10 Things # 40

Oh, my Worrells and my Benauds long ago

1/ The Frank Worrell Trophy is up for grabs….oh, it’s been decided.

2/ Actually, it never left Jolimont. Cricket Australia sent the famous replica, commissioned when the trophy went missing forty years ago, only to be found in Wes Hall’s mother’s garage. The West Indies held it another decade; now Australia have held it for three decades, and Todd Greenberg might as well stow it in his garage, behind the old exercise bike, the VHS cassettes and the once-used home brewing kit.

Yer actual FWT

3/ There has been no sorrier falling off in my lifetime. In 1995, the Worrell Trophy was the World Test Championship avant le lettre. As editor-in-chief at The Australian, Paul Kelly commissioned a wraparound to celebrate the victory of Mark Taylor’s team, then a weekend Inquirer.

I was never this young

Pat Cummins will instead put his feet up for a day, while waiting to hear if the lights at Sabina Park have been approved, and they’ve found some pink balls to practice with. Australia won’t go easy in Jamaica, with some low-hanging WTC points to pluck; Cricket Et Al will, of course, be checking out the jerk chicken situation. But it’s been hard to resist the sensation, twenty-five years after the shift to host nations covering the costs and bearing the losses of inbound tours, that what remains of red ball cricket in the Caribbean is a kind of Potemkin village: middle-aged overseas fans sitting in a staged simulation of what a Test in West Indies used to be like, augmented by DJs and steel bands for ‘atmosphere’.