by Tim Wigmore
Every team had bespoke coaching and fitness training for players, and the 14 ‘legends’ on the panel Stanford assembled ensured knowledge diffused across the region.
The tournament involved ‘more training as [a] team, less [as an] individual,’ Browne remembered. ‘It’s just the fact of preparing yourself in a professional set-up. Every day you’re going out as a group, playing cricket – you never had that before. You are now in a set-up that is paying you money.’
When Nevis reached the semi-finals in 2006, the island was selected as one of the competition’s developmental teams, meaning players were paid around £1,700 a month for a year. ‘People were coming out, having the opportunity to have cricket as a career and get paid.’
For some players, the money they received from Stanford did not last. Several members of the Stanford Superstars who thumped England in the notorious winner-takes-all $20 million match in 2008 invested all their $1 million winnings in Stanford. Like others conned by him, they never got any of their cash back.
After years of neglect, the Coolidge Cricket Ground in Antigua was later revived. But even while the weeds reigned, the ground – for all that it was a symbol of criminal activity on an extraordinary scale – could still claim to have planted the seeds of a new dynasty.
‘The investment made by Allen Stanford in that format of cricket led to West Indies dominating T20 cricket around the world,’ Ganga said. Carlos Brathwaite, who would later become the West Indies T20 captain, observed: ‘It started the whole T20 revolution. So thanks to Stanford for that.’
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It was the million-dollar shot. In the first Stanford 20/20 final, Narsingh Deonarine hit the penultimate ball for six, securing Guyana the title, and the $1 million prize.
Yet, for all the pain of Deonarine’s million-dollar six, Trinidad and Tobago glimpsed a shape of their future in the 2006 Stanford tournament. In 2008, they won the second Stanford 20/20 – and then beat Middlesex in the Stanford international club championship, earning $400,000.
‘An opportunity to play T20 cricket was handed down to us and we had to basically develop our own approaches towards this format,’ Ganga recalled. ‘Players trained with certain things in mind. We strategically decided how we wanted to play the game. We had some physically strong players and we knew it was about risk-taking and managing it from a batting, bowling, fielding perspective. We adopted an approach that was very similar to the Sri Lankan national team that won the World Cup in 1996.’
In that competition, Sri Lanka’s buccaneering batting at the start of the innings left an indelible mark on 50-over cricket. Now, the West Indies were about to do the same for the 20-over game. ‘They were very ruthless and fearless in their approach and that is exactly the approach that we adopted in T20 from the onset.’
After the 2009 Stanford 20/20 was cancelled, the West Indies board did not organise a replacement. Trinidad and Tobago qualified for the inaugural Champions League, in October 2009, by dint of their performances a full 20 months earlier. Competing against sides who had played much more T20, had overseas players and more heralded domestic systems, they were considered rank outsiders.
Ganga did not share this belief. While his classical batting was not naturally suited to the format, Ganga emerged as the West Indies’ first great T20 thinker. ‘He understood how to build a T20 team,’ reflected Ian Bishop, a former West Indies Test player from Trinidad. ‘He was ahead of his time.’
Stanford gave Trinidad and Tobago a ‘competitive advantage’ in the first Champions League, Ganga said. ‘We were a lot more comfortable playing in pressure situations.’
This confidence was married with intense preparation. ‘We were more prepared than most other teams,’ Ganga recalled. ‘We were able to analyse our benchmarks that were playing T20 cricket and we set our standards a little bit higher than what was happening globally so we were always a step ahead of the game in terms of benchmarks for batting, for bowling. We knew trends and it worked in our favour.
‘We were meticulous. We analysed what other teams were achieving in T20 cricket from the point of view of dot balls, where they were after six overs, how they approached the middle overs, and where they scored in the death overs. We used that information to suit our style of play.’
In India, Trinidad and Tobago unveiled their radically different approach to T20 on the world: embracing boundary hitting at the expense of all else, even if this meant playing out more dot balls. ‘We knew that we could afford to consolidate in the middle overs and set the game up so that [Kieron] Pollard and [Dwayne] Bravo could play with freedom at the back end.’
Ganga liberated the belligerent hitters around him in the batting order, instilling an approach that emphasised boundaries over reducing dot balls. He also innovated in the field – notably embracing using Samuel Badree as a leg-spinner who would routinely bowl all the way through the Powerplay, a role unique in T20 history.
Opening with Badree, who scarcely turned the new ball but generated bounce and skid, recognised how spinners, contrary to 150 years of received cricket wisdom, could be most effective at the start of an innings. The decision had its roots in club cricket, where Badree thrived with the new ball in T20. Trinidad’s players knew that the Champions League was a route to the IPL. Their play was stunning, twice chasing scores over 170 comfortably – including in Pollard’s epochal heist against New South Wales – and scoring 213, the competition’s lone total over 200, against the South African team Diamond Eagles.
