I'm late to this debate, but I'm adding my two cents because I suspect that I'm one of the very few contributors who actually saw Sobers play. It strikes me as astonishing that people can attempt to evaluate Sobers' status as a bowler on the basis of a SINGLE statistic - his test bowling average. Don't get me wrong - figures do matter, but they have to be understood in their context, and used with other sources of information such as the views of contemporary players and journalists.
For example, Peter May and Ken Barrington both played for Surrey and England at around the same time (May was four years older and retired relatively early). May's test batting average was 46; Barrington, who played in more tests, averaged 58, which is significantly higher. Nevertheless, virtually all of the players and journalists who played with or watched the Surrey pair considered May to be the greater batsman. It would be foolish to ignore their testimony.
Sobers was a batsman who can bowl, as opposed to Miller, Procter, Imran, Botham and Kapil, who were bowlers who could bat. His bowling never reached the heights that his batting did, but in his prime he was good enough to hold his place in a strong test side as either a seam bowler or a spinner. This, in fact, is what happened. The West Indies selectors were able to omit a fine Jamaican fast bowler named Lester King because Sobers could support Hall and Griffith, and they also excluded an excellent slow left arm spinner named Edwin Mohammed, who operated very successfully with Lance Gibbs for Guyana. When David Holford joined the W.I. team as a leg spinner he, not Sobers, was regarded as the fifth bowler.
Any test captain of that era would have been happy to have Sobers in his team purely as a bowler. Most of them have said so.
I admired Imran very much indeed, but I don't believe that he (or for that matter, Botham or Kapil) would have been chosen to play for the stronger W.I. sides of the 1960's through the early 1980's purely as a batsman. The mid-1960's team featured Kanhai, Butcher, Nurse and Sobers in the 3 to 6 batting positions. The team in the early 70's consisted of Kallicharran, Lloyd, Kanhai and Sobers in these slots, while during Lloyd's reign as captain around 1980 Richards, Kallicharran, Rowe and Lloyd himself played. Which of these players should have been dropped to play Imran as a batsman?
One last point. Most of the players and journalists who saw Sobers considered him to be the best allrounder in the game's history, not just a great batsman who could bowl occasionally. Few, if any, of them changed their views after seeing later generations of players. Ultimately we have to choose between two competing hypotheses. Either John Arlott, Trevor Bailey, Bishan Bedi, Geoff Boycott, Don Bradman, Greg Chappell, Ian Chappell, Dennis Compton, Colin Cowdrey, Jack Fingleton, Wes Hall, Ray Illingworth, Alan Knott, Clive Lloyd, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Barry Richards, John Snow, E.W. Swanton, Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, John Woodcock and many others are all complete idiots who know nothing about evaluating bowlers, or the people who claim that Sobers was a mediocre bowler are, to put it mildly, misinformed. I know which option appears more plausible to me.
