By Alan Wilkins
Alan Wilkins
Ezra Moseley was a man who used as few words about himself or his predicament in life as he used steps to the bowling crease. Ten running strides were all that were needed for the bantamweight Bajan to generate serious pace. Ezra tormented the best batsmen of his generation – he broke Graham Gooch’s hand at Port-of-Spain as England were on course for a Test victory.
He nearly decapitated Jimmy Cook in a ‘rebel’ Test at Newlands, Cape Town, in 1982. The bantamweight punched so far above his weight, he was, according to Robin Smith, one of the game’s greatest players of fast bowling, “quicker off the pitch than any bowler I faced”. And Robin ‘Judge’ Smith faced them all.
I last saw Ezra at the County Ground, Bristol, home of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, in the summer of 2017. He was coaching the West Indies Women’s Cricket team during the ICC Women’s World Cup that year. As the Windies women had just finished their practice, Ezra picked up a stray ball on the field and just turned his arm over, bowling a couple of balls into the practice nets on the outfield. I swiftly beckoned my roving cameraman to get the shot, record Ezra bowling into the practice net. There was no mistaking that languid action, the easiness of the moving parts, the aesthetic quality of a bowling action that could have told such a different story in West Indies folklore than it did.
The stats on his profile will tell you that Ezra Moseley played in only two Tests and 9 ODIs. He signed for Glamorgan County Cricket Club for the 1980 season, as I signed for Gloucestershire in my departure from the Welsh county. Oh, how I wish I had stayed and bowled at the other end to him! Ezra became one of Glamorgan’s most popular overseas signings, taking over a hundred first-class wickets in his first two seasons before a stress fracture in his lower back put the brakes on his rise to stardom.
Whilst on the sidelines he made the decision to go to South Africa on the 1982-83 West Indies ‘rebel’ tours, but rarely did he talk about that decision or his experience in the country that was ostracised from the official international family because of its apartheid policies.
When the life ban that was imposed on the rebels was lifted in 1989, Ezra made his official Test debut at the age of 32. That’s when he broke Gooch’s hand. He was the fourth bowler in the Windies attack in that Test behind Curtly Ambrose, Ian Bishop and Courtney Walsh.
It was the predicament he never discussed. He was in a long line of genuinely world-class West Indies fast bowlers, a conveyor belt of Caribbean carnage that terrified international batsmen – Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Andy Roberts, Colin Croft and Patrick Patterson were the main protagonists, then came Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Ian Bishop – with the likes of Sylvester Clarke, Hartley Alleyne, Winston Davis, Wayne Daniel and Franklyn Stephenson adding extra firepower when required.
The problem was that they were rarely required. Remember when Winston Davis ripped the Australians apart in the 1983 ICC Cricket World Cup when he demolished them with 7-51 at Leeds? He was dropped for the next match in favour of the ‘big guns’ ahead of him in the pecking order. How vexing was that conundrum for any bowler of Winston Davis or Ezra Moseley’s pedigree in those halcyon years of West Indies’ dominance?
Ezra made friends in dressing rooms from Cardiff to Port Elizabeth, from Bridgetown to Pretoria. He could be moody – how many fast bowlers are not moody? – he could simmer like a geyser, he had his moments when he just did his thing. But there were no public remonstrations. He contained it all in his inner self.
He was asked in a TV interview who, in his opinion, was the greatest West Indies fast bowler. “Malcolm Marshall” was his instantaneous reply. There were comparisons between the two by many hard-nosed professionals at the time when Marshall was arguably the greatest of them all. Was it this debate that was embedded in the back of Ezra’s mind all those years? Sadly, we will never know.
But even if a tragic accident on the roads of Barbados had not robbed him of his life, I doubt for a moment that he would have been drawn into the subject.
A man of few words. A man who, on his day, was as lethal as any fast bowler the Caribbean has produced and all he took were a few steps to do it.
He let the ball do his talking and boy, did it talk.
RIP Ezra. (Cricbuzz)
Alan Wilkins is a cricket commentator and former first-class cricketer for Glamorgan and Gloucestershire