The upshot was that, having initially been almost ignored by the IPL – just eight players appeared in the first two seasons compared to 30 Australians – soon West Indies players became among the most coveted in the league. By the end of 2019, only Australia and South Africa had featured more as overseas players in the tournament.
Rise of the West Indies and Trinidad and Tobago in the IPL
IPL Season
WI Players to Appear
T and T Players to Appear
2008
4
1
2009
4
1
2010
6
3
2011
4
2
2012
8
4
2013
12
6
2014
13
7
2015
8
5
2016
9
4
2017
9
5
2018
8
4
2019
13
5
Uniquely, players from the West Indies had access to all three of the Stanford tournament, the Champions League and the IPL. And so Caribbean players had both especially strong reasons to prioritise T20, and an unrivalled opportunity to develop their skills in the format. For all that the IPL benefited local Indian players, the BCCI barring them from playing in overseas T20 leagues prevented them from enjoying the same learnings in foreign conditions as the West Indies.
‘Once there was that initial success in the Stanford tournaments, it has just steamrolled,’ observed Bishop. ‘More and more young players have idolised Gayle and Pollard, who were the early trendsetters in the format.’
The ascent of T20 ‘definitely encouraged them to specialise, because most of these players are looking to take their skills into bigger and more lucrative markets like the IPL,’ explained Sean Newell, the cricket coach at Calabar High School in Jamaica. ‘West Indies will continue to have a super-strong T20 team as our team consists of all the skill sets for the shorter and more exciting format.’
The relative importance of T20, compared to the other formats, was greater in the West Indies during a formative stage in the game’s development. This advantage underpinned the West Indies’ T20 World Cup victory in 2012, the team’s first World Cup victory in any format for 33 year
s. Six of the victorious XI, and eight members of the 15-man squad, were from Trinidad and Tobago. All of these had been in Trinidad’s squad for the 2009 Champions League. When the West Indies pulverised Australia in the semi-final, Pollard and Dwayne Bravo hit three sixes apiece to lift the total to 205; then, Trinidad’s bowlers claimed nine Australian wickets.
After Stanford and the Champions League, which was scrapped in 2014, the West Indies gained a more durable T20 competition: the Caribbean Premier League, which launched in 2013. With only six teams in the region, and franchises permitted four overseas players per team, even competition to gain spots in the squads could be fierce. This was especially the case in Trinidad, who won three of the four CPL titles from 2015 to 2018 in dominant fashion.
In a sense the CPL completed the revolution that Stanford, and then the Champions League, started: for the first time, domestic West Indies players could play with and against foreign stars in the region. Thanks to T20, Caribbean players could be well paid even without playing for the international side or foreign teams.
‘I think the CPL and T20 – you could put it as a by-product of what Stanford started,’ said Virgil Browne. ‘It’s a great thing for the region in terms of bringing back interest in the game of cricket.’
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The theory of desirable difficulty holds that there are some problems no one would ever want, but can actually be a help in the long run. For instance, the most successful individuals are more likely to lose a parent young.
In the years after Stanford, a cocktail of the inequities in cricket economics and the toxic relationship between the West Indies players and board pushed a number of their best cricketers to become T20 specialists at home and abroad. From 2012 to 2016, the seven cricketers in the world who played the most T20 matches were all West Indian. And so they came to understand the intricacies, skills and tactics of the format more than anyone else.
Most T20 Matches in the World, 2012–16
Player
Matches
Dwayne Bravo
250
Kieron Pollard
218
Andre Russell
211
Chris Gayle
194
Dwayne Smith
193
Darren Sammy
190
Sunil Narine
188
‘From playing around the world, we know about playing T20 cricket,’ said Ravi Rampaul, a Trinidadian fast bowler who played in the Champions League and the T20 World Cup-winning campaign in 2012. ‘We have experience in all the team because of all the franchises.’ When put to him that the frequently poisonous relationship between the West Indies’ players and board had been an advantage for their T20 because it encouraged players to specialise, he laughed. ‘That’s true.’ While the West Indies often struggled to field anything like their best team in bilateral T20 cricket, with leading players unselected or unavailable due to the relations with the board and being able to earn more in T20 leagues – contributing to their surprisingly underwhelming performance in bilateral cricket – their full-strength squad came together for the T20 World Cup.
Deleterious relations with the board, ‘in a way worked out well for the players,’ said Badree, a long-time representative on the West Indian Players’ Association. ‘As the T20 leagues came aboard, the players had more opportunities to go outside and represent different franchises, different teams, and make an honest living – a decent living at that.
