The belligerent Seymour Nurse was born on November 10, 1933. Abhishek Mukherjee looks at one of many West Indies batsmen who never got the run he deserved because of the stiff competition he faced in from contemporaries.
Had Seymour MacDonald Nurse been born, say, fifty years later, he would probably have played a hundred Tests for West Indies. West Indies would have loved to have him at the middle-order (or even at the top, a position where he had started his career) of their batting line-up.
Nurse was that perfect, rare combination of elegance and strength that makes some batsmen more attractive than others. Writing for The Barbados Nation Philip Spooner called him “classy, stylish, and a wonderful exponent of the art of battingâ€. His ability to take a Test away from the opposition made him a much-feared batsman; add to that his ability to rise to occasions and scoring big, and you probably get a package as perfect as any.
Nurse had scored 2,523 runs at 47.60 from 29 Tests (yes, that few) with six hundreds. He had played in nine series (one, one, and two Tests in three of them), and had crossed 500 runs twice in the remaining six. His fourth-innings numbers read 362 runs at 72.40 with two hundreds.
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