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

181 West Indies in 1996/97 West Indies were involved in three Test series in 1996/97, beginning with a topsy-turvy five-match series in Australia in which the visitors lost both the first two Tests by over 120 runs and the fourth by an innings and 183, but were victorious in the third and fifth by six and ten wickets respectively. The 3-2 series defeat meant that West Indies had now lost successive home and away to series to the same side for the first time since their successive defeats by Australia in the early 1970s. With Richardson departed, Courtney Walsh returned to the captaincy, though Brian Lara was given his first taste in the role for most of the final Test after Walsh had damaged a hamstring early on. Lara responded with an innings of 132, West Indies’ highest of the series, while Walsh reduced his pace to take 5-74 in Australia’s second innings to set up the victory. For the first time ever, West Indies played two Test series at home in an extended 1996/97 season, beating India 1-0 in a five-match series in March/April 1997, and beating Sri Lanka by the same margin in a two Test series in June. In the India series, slow pitches and rain between them contributed to the four draws: a total of five full days were lost to the weather in the last two Tests, neither of which reached a third innings. The only decided game of the series was a livelier affair, in which India took a narrow first-innings lead before bowling West Indies out cheaply, leaving them needing only 120 in their second innings for victory; whereupon Ian Bishop, Curtly Ambrose and newcomer Franklin Rose promptly bowled them out in under 36 overs for just 81. More damage to his hamstring meant that Walsh missed this match altogether, thereby making it the first Test match in which Lara captained the side from the outset. The Tests in June marked two significant ‘firsts’: they were Sri Lanka’s first-ever Tests in the West Indies, and the second Test was played on the island of St Vincent, thus becoming the first to be played in the Windward Islands. In the first match, at St John’s, a low-scoring game was won thanks to an opening partnership of 160 in the fourth innings between Sherwin Campbell and Stuart Williams – but West Indies still lost four wickets in adding the further 27 runs needed for victory. The second match, at Kingstown, ended as a draw in bad light with Sri Lanka needing only 36 runs to square the series – but with only two wickets in hand. Not for the first time, conditions prevented what might have been a truly thrilling end to the game. Including the Tests against Sri Lanka, the first-class season in the West Indies did not end until the unusually late date of 24 June. It had begun on the unusually early date of 23 September when a virtually full-strength Barbados side took on the Free State side from South Africa in an inconsequential friendly. The match was drawn, with no play possible on the final day. It would be a further three months before the West Indian season would resume in earnest. When it did, the previous season’s experiment of deciding the Red Stripe Cup competition with a final between the two leading teams was not repeated. Instead a different change was introduced to the format of the competition, which for this season alone was played as a double round-robin, with each side meeting each of the others both home and away. So a total of 30 matches were scheduled, though in practice three were completely lost to rain, all of them in the early part of the season in Guyana, who thus saw whatever chance they had of success in the competition washed away before barely a third of the season had passed. Starting the season with three straight wins, Barbados took an early lead in the competition and were never under any threat thereafter. They ended with six outright wins in their ten matches, one of them a rare two-day victory over the Windward Islands. Jamaica finished as the tournament runners-up, while two wins in their last three matches saw the Leeward Islands overtake Trinidad & Tobago to secure third place.