I didn’t have the education to write books. But I know the game,” the late Sir Garfield Sobers said at an event organised by the Barbados Museum and Historic Society in 2019. The cricket legend, who passed away in Barbados on Friday at 89, was referring to the fact that one doesn’t need to be scholarly to coach a team. Sobers didn’t take into consideration no less than eight cricket books he wrote in collaboration with professional writers.

To reveal what Sobers wrote on the Indian cricketers he played against (Sunil Gavaskar and Farokh Engineer were also his teammates in the 1971-72 Rest of the World side), I tucked into two of the most popular books by him that were available on these shores. Twenty Years at the Top, co-written with Brian Scovell and published by MacMillan in 1988, and Garry Sobers An Autobiography with Bob Harris, published by Headline in 2002.