Soul Limbo
by Nicholas Lezard
July 2024
As they capitulate to England once again at Lord's, Nicholas Lezard asks whatever happened to West Indies cricket.
The occasional glimmer of hope notwithstanding, when it comes to test cricket the West Indies are still trying to claw their way out of the dismal hole created by their extraordinary decline from almost terrifying dominance throughout the Seventies and Eighties.
Since then I think a lot of cricket fans have secretly felt that a world in which the West Indies do not rule over the game is a world with something wrong with it, like a glitch in the Matrix.
But the real reason I still yearn for them to win is that when watching them I am transported to the first cricket match I ever went to on my own—that is, unsupervised by a parent, anyway.
I can date this exactly, because it was the match in which F.C. Hayes, on his debut for England, made 106 not out, a performance which strongly indicated great things to come. (They didn’t, but that’s another story.) I can vividly remember seeing the figures on the old-fashioned—but, to my eyes, huge—scoreboard. So I looked it up just now. It was in 1973, and I was 10. TEN.
My friend Dom and I had been packed off on the tube, on our own, with our tickets, and that was that. I think we were given sandwiches and a can of something fizzy. And this match was at the Oval, effectively the West Indian’s home ground on this side of the Atlantic. Black spectators would always outnumber white ones: it was the deal, and the point.
In those days you were allowed to make a lot of noise at the ground, and the WI fans would bang their empty tinnies together, in concert and co-ordination, to create a wonderful steelband effect, echoing off the stands and amplified by the joyous unity of the crowd and the fact that beer cans were more robust then. (The BBC’s theme music to its coverage of all tests—'Soul Limbo'—is a nod to this, and it is a great loss that the authorities don’t let it happen any more.)
The thing is that you could, in those days, sit on the ground, just behind the boundary ropes. You could run onto the pitch at the end of play. Occasionally, you’d get a streaker. And the Oval of course is dominated by a huge gasometer which I had only ever seen on the telly before.
But just picture the scene of two ten-year-old boys, brought up in the primmest and whitest parts of London, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by a seemingly endless crowd of black people, all cheering their team on loudly, making ad hoc music, drinking as many tins of Red Stripe as they could to replenish the 'orchestra', and many of them smoking suspiciously long, fat roll-ups. I had never been south of the river before, let alone met a black person socially. I had also never been alone in a large crowd before. For the first few minutes I was, in short, fucking terrified.
And you know what happened? It sounds corny and made-up, but I swear it’s true. The West Indies fans looked at our tiny selves, and then immediately made room for us so we could see the match, ensured nobody trod on us, joked about offering us a swig of their tinnies—and at one point someone even hoisted me onto his shoulders so I could get a better look at the game.
The West Indies crushed England that day—as they deserved to—but the fans around us paused in their celebrations to shake our hands and slap us on the back, and we went back home in a kind of dazed glow, thrilled with independence, the joy of the game, the spectacle of mass delight, the glimpse of an expanded, other world and a shared humanity within it, and that’s why I don’t mind it too much when the West Indies beat England at cricket.
