First-Class Matches Trinidad and Guyana 1958/59 to 1989/90

8 A note regarding other territories in the West Indies It has only been in Trinidad & Tobago and in Guyana that some internal matches were, for a time, accorded first-class status. There have been some form of organised ‘internal’ matches in other parts of the Caribbean as well, but none has ever been treated as first-class. They may be briefly noted as follows: Barbados From the late 1930s, two major cricket leagues existed side-by-side in Barbados: the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA), set up in 1892 as the Barbados Cricket Challenge Committee and described in a recent, locally-published source 1 as ‘controlled and dominated by rich white families at least until the 1970s’; and the Barbados Cricket League (BCL), established in 1937 and described in the same source as designed ‘to cater to lower class Blacks from the rural districts for whom there had not previously been any place in organized cricket’. An annual match between sides representing the BCA and the BCL was first held in 1947. In an article in Cricket Quarterly in 1965 2 - some years after first-class status had been given to matches for the Beaumont Cup in Trinidad – the writer David Gallagher said this: ‘An interesting question is whether the annual three-day matches between BCA and BCL should not also be considered first-class; the standard may be as high as that of the Beaumont Cup in Trinidad’. Whether the question of according first-class status to these matches was ever considered by the West Indies Cricket Board is not known, but neither this fixture nor any other internal matches within Barbados has ever been given this status. In any case, the question went away after 1969, when a BCL XI was admitted to the BCA, and the matches between the two organisations were abandoned. Jamaica From British colonial times, Jamaica was divided for some administrative purposes into three counties, Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey. Until very recently there does not seem to have been any regular cricket competition between teams representing these three counties, perhaps because Surrey – which includes Kingston – would surely have dominated such an event as totally as their English namesake dominated the English County Championship in the 1950s. This changed in 1997, when the Jamaica County Championship was set up by the Jamaica Cricket Association. This featured not only teams representing the three counties, but also the three leading clubs from that year’s Senior Cup Competition. Moreover, professional players from other territories were able to take part in what was the first semi-professional league in the West Indies. In that first year, 15 Test and first-class players from outside Jamaica took part, including the likes of Carl Hooper (Guyana), Phil Simmons (Trinidad & Tobago) and Curtly Ambrose (Leeward Islands). The first tournament was regarded as a great success, but the number of big names participating rapidly declined. After three years – in each of which the competition was won by the reigning Senior Cup champions, rather than any of the traditional counties – no more is heard of the event. 1 ‘100 Years of Organised Cricket in Barbados’, published by the BCA in 1992.. 2 The West Indian Season 1964 by David Gallagher, published in Cricket Quarterly volume 3 (1965), at p. 84.