The final innings

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — Garfield St Auburn Sobers played his final innings at the Kensington Oval here on Wednesday under bright sunshine for nearly three hours, still able to mesmerise local, regional and international spectators, most of whom, including Britain’s King Phillip, acknowledging that there have been few, “whose name alone brings a smile to people’s faces across Barbados, the Caribbean and the entire Commonwealth”. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, in her “grateful from the nation” tribute at the State Service of Thanksgiving, said the visit to the Kensington Oval, “this most iconic of cricket grounds where Sir Garry’s casket was draped with the national flag of Barbados”, was to pay tribute, “but also to send a message to the future”. She said the 89-year-old Sir Garry did not come to be the best or the first or the last, but “came to do his best and to be his best, not for the world, but for goals that he set himself, conscious that if he did that, along with whatever else everyone else did, that glory could come, victory could be assured”.

Sobers was buried one day after he would have celebrated his 90th birthday, and Mottley said that the gods would have conspired to ensure that the West Indies cricket team had defeated the visiting Pakistan test team by 90 runs on Tuesday in Trinidad and Tobago, thereby allowing the seven members of the regional team to attend the ceremony. “I say today as we say farewell to you, Sir Garry, this is your final walk from Kensington Oval. This will be our country’s last opportunity to give you that which you became so accustomed to, a standing ovation,” Mottley said in blazing sunlight over the picturesque ground on the outskirts of the capital, Bridgetown.

“I ask each and every one of us in this Oval today …to let us stand and give Sir Garry, our Sir Garry, our hero, our beloved man. A man who guided me in my own personal journey with the confidence that I think that each and every one of us as children need to take on this world. “We thank you for teaching us that greatness could wear humility, that excellence could still belong to ordinary people, that the dreams of a little boy from the Bayland could become the inheritance of an entire nation,” Mottley said of the man, who until July 17, was one of two Barbados living national heroes, the other being the internationally acclaimed singer, Robyn Rih…