History of West Indies Cricket: The Great Era and After

For about fifteen years, from the start of the 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, West Indies did not lose a Test series. Not at home, not away, not against anyone. No other side in the history of the game has managed a run of that length, and the manner of it, four fast bowlers rotating through the day at genuine pace, has never been repeated because no other country has ever had the raw material to try. That period sits in the middle of this story rather than at the end of it, which is the thing most accounts get wrong. There was a great deal before it and there has been a great deal since.

This page follows the West Indies team from its first Test match onward. How cricket reached the Caribbean, how the clubs and colonies organised it and how a combined side became possible at all is covered separately in our account of the origin of cricket in the West Indies.

From first Test to first series win

West Indies played their first Test at Lord's in June 1928 and lost all three matches of that series by an innings. The batting was not equipped for English conditions and the fast bowling, good as Learie Constantine and Herman Griffith could be in short bursts, could not sustain pressure across five days.

The correction came quickly. On the return series at home in 1929-30, West Indies won their first Test, at Bourda in Georgetown, and drew the rubber. That series also produced one of the strangest matches in the record book. The final Test at Sabina Park was played to a finish under timeless rules, ran for nine days, and was then abandoned as a draw because the England team had a boat to catch. Andy Sandham made 325 for England in it, the first Test triple century.

In 1934-35 West Indies beat England at home for the first time, taking the series 2-1. Progress in the 1930s was real but narrow. It rested very heavily on one man.

George Headley

Headley was born in Panama, raised in Jamaica, and became the first great batter the Caribbean produced. He made 176 in his second Test innings and went on scoring at that level for a decade, finishing with a Test average above sixty in an era when West Indian totals frequently collapsed around him. English writers called him the Black Bradman. In Jamaica the preferred formulation reversed it.

There is a statistical way to put his position and a human one. The statistical version is that he made a very high proportion of his side's runs. The human version is that in a region where black cricketers had been admitted to representative teams mainly as bowlers, the best batter in the Caribbean was black, obviously so, and could not be explained away. In January 1948 Headley captained West Indies in a Test at Bridgetown, the first black man to do so. It lasted one match. He was not appointed for the series.

1950, Lord's, and the arrival

The Second World War took six years out of the fixture list. What emerged afterwards was a different team.

In 1950 West Indies toured England and won the series 3-1, including their first victory in a Test on English soil, at Lord's in June. The bowling was done by two spinners aged twenty and twenty, Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine, who between them took a startling proportion of the wickets on that tour. Ramadhin bowled a mixture of off-breaks and leg-breaks out of the front of the hand with his sleeves buttoned to the wrist, and English batters spent the summer failing to read him. A calypso recorded in London to mark the Lord's win made the pair famous well beyond cricket.

The win mattered out of all proportion to a single series. It came in the same period as the first large wave of Caribbean migration to Britain, and a West Indian crowd celebrating on the outfield at Lord's was a public event with a meaning nobody in the game had to explain.

The three Ws

Behind the spinners was a batting order finally worth the name. Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott were all born in Barbados within about two years of each other, within a small radius of Bridgetown, and all three became great Test batters. Weekes was the most relentless accumulator and holds the record for consecutive Test hundreds, made in 1948. Walcott was the most powerful, and kept wicket early in his career. Worrell was the most complete stylist and, as it turned out, the most consequential.

The 1950s did not run smoothly after that. The 1957 tour of England was lost heavily, in part because England worked Ramadhin out at Edgbaston, where Peter May and Colin Cowdrey batted him into the ground with an enormous stand built on pad play. West Indies could beat anybody at home and struggled abroad, which was a fair description of the side's condition for the rest of the decade.

The captaincy question, and Frank Worrell

Through all of this, the captaincy remained with white amateurs. John Goddard, Jeffrey Stollmeyer and Gerry Alexander led the side in the 1950s. By that point the composition of the team made the arrangement indefensible on cricketing grounds, and it was increasingly indefensible on any other grounds too, as one Caribbean territory after another moved towards self-government.

