The West Indian Cricket Team

Australia vs. West Indies

3rd ODI - 03:25 AM GMT
Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), Sydney
View: Match Details
Feb 12 Fri
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Team Bio

The West Indian Cricket Team, also sometimes referred to as the Windies or West Indies, is a multi-national cricket team representing a sporting association of a dozen English-speaking Caribbean countries and British dependencies that form the British West Indies. The beginnings of West Indies cricket go back to 1890s, when the first representative sides were selected to play visiting English teams. The team is administered by the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB). The team was granted Test status in 1928 when it played its first official international match. West Indies has been home to some of the most spectacular cricketers ever to grace the gentleman’s game. By the seventies, the West Indies were unofficially crowned world champions, a status they retained throughout the 1980s. The Windies were known for their four-man pace battery, supported by some of the best batsmen in the world. The eighties saw them set a then-record streak of 11 consecutive Test victories in 1984 and inflict two 5–0 "blackwashes" against their old foe, England. One look at the names of West Indian greats and it is no wonder that the likes of Frank Worrell, Garfield Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharran, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh, Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose are names that can inspire awe even today. However, all good things do not last forever and there has been a sharp decline in West Indian cricket largely due to the failure of the WICB to make the game more professional added to the economic deterioration in the West Indian countries. The current side has players from the now independent states of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago, the British dependencies of Anguilla, Montserrat and the British Virgin Islands, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands and St. Maarten. The team is led by destructive opening batsman Chris Gayle and boasts of some fine cricketers in Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Denesh Ramdin, Dwayne Bravo, Fidel Edwards and Jerome Taylor among others.