Franklyn Stephenson is regarded as one of the finest West Indian players to have never played international cricket. His crime — touring apartheid South Africa with the West Indies ‘rebels’ in the 1980s. In a 15-year competitive career, Stephenson picked up 792 wickets in 219 first-class games, and 448 scalps in 282 List A matches with is right-arm fast bowling, apart from being a more than useful batsman who had multiple hundreds in both formats. Now focused on running his cricket academy in Barbados, he talks about his early days, the South African tour, his exploits in county cricket, and pioneering the slower ball, among other things. Excerpts:
Talk to us about your early days leading up to your first-class debut for Barbados.
In those days, Barbados had a string of fast bowlers. Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Wayne Daniel, Ezra Moseley and Hartley Alleyne, to name a few. I went to thenational selection trials for four years and did not get picked. To be fair, these guys were senior and deserved to play ahead of me. So I played in the English leagues and got an opportunity to play for Tasmania too. In 1981 I played against the touring West Indies team lead by Clive Lloyd, and got five wickets against them.
During this time, I was batting lower down and my batting skills came to the fore in one of the training sessions where I got to bat early and impressed everyone. On my debut for Barbados, we lost two quick wickets, Andy Roberts was bowling at the speed of light and I went in as nightwatchman at No. 4 and smashed 166. The quality of the field, people being oblivious of my batting skills, those kept me away from the West Indies first class set-up till 1981-82.
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