A career average of 112

Both West Indian openers made hundreds at Port of Spain in February 1948. One of them played four Tests in all. The other never played again.

The stand

England had made 362, Billy Griffith scoring 140 on his own Test debut at the age of thirty-three, which is a strange enough thing on its own.

George Carew and Andy Ganteaume opened for West Indies and put on 173. At the close of the second day they were still there: Carew 101 not out, Ganteaume 52 not out.

Carew went first, leg before to Jim Laker for 107. Ganteaume made 112 with thirteen fours before he was caught by Jack Ikin off Dick Howorth, with the score on 306.

West Indies reached 497. England batted again and made 275, and West Indies were 72 for three chasing 141 when the match was drawn.

Full scorecard: West Indies v England, 2nd Test, Port of Spain, 11–16 February 1948 →

Why he did not bat again in the match

He was down to open the second innings and West Indies lost early wickets in a chase that ran out of time. Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott and Foffie Williams went in ahead of him because the situation demanded quick runs.

Ganteaume is listed under did not bat. It is the second most consequential line on the card.

The arithmetic

One Test. One innings. Not out never. One hundred and twelve runs.

Batting average: 112.00.

Don Bradman finished on 99.94 across 52 Tests and eighty innings, and that number is the most famous statistic in the sport. Ganteaume is above him, permanently, on a technicality that the record book has no mechanism for annotating.

Every list of Test batting averages either carries a minimum-innings qualification designed specifically to exclude him, or puts a Trinidadian who batted once at the top of a column Bradman is supposed to own.

The other debutant

Four men made their Test debuts in that match. One of them batted at four for West Indies and made 97.

His name was Frank Worrell. He went on to play fifty-one Tests, average nearly 50, captain West Indies, be knighted, and have a trophy named after him that Australia and West Indies still play for.

Two men walked out at the Queen’s Park Oval for the first time in the same week. One made 112 and was finished. The other made 97 and was beginning.

Why he was never picked again

The reasons that circulate are that he scored too slowly, that the West Indies board of the period selected on island quotas, that Jeff Stollmeyer and Allan Rae were the preferred opening pair once available, and that Ganteaume had a difficult relationship with people who mattered.

He was 27. He kept playing first-class cricket in Trinidad for another fifteen years and captained the island.

No selector left an account. West Indian selection in the 1940s produced no published minutes, and the men who made the decision were dead long before anybody thought to ask them in a way that would be written down.

What he thought of it

He lived to ninety-five and died in 2016, which meant he spent sixty-eight years being asked the same question by every journalist who found him.

He said more than once that he would rather have been remembered for the innings than for the average, and that the average was an accident of arithmetic rather than an achievement.

He is right, and it makes no difference. The card says 112, and the column says 112.00, and those two numbers are the whole of what the sport retained about him.

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No. 2 in One Cap, a series of 6.

NextA hundred and a fifty, and then nothing