The calypso ends

CRICKET “remains the instrument of Caribbean cohesion,” wrote Clive Lloyd, a former West Indies cricket captain, without exaggeration. After the short-lived dream of the West Indies Federation, which united the former British islands of the Caribbean in 1958-62, little more than the pre-existing regional cricket team survived—but what a team it was.

In their pomp, from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, the mostly poor, black islanders, from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and elsewhere, were almost unbeatable in a game that had previously been dominated by middle-class white men. They transformed the world’s second most popular game after football, making it faster and more glamorous; at a time when South Africa was riven by apartheid and India’s cricketers could scarcely manage to win a game, they were an inspiration to non-white sportsmen all around the world. The West Indies was the greatest union of sporting nations in history; yet on October 17th the latest of many recent crises put its future in jeopardy.
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