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

9 Matches in the three seasons of the Jamaica County Championship were played over only two days, and thus could never have been considered for first-class status. But in any case, the competition did not begin until after first-class status had been withdrawn from the internal competitions in Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, at a time when such matches were no longer in the frame for consideration as first-class. Leeward and Windward Islands Competitions between the islands – now island nations – in the Leeward Islands, and in the Windward Islands, began before the First World War, and continue to this day. In the Leewards the matches were initially contested between Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica and St Kitts, later joined at various times by Anguilla and Nevis, and most recently by teams from outside the former British orbit - St Maarten (still today a component county of the Netherlands) and the US Virgin Islands. From their inception in 1913 until the late 1970s the matches between the islands were contested for the Hesketh-Bell Shield, but subsequently the event has just been known as the Leeward Islands Tournament, with various sponsors’ names sometimes attached. The matches were played over three days between at least the 1970s (and probably earlier) and the mid-2010s, but outside those dates they were played over two days, or most recently as one-day, single innings games. Similarly in the Windwards, where the early competitors for what was initially known as the Cork Windward Islands Challenge Cup were Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent; Dominica joined them when their administration transferred from the Leewards shortly before the Second World War. As in the Leewards, the matches – inaugurated in 1910 - were initially played over two days only, though by the late 1960s they had become three-day games, and they remained as such until at least the early 1990s. In the 2010s the series was continuing, now just as the Windward Islands Tournament, but with matches played over two days only. The Cricket Quarterly in Spring 1966 noted unconfirmed reports that first-class status had been granted in 1965 to the ‘internal’ tournaments within the Leeward and Windward Islands – even though at the time the first-class status of the islands’ combined teams was still unclear. But the following edition of the Quarterly quickly scotched that rumour, stating that inApril 1966 the West Indies Board, ‘in the face of what we can only describe as well-justified objections, reversed their ruling’. There the matter rested until 1990, when the West Indies Cricket Board of Control rejected a new application to recognise these matches as first-class, at the same time as they determined that only fixtures in what was then the Red Stripe Cup, together with certain matches involving touring teams, would be accorded first-class status. Records of all of the tournaments noted above are only partial at best, and particularly in the Leeward and Windward Islands, establishing the exact dates of the start of the tournaments, and whether or not they have subsequently continued without a break, and the period over which matches were played as games of three days or more, is beyond the scope of the present book. Other Territories