As the Emancipation Cricket Festival is launched in St Vincent and the Grenadines, the 15-country bloc Caricom says it is ‘deeply concerned’ about the state of the sport
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hen they toured overseas in the 1970s, West Indies cricketers were sometimes subjected to barrages of racist abuse. But back home in the Caribbean, the men were heroes, with families huddled around radios and televisions whenever they played and shouts of jubilation erupting across entire communities whenever they won.
Today, the generation of players who won two World Cups, in 1975 and 1979, are acclaimed as living legends for stepping up to the crease regardless of the challenges – and triumphing over teams from larger, more developed nations.
And as the region celebrates Emancipation Month to commemorate the end of slavery, they have been hailed as figures of regional pride whose mastery of a game imported by the British became a powerful symbol of political and cultural resistance.
