#drew forrest

In Beyond a Boundary, James drives home the point that cricket in the West Indies was far more than a game – it crossed “the boundary” into the hearts and minds and the cultural and political life of the mass of ordinary islanders. “The cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles, which were charged with social significance,” he wrote. For the team of the 1980s, it was similarly symbolic. The mental atmosphere was the product of three decades of decolonisation, often through armed resistance, and continuing revolutionary wars in southern Africa. Liberation was also in the air in the Caribbean. Between 1960 and 1980 the number of independent island states grew from three to 16. Black pride found a defiant voice in Rastafarianism and the anthems of Bob Marley, who told the islanders: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our minds…”

In 1998, on the eve of the West Indies’ first tour to South Africa, Lara, now captain, led a player uprising over pay and stood up Nelson Mandela at the airport. Sacked and then reinstated by the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), he eventually rejoined the side, but to no avail – the West Indies were humiliatingly “blackwashed” 5-0. Since then, they have lost every one of seven series against the South Africans, home and away. Against Australia they have not won a Test, let alone a rubber, for 20 years.

Richards, captain in 50 Tests between 1985 and 1991, saw his mission in an even more decidedly political light. Historian and University of the West Indies vice-chancellor Hilary Beckles writes that he “unleashed on the field of play a level of historical awareness of the West Indian struggle for sovereignty that touched the souls of disenfranchised millions, who felt the power of his mind and the strength of his convictions”. His personal bearing and batting style loudly proclaimed Black pride. There would be no concessions, no retreat; aggression, on principle, would be met with counter-aggression. He was reggae artist Peter Tosh’s “steppin’ razor” personified. Refusing to wear a helmet or body armour, he sauntered to the wicket with studied nonchalance, insolence almost, in his trademark red West Indies cap. Once he had taken guard, he was capable of some of the most destructive batsmanship the game has seen.

The hardened tradition, which CLR James adamantly resisted through the columns of The Nation newspaper, was Black players under white leadership. After Worrell was installed as the first regular Black captain, the team had its first transient spell of world supremacy, winning from 1961 to 1967 against India (twice), England (twice) and Australia. In that era of slow-scoring wicket preservation, mocked by James as “the welfare state of mind”, the West Indies under Worrell were seen as breathing new vitality into a stagnant undertaking. The Three Ws hallmarked a dashing technique, including wristy, swashbuckling strokeplay – driving “on the up”, the right-over-left flick from outside off through midwicket, and the back-foot cover drive off a ball of near-yorker length – that thumbed the nose at the ossified canons of orthodoxy. Walcott, in particular, bequeathed to Lloyd and Richards the idea that batsmen should not take a step backwards and that the ball was there to be bludgeoned, not fended off. The media labelled this “calypso cricket”, with just a condescending hint that the players were flamboyant, “naturally gifted” entertainers, like the minstrels of yesteryear, for whom winning was secondary. What the Lloyd-Richards axis did was give it a backbone of steel.

Under the leadership first of Clive Lloyd, then of Vivian Richards and briefly Richie Richardson, the West Indies did something without precedent and unlikely to be repeated: for 15 years, between 1980 and 1995, they lost not a single Test series. Lloyd and Richards succeeded in binding 13 major islands and territories spanning 2 900km, infusing them with a burning will to win and fostering a belief in the Caribbean, and the wider world, in their incontestable ascendancy. Political union had failed with the collapse of the West Indies Federation in 1962, but cricket kept the idea of the West Indies as a nation alive.