Sport
Once a dominant force in Test cricket, the West Indies has in recent years dissolved into a hapless team rent by administrative problems, disunity and lack of funds. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
The spectacular collapse of West Indies cricket
There is, almost inevitably, an elegiac tone when writing about West Indies cricket. It can be hard not to become wistful, even faintly mournful, when reflecting upon the Windies’ now distant past of flamboyant invincibility. We’ve been eulogising them for decades.
It is remarkable to think back upon the capstone to the West Indies tour of Australia in 1960-61 – a grand tickertape parade in Melbourne, held to honour our guests and attended by hundreds of thousands of fans.
For the preceding decade, Test cricket had developed a reputation for being repellently dull. The sportswriters could be depended upon to file bitter laments and unflattering comparisons with earlier, supposedly more golden eras of batting. But in the summer of 1960-61, the five Test series was played with creativity and thrilling parity. Australia won the series 2-1, and it provided the sport’s first tie (there’s been only one since).
Captains Frank Worrell and Australia’s Richie Benaud were celebrated for their intelligence, flair and mutual respect. That year’s Wisden almanac reported: “Four months earlier these same players had arrived almost unsung but vowing, through their captain, that they were going to re-instil some lost adventure into cricket, which for several years had in the main been a dull, lifeless pastime to watch internationally … Summer’s glorious pastime had returned as a spectacle of some consequence and faith in the game was restored among the all-important younger fraternity on whom its popularity, and indeed its very existence, depends.”
The series was also significant for being the first played by a West Indies team liberated from the prohibition on Black captaincy. Frank Worrell would become the Windies’ first. After the end of the fifth and final Test at the MCG, Don Bradman introduced Worrell to the stage before an enormous crowd who showered him with a lusty rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.
Two days later, on February 17, 1961, almost half a million Melburnians lined the streets of its CBD to watch the West Indies players in open cars travel slowly to their reception at Town Hall. They were astonishing scenes, one photo of which blessed the front page of The Age the next day. “Commerce in this Australian city stood almost still as the smiling cricketers from the West Indies, the vanquished not the victors, were given a send-off the like of which is normally reserved for Royalty and national heroes,” Wisden reflected. “Open cars paraded the happy players from the Caribbean among hundreds of thousands of Australians who had been sentimentalised through the media of cricket as it should be played.”
This week, in the third and final Test match of the Frank Worrell series, held at Sabina Park, Kingston, Jamaica, the West Indies suffered a historic, scarcely credible capitulation. Having already lost the series – it was 2-0 to Australia before the match – the West Indies were chasing 204 for victory when they were bowled out for… 27. It would be very difficult to make worse such a bewildering indignity, but the Windies did manage, barely, to avoid setting a new record for Test cricket’s lowest score – that, for now, is retained by New Zealand with their score of 26 against England in 1955.
The scorecard yields all manner of statistical oddities and astonishments. In the West Indies’ second innings, the second highest scorer was not a West Indian batter but the extras the Australian bowlers conceded. There were seven ducks, the innings lasted less than 15 overs and the West Indies had lost three wickets before they’d registered a solitary run. Scott Boland bagged a hat-trick and figures of 3/2 off only two overs, while Mitchell Starc seemed possessed of some ancient magic and finished with the ludicrous numbers of 6/9. At 35 years old, Starc only seems to be getting better – I’m not sure I’ve seen him bowl so well.
In fairness to the West Indies, in all three Tests they were competitive in the first innings, a fact helped by a brittle Australian top order that so far has not benefited from the experimental shuffling of line-up and batting order. Regardless, Australia’s bowling is an embarrassment of talent and the West Indies were out of their depth against the intimidating swing and seam of Starc and co.
Even for a side that has, with some exceptions, lurched between mediocrity and abjectness for three decades, this annihilation was a fresh nadir. In language you might mistake for the consolations of a statesman following a major earthquake, the president of Cricket West Indies, Kishore Shallow, said: “While disappointment is natural, we must not allow this moment to define our journey. Now is not the time to turn away. Now is the time to stand even closer as a people. These are the moments that shape us.”
