Nothing would be better for Test cricket than a West Indian revival

It was good to see a large crowd at the Kensington Oval for the first day of the Barbados Test, but a bit sad that such a large proportion of it seemed to be English supporters, many of them unwisely stripped to the waist. Television coverage can be misleading. I hope it was and that there were lots of home supporters there too.

I’ve never been to the West Indies, but I’ve always loved West Indian cricket – well, almost always for there were many days in their years of supremacy when their battery of fearsome fast bowlers went just a bit far, notably the Old Trafford Test in 1976 when, on the Saturday evening the England openers John Edrich (aged 39) and Brian Close (aged 45) withstood 14 overs of battering, in which more balls were aimed at the head than at the stumps. E W Swanton thought it was disgraceful – and Swanton himself was a lover of West Indian cricket.

It was in 1950 that my love affair with it began, a year when the Three Ws – Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott – all made glorious centuries. But it was the young spin-bowling pair, left-hander Alf Valentine and Sonny Ramadhin, bowler of off-breaks and leg-breaks, who caught my fancy. Before the tour nobody had heard of them. It was expected that the three fast bowlers in the party – Johnson, Jones and Pierre – would be the main bowlers, good preparation, it was said, for English batsmen about to encounter Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller yet again that winter. Not a bit of it: Valentine took 33 wickets in the series, Ramadhin 26. When they combined to win the Second Test at Lord’s, Calypso Cricket was born, as jubilant West Indians sang of “those two little friends of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine”. When Len Hutton first faced Ramadhin, Clyde Walcott behind the stumps said, “I don’t know what you’ll make of this boy, Len. I’ve been keeping to him for a few weeks now, and I still don’t know which way he is going to turn the ball.”

Batsmen would share that ignorance, but seven years later at Edgbaston Ram’s spirit was all but broken by Peter May and Colin Cowdrey in a partnership of 411, distinguished, if that is the word, by a cynical preference for playing the ball with the front pad rather than the bat. In those days you couldn’t be lbw if struck outside the off-stump even if you weren’t even pretending a play a stroke, while umpires almost never gave a batsman lbw if he was playing forward. Watching from the pavilion, the Yorkshire and England slow-lefthander, Johnny Warde thought it “an utter scandal”. Ramadhin had appealed some fifty times and Wardle thought that at least thirty were plumb out. So much for the Spirit of Cricket – title of the annual speech delivered at Lord’s in memory of Cowdrey. That said, the West Indian captain, John Goddard, kept Ramadhin bowling and bowling – for 98 overs in all – madness.

So that tour turned unhappy for the West Indies, ending with a heavy defeat at The Oval where, like so many teams in the Fifties, they were – as the saying went – “Lakered and Locked”. Still it also introduced to us two of the best I’ve ever seen: Rohan Kanhai and Gary Sobers.

If you are one of those who judges everything by figures, you might conclude that Kanhai was only a very good batsmen – 15 Test centuries and an average in the upper 40s but I can’t think anyone who watched him would agree. C L R James, the pre-eminent West Indian writer on cricket, thought him the equal of his own hero of the 1930s, George Headley, known as “the Black Bradman”. Kanhai was a magician, comparable to Denis Compton. Like Compton he could cut a good length ball off middle-stump to the boundary and then, if the bowler, thinking this a piece of outrageous luck sent down an identical delivery Kanhai – or Compton – might sweep it to long-leg for four. In full flow he batted as if he was inventing the game as he went along. He could be obdurate in defence according to the situation or perhaps simply his mood.

As for Gary Sobers, he was simply the greatest cricketer I have ever watched. There was nothing he couldn’t do, and everything he did was with style. His batting figures speak for themselves; his bowling ones of modesty or self-denial. He was a wonderful bowler with the new ball – a left-handed Jimmy Anderson; but, as captain, he would give the new ball to players who were picked only as fast bowlers. In the 1980s – several years after he had retired – there was much argument as to which was the greatest of the four great all-rounders of that period: Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Richard Hadlee and Kapil Dev. All were undeniably great; none the equal of Sobers.

Then came the years of supremacy, the years of Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards and the battery of fast bowlers. For almost twenty years the West Indies were the best team in the world, rivalled only in our time by Don Bradman’s “Invincibles” in the years immediately after the Second World War. They were so good that even those of us who had loved and admired West Indian cricket tired of their supremacy. Which indeed suddenly ended: bad management, inter-island rivalries, lack of team spirit – these and other reasons were all offered. Promising players failed to fulfil their promise. There was suddenly a softness in Caribbean cricket. Hard to know why.

There have been only two great batsmen in the last quarter-century: Brian Lara and Shiv Chanderpaul, and no great bowlers since Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose retired. Instead of love, admiration, respect and fear, there was dismay, exasperation, even – worst of all – pity. There was one other batsman who promised to be great, but Chris Gayle has for years now preferred the easy pickings, big money and razzmatazz of Comic Cricket to the demands of the Test arena; sad. The game is much poorer for the decline of the West Indies – a decline reflected in meagre attendances at Test matches except when English tourists fill the grounds.

Nothing would be better for Test cricket than a West Indian revival. Nothing would do more to ensure its survival. Still perhaps the wheel is turning, if only slowly. The present West Indian side has a serious and talented captain in Jason Holder, and on the first day at Kensington Oval two young batsmen played in a manner to suggest that they may prove to be worthy successors to the Greats of the Golden Years. A century in both innings at Headingley in 2017 had already revealed Shai Hope as a true Test match player. In the afternoon and evening of Thursday, the even younger Shimron Hetmyer played not only with power and elegance but also with the sort of swagger which suggests that bowlers exist to allow him to express himself and display his genius. I hope this isn’t another false dawn: Cricket needs heroes, and it will take swagger and style to bring the home crowds flocking back to watch Test cricket in the West Indies.