Courtney Walsh was a great fast bowler for Jamaica, Gloucestershire, and the West Indies. He has had a stellar, record-breaking career, and at one point was the game’s most prolific wicket-taker. From all reports he is also a great human being. Despite a capacity for high pace and hostility, he was a gentleman of the game who played it hard but with integrity.

There were a few controversial moments during his very long career. There was one spell to England tail-ender Devon Malcolm, a man who hardly knew which end to hold his bat. The bespectacled number 11 batter was made to endure a few short deliveries from Walsh after putting up some resistance during the 1994 Test in Jamaica.

Walsh was heavily lambasted by those who considered his actions excessive. The late Bob Willis, one of England’s greatest fast bowlers, called Walsh’s conduct “ungentlemanly”, and Alan Lee, writing in
Wisden, called the display “unedifying”.

But let’s cast our minds back to an incident that occurred during the 1987 World Cup held in India and Pakistan. In their semi-final game against Pakistan, the West Indies batted first and set their opponents 217 to win. Walsh began the last over with Pakistan needing 14. With a ball to go, they required two, and Walsh, seeing Saleem Jaffer out of his crease as he was about to deliver that final ball, chose to warn rather than run out the Pakistani non-striker. The batter got the runs required off that last ball and so Pakistan won, which meant, in the end, the West Indies missed the opportunity to advance to the semi-finals.

Following the incident, Walsh was widely and rightly praised for remaining faithful to the spirit of the game. The Pakistan Government gave him a medal and his warning to Jaffer came to be regarded as one of the great World Cup moments.

Recordings of the event, however, showed that Jaffer was some way down the pitch when Walsh stopped to issue his warning. The unfair advantage he’d, therefore, have gained in setting off earlier than he should have would have been considerable. It’s not like the umpires deny the batting team the run if the non-striker takes off from outside the batting crease. He and his team would be much more likely, therefore, to complete the two runs required for victory and a place in the finals. So why shouldn’t he have been run-out for handing his team an unfair advantage? And it should not matter if he acted deliberately or not. In football, as we all know, a foul need not be deliberately committed to result in a free kick or a penalty for the opposing team.

Walsh did what was considered a gentlemanly deed by not running him out. Yet, had he decided to remove the bails, allowing his side to win the game, he’d have been well within his rights. The blowback would’ve been huge, like it was when Ravichandran Ashwin ran out Jos Buttler during the 2019 Indian Premier League (IPL), or when West Indies all-rounder Keemo Paul ran out Zimbabwe’s Richard Ngarava during the 2016 Under-19 World Cup. The condemnation, especially from former players, was so severe that the then 17-year-old was moved to tears: “…[It] was definitely tough,” Paul admitted at the time. “I just locked myself away. I saw it on
BBC. I read a lot of comments on social media. I took it hard. I cried a lot and wondered if I did the right thing…”

The non-striker who steals an inch when backing up could well miss being run out by an inch when completing his run. How is that fair to the fielding side, and why would the bowler be in the wrong if he chose to run him out? Sometimes the slimmest of margins determine victory or defeat. Coach Tony D’Amato explains it well in the Oliver Stone-directed movie
Any Given Sunday while delivering a pep talk before a massively important game: “You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game — life or football — the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half-second too slow, too fast, and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second…”

The lesson here is that minuscule additions or losses can lead to epic wins or painful defeats. At its most elite, most competitive level, sport is largely about incremental gains. Teams strive to make and accumulate small advances. Total domination of one party over the other is the exception rather than the norm. Baseball players steal bases, bunt, fight for each run. In football, teams encroach on opposition territory one pass at a time; games sometimes end scoreless or tied, and winning by a single goal is commonplace. Boxers, for the most part, earn points, jab by jab, punch by punch, and not many separate the combatants at the end of the most enthralling bouts. Pakistan, it should be remembered, won by a single run off the very last ball of the game.

So did Walsh do the right thing in choosing not to claim that all important inch? The West Indies, led by Viv Richards, was still a reasonably good team then and could possibly have gone on to win the World Cup for the third time.

Walsh was a principled man, doing what he believed to be the principled thing, and for that he cannot be faulted. But the batter had no right to leave his crease early, and many of us believe he ought to have suffered the consequences of his unfair or careless behaviour.

Garfield Robinson is a Jamaican living in the US who writes on cricket for a few Indian and English publications. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or garfield.v.robinson@gmail.com.

Keemo Paul Getty/CPL T20

ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup trophy