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

14 seventh match in the season as referred to in the above extract from WICA 1977 ). This fixture was repeated in each season to 1979/80, apart from 1977/78 when it was abandoned due to rain. But then it too began to experience its troubles. The match for the 1981 Beaumont Cup began as usual as a first-class match, but it was abandoned after two days, because by this time rain had prevented even the first innings of the match from being completed and it was concluded that there was no prospect of the scheduled three-day game being brought to an outright conclusion. Instead, a one-day game between the sides was arranged for the third day – but in the end rain prevented any play in that match too. So in practice, the abandonment of the first-class match was of no effect, and had the decision to abandon it not been made it could probably have stood for all time as a rain-ruined, but still first-class, match. But the abandonment was too much for the West Indies Cricket Board of Control, who considered it to amount to an ‘irregularity’ which led them to withdraw its first-class status. Things got worse in 1981/82. The match was played out, with South & Central winning by an innings; but both sides were weak, and only nine players batted in North & East’s first innings, and only eight in their second. To quote once again the West Indies Cricket Annual – ‘The annual match for the Beaumont Cup proved a disaster for the second year running, its first-class status again in doubt. In 1982 its position was devalued even before it began when leading players Larry Gomes, Richard Gabriel, Randall Lyon, Augustine Logie, Keith D’Heurieux, Bernard Julien, Harold Joseph and Anmeal Rajah were unavailable for one reason or another. ‘That unsatisfactory situation was further compounded when the two Tobago representatives on the North-East team, Clint Yorke and Alston Daniel, did not show up because of some misunderstanding over travel, and when North-East’s Anthony Dharson batted only once. ‘In the circumstances, a ruling was expected from the West Indies Board on the status of the match. This was not forthcoming from its Annual General Meeting, and until the matter is finalised the Annual will not recognise the match as first-class.’ [WICA 1982, page 67] No such ruling was ever received, and consequently this match remains outside the first-class canon. The Beaumont Cup match returned to favour for three more seasons from 1983 until 1985. The 1986 match was, however, cancelled by the Trinidad & Tobago Cricket Board ‘to concentrate on preparation of the team for the Shell Shield’ (as reported in WICA 1986 ), and although a match was scheduled for late May 1987, no details of it have ever emerged, and the likelihood is that it never took place. As well as the status of the fixture, its actual identity was becoming less and less clear. Reference to it in WICA 1987 called it the Texaco Trophy match rather than the Beaumont Cup match, and named the competing sides as North-East-Tobago and South-Central, rather than just North & East and South & Central. By 1989 WICA was once again referring to it as ‘the annual match between North and South Trinidad’, and thereafter the names of the two competing sides seem to be interchangeable between those two styles. Administratively, the demise of first-class internal matches in Trinidad & Tobago was equally messy. The decision to end the first-class status of the last of these fixtures was reportedly taken by the West Indies Cricket Board of Control in 1985, though it seems to have passed unannounced – even by WICA - for four years until it was noted in WICA 1989. Indeed, in 1987 that Annual continued to refer to the scheduled May 1987 fixture as first-class. Perhaps there never really was a definite decision, and the reference to the 1985 ‘decision’ was just an attempt to be wise after the event. Trinidad – history