On ABC TV, former West Indies captain Carl Hooper gave the impression of a man who’s just discovered some grave and intimate treachery, and I wondered if the poor chap might actually weep or vomit on live TV. “It’s been so disappointing,” he said. “I’m angry, I’m upset, because I think we were building a good thing a few years ago. The boys came out here and had a Test match win in Brisbane, a drawn series, and then we went to Pakistan and drew 1-1. Fantastic results. And then we had wholesale changes, and to see this is the end result, it’s like what we’ve done for the last two years or three years, and trying to build something, is just sort of gone up in flames today.”
Cricket West Indies assumed battle stations and called an emergency meeting that would be attended by three greats: Sir Clive Lloyd, Sir Vivian Richards and Brian Lara. “We are in a rebuilding phase, steadily investing in the next generation, and reigniting the spirit that has long made West Indies cricket a force in the world,” Shallow said. “Progress is rarely straightforward. It takes time, perseverance and belief, especially in our most difficult moments.”
But variations of such statements have been made for decades now.
I’m wary about writing on the West Indies of old. As a boy obsessed with the game, their skill, aggression and swagger was magnetic to me. So much so that I feel the gravity of hyperbole and nostalgia now tugging my sleeve. Boy they were fun, and if I’m too young to have watched Clive Lloyd, Michael Holding or Joel Garner, some of my fondest cricketing memories are of Curtly Ambrose terrifying our batters, or the effortlessly cool Viv Richards slicing up our bowlers. As a boy, his rockstar self-possession impressed me.
The famous dominance of the West Indies was really imposed in the 1970s, and between 1980 and 1995 they didn’t lose a single Test series. The conventional moment for marking their decline comes from that latter year, when they lost the Frank Worrell Trophy 2-1 at home to an Australia captained by Mark Taylor. Soon, there would be new invincibles.
Things have a way of seeming inevitable once they’ve happened, but I wonder if the West Indian dominance wasn’t itself an aberration and the decades of fallowness since a reversion to the mean.
That said, two decades of brilliance hardly suggests a fluke. But relative to their competitors, the odds were never great. To start, West Indies cricket draws from 15 island countries and team selection and harmony has long suffered from intra-country rivalries. The collective population is small, the game’s administration has long been poor and the relationship between the board and the players association has been notoriously fractious. The representative countries are relatively impoverished, and so too the training conditions for young aspirants.
One of their major financiers and sponsors, Allen Stanford, was convicted in 2012 for running a giant Ponzi scheme worth billions and was sentenced to 110 years in an American prison. The native Texan and Antiguan citizen had established a cosy, crooked network of largesse and influence in his adopted country – enough to earn him a knighthood as a neat quid pro quo for generous political donations. His conviction revealed how easily the game there could be hijacked by grifters.
Finally, the status of Test match cricket seems to have dwindled, if not atrophied throughout the Caribbean islands that once comprised the most fearsome cricket team the world has known. Insufficient investment has made T20, especially the Indian Premier League, vastly more lucrative and it’s not been uncommon for West Indian players to forsake their national side in favour of their Indian club.
If the West Indian team’s mediocrity – if that’s not too gentle a word – is to be arrested, then the status of Test cricket must itself be revived. It might also require the benevolent interventions of the International Cricket Council, a body that’s long been happy to watch the game atrophy in the Caribbean and to endlessly accommodate the all-powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India.
Much has been said this week by former players and West Indian administrators, often on behalf of a population they presume to describe as being anguished and dispirited. Are they? Perhaps. But I’d be curious to learn something of the popular response to the loss. Does it matter anymore? I don’t know. If not, the revival of the game will be extremely difficult, no matter how long and pleasant our memories.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Windies collapse".
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