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

251 West Indies in 1998/99 A simmering crisis in West Indian cricket came to a head in November 1998 as the players were – supposedly – en route to a tour in South Africa, with a breakdown between the recently-formed Players’Association and theWI Cricket Board over a wide range of issues, not all of them related to the players’ remuneration. First the players refused to travel to South Africa; in response the Board sacked the captain and vice-captain (Brian Lara and Carl Hooper) from those roles. After a lengthy stand-off, much of it spent in a hotel near HeathrowAirport in London, the Board conceded as Lara and Hooper were reinstated and the Board agreed to explore other measures to try to improve the players’ pay and conditions. This climb-down was enough to ensure that the tour went ahead; but it was not a happy band of cricketers who finally headed south. They were even less happy after the 5-0 ‘rainbow wash’ that they suffered in the ensuing Test series, in which the four-wicket defeat in the first Test was, by some distance, the closest the side came to a respectable result. Lara was retained as captain throughout, but in the absence of success either by him or by his team his leadership was soon the subject of much criticism. Across the five Tests, only one West Indian batsman played an innings higher than 79 (and that was only 86), and the side’s leading runscorer was their new wicketkeeper, Ridley Jacobs. The bowling attack, still almost completely relying on pace, could make little impression on a South Africa side in which Jacques Kallis was realising his full potential as an all-rounder, and Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock were as potent an opening attack as any that West Indies had faced in years. How much the magnitude of the defeat can be put down to off-field issues as well as to the superior playing abilities of the South Africans is perhaps an open question. The prospect of a series at home against Australia in March/April did little to calm the nerves, and a 312-run defeat in the first Test, in which West Indies were bowled out in their second innings for their lowest-ever total in any Test, threatened that the worst might still be to come. Instead, what did come was Brian Lara. First he made a brilliant 213 at Kingston (only seven runs fewer than his side had made in two innings in the previous game) to ensure that West Indies barely had to bat a second time to level the series. This was followed by an even more majestic 153* in West Indies’ second innings at Bridgetown, in which he single-handedly led his side from 105-5 and 248-8 to an epic one-wicket victory at 311-9. It was an innings never to be forgotten, and given the context in which it was played it fully deserves to rank among the best two or three Test match innings of all time. Many would place it right at the top. It couldn’t last, though, and even with a century on his happy hunting ground at St John’s Lara couldn’t prevent Australia fighting back to square the series in the fourth and final Test. So the series wasn’t won; but the region’s hero had redeemed himself, and for a while at least the unhappy mood of the previous months was lifted. Maybe a better future beckoned after all. But the roots of the problems were more fundamental than could be remedied by two outstanding innings from their captain, or two fine victories against a powerful Australian side, or even by changes to the structure of the players’ payments. West Indies’ decline over the past few years in major part stemmed from the falling standard of domestic first-class cricket, which in turn owed much to the declining attraction of cricket to West Indian youngsters, and also from the failure to produce pitches that favoured aggressive batting and quality fast bowling – the assets that had allowed West Indies to stay at the top for so long in the recent past. The fact that many of the leading wicket-takers in the domestic competition this year were spinners, and that few of the leading batsmen could be said to have traditional ‘Caribbean’ aggression, were clear evidence of the change that recent years had brought. The domestic first-class competition this year was supported by a new sponsor, soft drinks company Busta. The single round-robin stage was retained, supplemented by semi-finals and a