A reminder: Life is more than the photo-op!

By Ray Ford

So last Saturday morning, I woke up to the numbing news that the former Barbados and West Indies wicketkeeper/batsman David Murray had passed.

First, let me extend my condolences to Mr. Murray’s family, loved ones and friends he has left behind. And may God now grant him, eternal rest.

This time of the year, is Thanksgiving. And so it’s time once again for me to remember all the blessings that God has bestowed on me.

Like I think of all the players who were part of the West Indies touring party to Australia 1981-82, I consider David Murray “one of my brothers”. Because like the others, I interacted with him on that, my first venture or adventure to see the West Indies play cricket outside of Jamaica.

I don’t know what it might have been – whether because David Murray appeared to be Vivian Richards’ right-hand-man, and that when I arrived in Sydney, I assumed the position of Richards’ left-hand-man, but David and I, hit it off.

I can see him now – shorter than I am, with that teddy-bear-smile of his, and with sun-glasses perched atop his head, looking-up at me, expecting ‘di-Jamaikan’, to say something funny. And if even for a moment or two, I managed to make him forget his troubles.

Thanks to the sharp mind of Joseph “Reds” Perreira, I was reminded earlier Saturday morning, how David Murray came into the West Indies side. It was for the Australia Test at Bourda, when the diminutive Bajan wicketkeeper came in to replace his namesake Deryck Murray, who alongside Desmond Haynes and Richard Austin were left out of the original West Indies team, as an obvious reprisal by the West Indies Cricket Board of Control (yes, ‘the Control’ was still there) for the involvement of some of the West Indies players in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC). And so David Murray’s start actually playing Test cricket for the West Indies, was far from auspicious.

He toured India beginning that same year (1978-79) under Alvin Kallicharran, and then to Pakistan (1979-80). Prior to that he had toured Australia in both 1975 to 1976 and 1979 to 1980 as an understudy to the then West Indies vice-captain Deryck Murray.

When the West Indies were reconstituted after the schism over WSC, Deryck took back over wicketkeeping duties until glove-form began to desert him during the West Indies tour of England in 1980. On returning to the Caribbean David Murray was elevated to the first-string wicketkeeper for England’s tour of the West Indies.

Beginning with the Test at Bourda, the younger Murray ’kept in all four Tests of that home-series. But his taking the field for the second Test at the Queen’s Park Oval was not taken kindly by the Deryck Murray faithfuls. They organized a boycott, resulting in more of the first day’s crowd being outside the Oval, than in. And noticeably, unlike Clive Lloyd’s encouragement when Alvin Kallicharran was appointed captain in 1978, to the boycott, Deryck Murray remained silent.

“Lloyd was called ‘a dog’,” recalls veteran cricket broadcaster “Reds” Perreira. And as things turned out, it was (David) Murray (46) and Clive Lloyd (64) whose 75-run partnership helped to carry the West Indies to their first innings match-winning total of 426.

David Murray’s last stint for the West Indies was on that 1981 to 1982 West Indies tour of Australia, where he played as the wicketkeeper/batsman in the first two Tests in Melbourne and Sydney and then replaced by Jeff Dujon in the position – Dujon before then, playing as a batsman. And if Murray was angry at being after a time, left out of the Benson and Hedges World Series “one-dayers” as Martin Williamson suggested that he was, then, I did not see it.

Regardless, thanks to Ashley Gray for painstakingly taking the time, to remember David Murray in “The Unforgotten”. History is history. And true history does not allow for “picking-n-choosing”.

As for his glove-work, “Reds” Perreira feels that David Murray was (quote): “right up there with the likes of Jackie Hendriks, Jeff Dujon, Deryck Murray himself and Cyril Christiani who because of the strength of Ivan Barrow’s batting, only kept wicket in four Tests for the West Indies.” And I think that it’s written somewhere, that Michael Holding  the great, former West Indies fast bowler – rates David Murray, the best wicketkeeper who had kept to him.

May David Murray’s soul, now rest in peace.