Heroes of the Caribbean pitch.

• Author: Sankar, Celia
• Position: Cricket in the West Indies - Includes related article

Throughout the West Indies, the game of cricket attracts wildly enthusiastic crowds and inspires regional unity

If Latin America is passionate about soccer, then the Caribbean is zealously passionate about cricket. The game permeates life in the region. Throughout the islands, the scene is the same: On village greens, on the beach, in deserted streets, in fact, wherever there is clear ground and whenever there is free time children and adults gather around a makeshift wicket for the game. No doubt they are fantasizing that they are part of the region's larger-than-life professional team, whose members carry the pride of the Caribbean on their shoulders.

Hardly anyone misses a match played by the team - called the West Indies cricket team for historical reasons - even if it means staying awake at ungodly hours to listen on radio to their exploits in England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Pakistan. Serious business comes to a standstill in the entire region at crucial moments in the game. And when matches are played in the region, schools are given holidays and governments are known to postpone parliamentary sessions. Against eight opposing teams from the British Commonwealth, the eleven-man West Indies squad, made up of players chosen from various islands, has infused the region with pride by dominating the sport. They have won the quadrennial World Championship Cup twice and until last May had held test cricket's longest unbeaten record.

In 1975, the sport's governing body, the International Cricket Conference established the World Championship Cup to determine supremacy in the relatively new, short version of the game, the limited overs, or one-day competition. The Cup was captured by the West Indies in the first two tournaments. In international one-day matches played outside the Cup the West Indies has an impressive win rate of about 75 percent.

The West Indies team made its name, however, in the longer, traditional version of the game, the test series. This is the highest level of the game, and it is played only by England and eight countries that have been accorded test match status by the London-based International Cricket Conference - the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (which was banned from the sport until 1992 after its apartheid regime was dismantled), India, Pakistan, and, most recently, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. (In addition to playing international test cricket, many West Indian cricketers sign lucrative deals with English cricket clubs to play in matches among English counties.) International test matches are regularly organized between the governing bodies of the respective territories, and after twenty-nine of these encounters over the last fifteen years, the West Indies remained unbeaten. Their encounter with Australia last May in the Caribbean brought an end to that record, however. That defeat was the team's first loss in fifteen years, and it was their first humiliation at home in twenty-two years.

The West Indies' formidable reputation was established from the 1950s to the 1970s by such greats as batsmen Sir Garfield Sobers, Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Jeffrey Stollmeyer (all knighted by the British queen for their contributions to cricket); George Headly, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, and Vivian Richards; and bowlers Lord Learie Constantine (again, decorated by the queen), Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Sonny Ramadhin, Alfred Valentine, Joel Garner, Michael Holding, and Malcolm Marshall.

The stars of today are no less outstanding. Among the bowlers, there is the giant of a man, Curtley Ambrose (who, on the English tour last year, struck down six batsmen for twenty-four runs in an England total of forty-eight), Courtney Walsh, Winston Benjamin, and Kenneth Benjamin. Among the top-scoring batsmen are Richie Richardson, Carl Hooper, and Jimmy Adams. Outshining all others is Trinidad's twenty-five-year-old left-handed batsman, Brian Lara, who made international headlines and batted his way into the Guiness Book of World Records by scoring 375 runs in a test match against England in Antigua, and two months later, scoring 501 in a first-class match in English county cricket, the highest scores in the history of the game.

The region's zeal for the game is perhaps incomprehensible to its...