The public campaign was led from Trinidad. C. L. R. James, who had returned home in 1958 and was editing the newspaper The Nation, argued in print and at length that Worrell should captain West Indies, that the objections to it were about race rather than cricket, and that a colonial appointment policy could not survive in a region approaching independence. He was not alone, but he was the loudest and the most precise.

In 1960 Worrell was appointed captain for the tour of Australia. He held the job until he retired in 1963, and West Indian cricket was permanently altered by it.

1960-61 in Australia

The tour produced the first tied Test, at Brisbane in December 1960, a match that has been rerun in the imagination of Australian and Caribbean cricket ever since. Australia won the series 2-1. That is not what anyone remembers.

What they remember is that a series played hard and fast between two attacking sides restored public interest in Test cricket at a moment when it was flagging, and that when West Indies left Melbourne an enormous crowd lined the streets for a ticker-tape farewell. The trophy contested between the two countries was named for Worrell shortly afterwards. He was knighted in 1964 and died in 1967, at forty-two.

Sobers, and the best team in the world

Garfield Sobers had made 365 not out against Pakistan at Sabina Park in 1958, a world Test record that stood for thirty-six years, and he was by then the best cricketer alive by a distance that made the question uninteresting. He batted left-handed at the top of the middle order, bowled left-arm fast-medium, orthodox spin and wrist spin depending on what the match required, and fielded close to the bat as well as anyone.

He took over the captaincy in 1965, and West Indies beat Australia at home to be regarded, informally but universally, as the strongest side in the game. In 1966 they won in England 3-1. In 1968, playing for Nottinghamshire at Swansea, Sobers hit six sixes in an over off Malcolm Nash, the first time it had been done in first-class cricket.

His captaincy also produced one of the game's more debated declarations. At Port of Spain in 1968 he set England a target that they reached, losing the match and the series. Sobers defended it as an attempt to force a result in a dead rubber of draws. The Caribbean argued about it for years. By the early 1970s the side had aged, results had fallen away, and a rebuild was overdue.

The team of many nations

Before the next era, a point that has no equivalent anywhere else in international sport. West Indies is not a country. It never has been.

The team represents a group of territories in and around the Caribbean that share a cricket board and almost nothing else in the way of government. The list includes independent states such as Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Kitts and Nevis. It includes British Overseas Territories such as Anguilla, Montserrat and the British Virgin Islands. It includes territories that are not British at all, among them the United States Virgin Islands and Dutch Sint Maarten, which play through the Leeward Islands. Guyana is not an island and is not in the Caribbean Sea; it is on the mainland of South America.

There was an attempt at political union. The West Indies Federation was established in 1958 and collapsed in 1962, after Jamaica voted to leave and Trinidad followed. Cricket outlasted it, along with the University of the West Indies and the regional court, and the team therefore has the odd distinction of being the surviving institution of a country that failed.

What the arrangement costs

The romance of this is genuine. So are the costs, and they explain a good deal of the administrative history that follows.

• There is no single national government funding the game, so the board depends on tours, television and the goodwill of member territories.
• Home matches rotate around a dozen grounds across a thousand-mile spread, so home advantage is diluted and travel costs are enormous.
• Selection is scrutinised territorially. Any prolonged run of poor results produces a complaint from somewhere that a particular island is being overlooked, and the complaint is sometimes justified.
• Players hold different passports and different citizenships, which makes something as basic as arranging visas for a tour a genuine administrative task.
• There is no national anthem. The side has used the David Rudder song "Rally Round the West Indies" since the 1990s, adopted because there was nothing else available to use.

Clive Lloyd and the decision that changed everything

Clive Lloyd, a Guyanese left-hander who batted in glasses and fielded like a much smaller man, took the captaincy in 1974 and held it for a decade.

1975 and 1979

He won the first World Cup almost immediately. In the 1975 final at Lord's, played over sixty overs a side, Lloyd made a century against Australia and Viv Richards ran out three Australian batters from the covers to break the chase. West Indies won by seventeen runs.

