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

84 West Indies in 1992/93 1974/75, but their main strength lay in their bowling. Evergreen spinner Clyde Butts led the way with 34 wickets at 15.44, well backed up by fast bowler Barrington Browne, whose 26 wickets in the competition cost him a miserly 12.69 runs apiece. Second place in the table was taken by Leeward Islands, showing their strength in depth despite the absence of many of their leading players. The runner-up spot was secured when they beat the Windward Islands by seven wickets in the last match of the season, despite the loss of the first day to rain. Things would have been different, though, had the earlier match at Kingston between Jamaica and Barbados been able to reach any sort of conclusion, as first-innings points for either side would have meant them finishing above the Leewards in the final table. But the loss of a day to rain, and dogged batting by the Jamaican tail-enders on the last day, left the match as a ‘No decision’, and meant that the two sides tied for third place in the table at the end of the season, just three points behind the Leeward Islands. Butts’ 34 wickets were the most by any bowler in the competition, in which the runscorers were headed by Barbados’ captain Roland Holder, with 510 runs at 72.85. Behind the stumps his team- mate Courtney Browne made 27 dismissals (23ct 4st) to set a new competition record, beating the figure of 23 recorded by Ricardo Skeete (Barbados) in 1982/83 and equalled by David Williams (T&T) in 1984/85. Holder boosted his run-aggregate further with an innings of 144 for the Board President’s XI against the Pakistanis at Georgetown, to give him a season’s total of 654 runs at 81.75. Only one other batsman – the Leeward Islands’ Ridley Jacobs, in just his second season of first-class cricket – passed 500 runs. Clyde Butts played no cricket outside the Red Stripe Cup, but over the season as a whole his tally of 34 wickets was still six more than that of the next most successful bowler – Winston Benjamin, another of the outstanding Leewards players whose services were not required by the national squad. RED STRIPE CUP 1992/93: FINAL TABLE P W L LWF DWF DLF ND Pts 1 Guyana 5 4 0 0 1 0 0 72 2 Leeward Islands 5 2 0 0 0 3 0 44 3 Barbados 5 1 0 1 2 0 1 41 Jamaica 5 1 0 1 2 0 1 41 5 Windward Islands 5 1 3 0 0 1 0 20 6 Trinidad & Tobago 5 0 3 1 0 1 0 9