Hunched in a chair several sizes too small for his giant frame, Clive Lloyd sucks on a red lollipop. “Kojak,” the former West Indies’ captain explains solemnly.A bald American television detective with a penchant for lollipops and the catchphrase “Who loves ya baby?” was, for reasons now obscure, considered cool during the mid-1970s. Lloyd, visiting London recently to promote his new biography Supercat, remains indisputably cool more than 20 years after retiring as captain of the world’s most successful side.Tall, stooping and bespectacled, Lloyd hit what remains the most memorable one-day century ever in the 1975 World Cup victory over Australia, a series of seemingly casual left-handed swats to all part of Lord’s. In the following year, spurred by ill-chosen remarks from England’s South African-born captain Tony Greig who had promised to make them “grovel”, Lloyd’s men dismantled their old imperial masters with a 3-0 away series victory.But it was the 1980s which placed a scattering of Caribbean islands and Lloyd’s home country of Guyana indelibly on the sporting map. Under Lloyd, then Viv Richards and finally Richie Richardson, West Indies were undefeated in a series between 1980 and 1995.Then it all went wrong, gradually at first then with disconcerting speed after the turn of the century. Under Lloyd between 1979 and 1985, the West Indies lost only three matches. In the latest ICC rankings, West Indies are the eighth-ranked Test side, ahead only of Bangladesh.“We didn’t put systems in place,” Lloyd said. “We just went along hoping that our cricket would fall into place. Well it’s not going to happen. Football came along. We had more people coming along in boxing, athletics and squash. “If your team is not winning, who wants to join a losing team? People are gravitating to other sports so we have to harness talent, try to get back up the ladder and encourage young people to play the game.”Lloyd’s team, featuring the calculated brutality of Richards with the bat and a quartet of fast, ferocious and intelligent bowlers backed by gloriously athletic fielding, were rated by the Sports Illustrated as one of the three most dominant in the world in any sport during the 1980s.