Four years later they won it again at the same ground, beating England after Richards made 138 not out and Joel Garner took five wickets in eleven balls at the end. Those two tournaments established the side as the dominant force in one-day cricket, a status they did not lose until the 1983 final, when India defended a small total at Lord's and won. Our guide to the Cricket World Cup and how the format changed sets those matches in the context of a tournament that has altered its own rules more often than any other.

Four fast bowlers

The strategic decision that defined the era came out of a defeat. On the 1975-76 tour of Australia West Indies were beaten 5-1, largely by Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson bowling very fast at a batting order that had no equivalent answer. Lloyd concluded that the answer was not spin, or containment, or better technique. It was more pace, for longer.

From 1976 onward West Indies selected four fast bowlers and no specialist spinner as a matter of policy, and they had the depth to rotate them almost indefinitely. Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner and Colin Croft gave way to Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose, Ian Bishop and Patrick Patterson without any drop in quality. Marshall, who took 376 Test wickets at under twenty-one, is frequently rated the best of all of them.

The method worked immediately. England were beaten 3-0 in 1976, a series preceded by the England captain Tony Greig's remark about intending to make West Indies grovel, which was repeated back to him all summer. Richards scored 291 at The Oval and finished the calendar year with a Test aggregate that stood as a record for three decades. Holding took fourteen wickets in that same Oval Test on a pitch that gave him nothing.

It also drew criticism, some of it about the short-pitched bowling and some of it about over rates, since four fast bowlers get through far fewer overs in a day than an attack containing a spinner. Both issues eventually produced changes in the laws. Neither slowed the team down at the time.

Viv Richards and fifteen years unbeaten

Vivian Richards took over as captain in 1985 and never lost a Test series in charge. He batted without a helmet against the fastest bowling in the world, chewed gum, and treated the crease as territory rather than a place of safety. As a symbol he was as important as Worrell had been, and considerably more explicit about it.

The record of the period is close to absurd. From 1980 until 1995 West Indies did not lose a Test series to anybody. England were beaten 5-0 in England in 1984 and 5-0 in the Caribbean in 1985-86. In Australia in 1992-93 the side won a series that included a Test at Adelaide decided by one run and a spell at Perth in which Curtly Ambrose took seven wickets for one run.

The run ended in 1995, at home, when Australia won a four-Test series 2-1. It was the handover of a title rather than a blip, and everyone present understood it as such.

Brian Lara and the long decline

Brian Lara sits across the join between the two halves of this story, which is part of why his career reads the way it does.

He made 375 against England at Antigua in 1994, taking Sobers' world record, then made 501 not out for Warwickshire the same summer, which remains the highest first-class innings ever played. In 1999 he almost single-handedly beat Australia at home, with 213 at Sabina Park and an unbeaten 153 at Bridgetown to win a Test by one wicket. In 2004, again at Antigua and again against England, he made 400 not out to reclaim the Test record after Matthew Hayden had taken it.

Around those innings, the team lost. Lara captained through some of the worst results in West Indian history, resigned, returned and resigned again. The pattern from the late 1990s onward was a batting order dependent on one or two players, a bowling attack without the old depth, and heavy defeats away from home.

Why West Indies cricket declined

There is no single cause, and accounts that offer one are usually selling something. The documented factors overlap.

Factor	What changed
Talent competition	Basketball, football and athletics became viable professional routes for young Caribbean athletes, with American college scholarships attached. Cricket lost its monopoly on the best sportsmen.
Structural funding	A board answering to a dozen territories with limited television revenue could not fund development at the level of the wealthier boards.
Domestic cricket	The regional first-class competition weakened, and the gap between it and Test cricket widened.
Coaching succession	The great fast bowlers largely did not move into regional coaching roles, and the transmission of method broke.
Labour relations	Repeated disputes between players and the board consumed years of attention.
Franchise economics	From the late 2000s a Twenty20 specialist could earn far more on the league circuit than in a board contract.

The last two deserve their own treatment.

Board, players and the disputes

The relationship between West Indian cricketers and their board has broken down publicly at least three times.

