Legendary West Indies cricket fast bowler and inimitable analyst Michael Holding suggests how regional administrators can breathe new life into youth sport—by marrying it to crime prevention measures. Look out for our full interview with Holding on the Burdie and Barney Show this Sunday, as we discuss cricket and the …
Read More »Flashback: A Lord unto itself; the mystique behind cricket’s most famous ground
The following article was written by Lasana Liburd for the Trinidad Express on 8 July 2004, after West Indies defeated England in the NatWest ODI semifinals at the Lord’s Cricket Ground in London: Nobel laureate VS Naipaul boasted about going there, legendary West Indies and Trinidad and Tobago spin bowler …
Read More »Waiting for Wehby action, WI wonders about Pollard’s promotion and the Peter Principle
It’s enough to wipe the smile off your face. Or make you disrespect anyone else who is within earshot. On the radio on Friday morning, the announcer broke the news this way: “As expected, Bangladesh defeated the West Indies by seven wickets in the second ODI earlier today.” That she …
Read More »Best: Warne fiddles with T20 bowling rules while Gower burns; how will ICC respond?
The beauty of art, it has been said, is the concealment of art; England’s right-handed middle-order batsman Mike Gatting and left-handed opener Andrew Strauss are certain to agree. Neither saw the threat Australia’s artful Shane Warne posed to his continued survival until it was too late. The first lost his …
Read More »Captaincy playbook: Brearley: ‘You need to be both inventive and cautious…’
I had been reading Mike Brearley’s 1985 classic, ‘The Art of Captaincy’, and re-reading ‘Frank Worrell’, by Ernest Eytle. It struck me in both that in a sense, like Richie Benaud, they did not become captains of teams, but rather, they moulded teams out of collections of individuals. In their …
Read More »The run of a lifetime: the inimitable, ‘non-sixy’ West Indies icon Sir Everton Weekes
Practically all the tributes that have congregated in memory of Sir Everton Weekes have come from cricketers and sports writers. They list his age, his career statistics and his batting style. Some have recounted an encounter. Cricket reporters tend to give the numbers; cricket writers are more interested in telling …
Read More »Captaincy playbook: Benaud was ‘energetic and often inspired, engendering total loyalty’
Cricket, like everything else, goes through troughs and peaks. Teams have floundered and risen. West Indies had malingered in the state of ‘potential’ for a long time, relying on talk without action, but perhaps with the world in one of its states of upheaval and change, it might be that …
Read More »Sir Frank’s lessons for Pollard; time for WI to have a word with Hetmyer
Until Tuesday, my cricketing new year was going reasonably well. Early in the day, Virat Kohli’s India had whipped Sri Lanka in the 1st T20I. But Ben Stokes’ bowling boots had, not for the first time, trampled all over my dream of a hard-earned draw for Faf Du Plessis’ men. …
Read More »BC Lara’s Great GOAT Debate: Sachin statistical score settled, Bradman left a little bit behind?
“In all,” observes Jon Hotten in The Meaning of Cricket, “he faced 19, 753 balls in Test cricket and another 13,086 in one-day internationals before he retired in 2007. Only 483 of those resulted in his dismissal, so 32,356 did not. “Put differently, just 1.47 per cent of the deliveries …
Read More »Best revisits BC Lara’s Great GOAT Debate: The Don, Sachin T or me?
“A man of genius,” CLR James says, in writing of Garry Sobers, “is what he is, he cannot be something else and remain what he is.” There is another West Indian left-hander, born a generation after Sobers on May 2, 1969, to whom James’ encomium applies unadjusted. Superlatives abound in …
Read More »Wired868TV (Video): Howzat?! Hillview College seek to maintain cricket stranglehold
Can Hillview College maintain their stranglehold over the Secondary Schools Cricket League? Wired868TV and the Tunapuna Piarco Regional Corporation seek out the secret of their success as we talk to captain Navin Bidaisee, senior player Kirstan Kallicharan, coach Richard Kelly and teacher Adesh Ragoo for Chasing Goals More from Wired868 …
Read More »Change at the top! Humble pie for Cameron/Nanthan as Skerritt/Shallow take CWI cake
Like two man-rat, humility and Jamaican Whycliffe ‘Dave’ Cameron cannot live in the same house. But the now former Cricket West Indies (CWI) President was humbled in his own backyard yesterday. New Cricket West Indies (CWI) president Ricky Skerritt and his vice-presidential running mate Dr Kishore Shallow both confessed to …
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