gavaskar at all” became legendary, summing up how India had conquered the West Indies.
Forty-five years later, Wisden India caught up with Lord Relator again. And in a free-wheeling conversation about those times where greats like Garfield Sobers and Rohan Kanhai bestrode the field, he performed the legendary calypso one more time (video above). And as you can see, it still remains as iconic and as fresh as ever.