In 1998 a squad travelling to South Africa halted in London over a contract dispute, and the tour began late after intervention from senior figures in the region. In 2009 a dispute involving the players' association led to a second-string West Indies side being fielded against Bangladesh, who won the Test series. In 2014 a tour of India was abandoned mid-way after the players withdrew over the terms of a new pay agreement, a decision with financial and diplomatic consequences that took years to settle.

The West Indies Cricket Board rebranded as Cricket West Indies in 2017 as part of a governance overhaul. The underlying structural problem, a board accountable to multiple territories and dependent on income it does not control, was not removed by a change of name.

The T20 game and the titles of 2012 and 2016

The shortest format arrived at the right moment for a cricketing culture built on power hitting and fast bowling, and West Indies became very good at it very quickly.

In 2004 the side had already won the Champions Trophy at The Oval, chasing down England's total with the last pair together. In 2012, under Darren Sammy, they won the World Twenty20 in Colombo, beating Sri Lanka in the final after Marlon Samuels counter-attacked from a hopeless position. In 2016, in India, they won it again, beating England at Eden Gardens when Carlos Brathwaite hit four consecutive sixes in the final over. On the same day, at the same ground, the West Indies women beat Australia to win their title. No other country has done that.

Darren Sammy captained both men's titles. He was not the most gifted cricketer in either squad and he was, by common agreement, the reason both squads functioned.

Franchise cricket and the regional side

The same qualities that made West Indies formidable in Twenty20 internationals made individual West Indians the most sought-after players in the global league market, and that created a conflict the board has never resolved.

Chris Gayle became the defining batter of franchise cricket. Our IPL data records 3,175 runs for Royal Challengers in 84 matches at a strike rate of 152.86, with 240 sixes, including the 175 not out that stood for many years as the highest individual score in Twenty20 cricket, and a further 1,346 runs for Punjab after that. Sunil Narine took 209 wickets in 200 matches for Kolkata at an economy rate of 6.80 in our figures, and later reinvented himself as an opening batter in the same side. Andre Russell scored 2,597 runs for Kolkata at a strike rate of 174.88 and took 122 wickets alongside them. Dwayne Bravo took 140 wickets for Chennai. Kieron Pollard played 168 matches for Mumbai, hitting 224 sixes, and won five titles there.

Add the Caribbean Premier League, launched in 2013, the Big Bash and the wider circuit covered in our survey of T20 franchise leagues around the world, and a senior West Indian all-rounder can construct a full professional year without playing for West Indies at all. Several have. The consequence is that Test squads have repeatedly gone out without the region's best-known cricketers, and that the board's negotiating position against tournaments paying multiples of its own contracts is weak.

It is not a moral failure on anybody's part. It is arithmetic. But it means that the modern Test side, built around a rotating group of specialists and younger fast bowlers, has generally been a different set of men from the one that wins Twenty20 tournaments. Continuity between the two has been the exception rather than the rule.

Where the record stands

West Indies have won two one-day World Cups and two men's World Twenty20 titles, plus a Champions Trophy and a women's world title. They produced the longest period of dominance in the history of Test cricket and the two highest individual Test scores ever made, both by the same man on the same ground. They have also missed qualification for a one-day World Cup, which would have been unthinkable to anyone watching at Lord's in 1979.

Both halves are true and the second does not erase the first. The structural conditions that made the great era possible, a deep local game feeding a regional competition feeding a national side, have weakened, and rebuilding them is a slower and less glamorous project than the one Lloyd undertook in 1976. The talent has not gone anywhere. Whether the structure can hold onto it is the open question.

There is one further point worth making about how this history is usually told. West Indies are the only major cricketing power whose greatness is discussed almost entirely in the past tense, and the discussion tends to treat the decline as a mystery requiring explanation. It is not much of a mystery. A federation of small economies with a combined population smaller than several individual Test-playing nations produced, for two decades, the strongest team in the sport. The remarkable thing was never the fall. It was that it happened at all, and that the region built it out of pasture grounds, colonial club rivalries and a school system inherited from the people who had ruled it.

The wider set of national arrivals and eras, including the sides West Indies beat and were eventually beaten by, is collected in our cricket history index.