Quote:Yet it was Fredericks that really stole the show with his flashy 69. I vividly remember the exquisite square driving and ferocious hooking. He paid special attention to left-arm pacer Gary Gilmour, regularly dismissing his offerings to the boundary boards at backward point. When the crowd in what was then the Eastern Stands shouted a rhyme to the bowler that he was "gonna get a lot more," the bowler responded by cheekily showing them the middle finger. It was there that I learnt what the gesture meant.

This was not the first time Fredericks had enraptured the Sabina Park audience. In 1972 Uton Dowe was a young, fast, aggressive Jamaican pacer who had already played for the West Indies. Guyana was responding to Jamaica's mammoth 467/7 declared in the second round of regional Shell Shield matches when he crashed into the diminutive opener's murderous blade. Opening the bowling, Dowe's first-ball bouncer forced Fredericks into evasive action, during which the ball cannoned onto the handle of his bat and flew over fine leg for six. The next five were sent to the boundary or flew over it at the batsman's direction. The sequence was 6,4,4,4,6,4, and the crowd was delirious. It didn't matter that it was the hometown bowler who was being so mistreated.