Playing The Game - How Cricket Made Barbados. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Playing The Game - How Cricket Made Barbados

How was it that, for several generations, a Caribbean island of just 250,000 people produced the world’s best cricketers? “Irony abounds throughout this story of slavery, sugar, change, continuity and cricket”.

With the first-ever use of extensive Barbadian archives (public and private), secondary sources and interviews, and going way beyond C L R James’s influential Beyond a Boundary, Stoddart’s writing infuses history with his own experience of living that very history – by playing the game there.

In telling this remarkable story as both historian and participant player, Brian Stoddart also provides a powerful reminder of the significant role sport, generally, has played in reshaping the modern world and, in particular, how cricket made Barbados.
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While stars like Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, Charlie Griffith, Garry Sobers, Joel Garner, Desmond Haynes and numerous others thrilled global crowds, many if not most were lucky to do so, having to defy broader social circumstances in order to succeed.

Because, as Brian Stoddart explains, cricket was central to the realignment of society in Barbados after the 1834 abolition of slavery, its organisation helping shape how Barbadians were ranked by colour, caste and class.

As the white plantocracy took control politically and economically, the island’s first organised cricket club was also created for that community. By World War One, it was joined by one serving the second-tier white community, another for leading brown citizens, and yet another for respectable blacks.

It was the 1930s before a regular but entirely separate competition for the majority black population was created. From there, mainly, emerged the string of players who took Barbados and composite West Indies sides to world prominence from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Within that evolution sits a myriad of stories about players of limited social means who either succeeded in winning, or failed to gain success, fame and social status. All struggled with a cricket system rooted in the historical past, adjustments to it over time being as hard won as equality overall in Barbados.
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“... an education as well as a delight. Stoddart, the outsider, understands West Indian society. He understands and reveals the complexity and the magic of the game which had been woven for so long like golden threads through the tapestry of Caribbean life.” ~ Simon Lister, author of Worrell (Winner of The Cricket Society/MCC Cricket Book of the Year for 2025); Supercat (biography of Sir Clive Lloyd); Fire in Babylon.