First-Class Matches West Indies 1989/90 to 1998/99

134 West Indies in 1994/95 end they were only separated by the four points that Barbados secured when taking a narrow first- innings lead when the two sides met in the first-ever first-class match in Anguilla. Only four points behind the Leewards were Trinidad & Tobago, who beat both the two sides above them in the competition but were unable to repeat the dose against any of the three below. The competition coincided with the absence of the leading players in New Zealand, so it was an opportunity for some new stars to come to the fore. Disappointingly, that was not how things turned out. Richie Richardson was the only cricketer to play throughout the Red Stripe Cup and in all four Tests against Australia, and it was he who headed the runscorers both in the domestic competition (544 runs at 77.71) and in the season as a whole (773 at 55.21). The only double- centuries in the Red Stripe Cup were scored by old hands Desmond Haynes and Roger Harper, though neither was to play against Australia, for a variety of reasons not all of them related to on- field performances. No new names there, then. In fact, both the top two places in both the runscorers and the wicket-takers in the Red Stripe Cup came from the Leeward Islands. Behind Richardson, the only other batsman to reach 500 runs was his tram-mate Dave Joseph (514 at an impressive 102.80), while the bowlers were headed by Dave’s brother Jenson Joseph (a fast-medium bowler in his first season) and slow left-armer Warrington Phillip, with 28 wickets apiece. Phillip topped the list with an average of 15.50 against Joseph’s 18.28. But these were not new stars on the up. Phillip and the Josephs were to aggregate a total of just four international appearances between them, all of them by Dave Joseph in four unproductive Test matches in 1998/99. In all first-class matches the Leewards pair were joined on 28 wickets by Barbados’s Vasbert Drakes, who was to have a slightly longer international career without ever hitting the heights. The mid-1990s may be seen as a period of transition in West Indian cricket, as the old order gradually faded away, to be replaced by – what? On the evidence so far, there was no sign of this transition being just a lull between two eras of success. There were still cricketing superstars around, of course – Lara, Ambrose, Walsh; but the prospects of finding new young players of a quality capable of restoring the West Indies to a place at the head of the cricketing table were looking slim. RED STRIPE CUP 1994/95: FINAL TABLE P W L LWF DWF DLF Pts 1 Barbados 5 3 1 0 1 0 56 2 Leeward Islands 5 3 1 0 0 1 52 3 Trinidad & Tobago 5 2 0 0 1 2 48 4 Jamaica 5 1 2 1 1 0 29 5 Guyana 5 1 2 0 1 1 28 6 Windward Islands 5 0 3 0 1 1 12