The First Black Captain Of West Indies

There’s a sporting gold mine near me. On their website, soberly explained as if it’s something that happens all the time, Cardiff’s Whitchurch High School note that the same academic year produced British Lion Sam Warburton, footballing Galactico Gareth Bale and rugby league international Elliot Kear. The much-mourned Tom Maynard was another from that year; surely by now we’d have seen three lions on his sweater. Folk in these parts are rightly proud of all of them.

Imagine though, three boys born within 18 months and a mile-and-a-half of each other all becoming among the finest cricketers of their era or any era since – and all with surnames beginning with ‘W’. For Frank Keating, “the three Ws” from Barbados “remain alpha and omega” and “a tripartite of sheer lustre”. While Clyde Walcott “bludgeoned” bowlers and Everton Weekes “dominated” them, wrote Learie Constantine, Frank Worrell simply “waved them away”. Constantine himself, like Worrell, was nominated by Michael Henderson as one of five men who fashioned West Indies cricket. George Headley, Sobers and Viv Richards were the others, but cricket scribe Geoff Armstrong suggests that given his contribution to Caribbean cricket, “you can nearly mount a case” that Worrell was “the most important cricketer of all time”. It’s a big call, but not without foundation.

Fred Trueman as “one the nicest people I ever played against”, West Indies’ first black captain must also be one of history’s greatest sporting leaders.