‘We’ve got so many experienced players that form the core of our T20 team – guys like Gayle, Bravo, Narine, Pollard and so on – who have played so many competitions around the world. The knowledge and the experiences that they’ve gained – when they come together as a team they bring that and they share it with the other guys. I think that’s really the reason why we are successful: that experience and that knowledge that we have of the other teams, having played in the same dressing rooms with these guys and played in different conditions.’
West Indies in T20 Internationals, 2012–19 (Excluding No Results)
Tournament
Matches
Won
Percentage Won
T20 World Cups
17
12
71%
Other T20
51
22
43%
A few months before the 2016 T20 World Cup, the West Indies toured Australia for a Test series. The West Indies’ performances were egregious. All the while, seven of the best Caribbean players, who were all part of the triumphant 2012 T20 World Cup squad, were in Australia playing in the Big Bash instead. Six of these players would then be in the 2016 World Cup squad too.
‘That was a massive help,’ said Phil Simmons, who was West Indies head coach then. ‘You look at the players who controlled the team – [Darren] Sammy, Chris [Gayle], Bravo – they’d played international T20 and T20 leagues around the world. It’s not a case where they’ve always smashed it, they’ve played proper cricket in different teams in different ways. So they brought their experience to the team and realised that we had to play this way because of the team we had.’
At the 2016 T20 World Cup, five of the West Indies side had played exclusively T20 in the preceding year, compared to none from any of their opponents during the tournament. Where once the West Indies used their players’ experience in county cricket to help them dominate Test cricket, now they used their multifarious experiences in domestic leagues around the world – the different conditions; the cutting edge analysis; the world-beating coaching – to help them dominate T20. So although the team itself had a puny support staff and sporting infrastructure compared to rivals like India, leading players had benefited from the totality of intelligence about T20.
All the while, the West Indies affirmed that T20 was a game that rewarded experience. In the 2007 WT20, the average player age was 27.38 years. By the 2016 tournament, the average age in the main stage had risen to 28.94, according to the statistician Ric Finlay. The West Indies were the oldest of the lot, with an average age in the final of 31.94.
T20 Records Held by West Indian Players (2019)
Most Matches
Kieron Pollard (475)
Most Runs
Chris Gayle (12,808)
Most Wickets
Dwayne Bravo (490)
Most Catches
Kieron Pollard (272)
Best Economy Rate (minimum 100 wickets)
Samuel Badree (6.02)
Best Strike Rate (minimum 2,500 runs)
Andre Russell (169.83)
‘The game is about decision-making under pressure,’ said the former Australia Test batsman Simon Katich, who coached many West Indies players as head coach of Trinbago Knight Riders. ‘Generally experienced players are going to make good decisions when they have a vast amount of experience to draw on given all the game situations they have found themselves in.’
Skill, style and experience, honed everywhere from windball games in Trinidad to the IPL, combined to make the West Indies some of the most sought-after T20 players in the world. Tom Moody, who has worked as head coach for Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL and tournament director of the CPL, observed how hard the Caribbean style is to mimic.
‘When teams and coaches and analysts look at trying to build a side, it’s very difficult to be able to build a side that is just the West Indian model. Generally in franchise cricket, every team is looking for a couple of players of those capabilities – the power hitters – but there’s only so many of them around.
‘What West Indies cricket have done very successfully, is that they have embraced their strengths – and their strength is power and speed. And they have embraced that and they have allowed their players to play with freedom with that . . . If they block three balls and hit three balls over the ground, well, 18 off an over’s pretty good, isn’t it? But not everyone is capable of doing that.’
***
For all that the broader financia
l situation in the sport is weighted against the West Indies – the board’s total revenue from broadcasting contracts is around £12 million a year, compared with England’s £220 million, from 2020 onwards, and India’s £750 million – their T20 pedigree appears built to last. In the 2019 IPL, 13 West Indies players appeared – including nine who did not play in the final of the 2016 T20 World Cup, and six who were 23 or younger. They played in the same spirit as their forebears.
A year earlier, a new T20 tournament had been created in Canada, which allowed teams to field an unlimited number of overseas players. The tournament had the financial clout to attract many leading cricketers – including Gayle, Russell, Narine, Dwayne Bravo and the Australian pair of Steve Smith and David Warner, fresh from being banned for their role in a major scandal when a cricket ball was doctored with sandpaper. And so the West Indies B team who entered the tournament passed by largely unnoticed. With good reason: 23 other West Indians had been picked up in the draft ahead of them, and only those left behind were eligible.
Yet this coterie of unheralded players ended up reaching the final. They did so playing in the spirit of the great Caribbean T20 sides, including chasing 216 in the semi-finals against an attack that featured the New Zealand fast bowler Tim Southee, the Australian leg-spinner Fawad Ahmed, Russell, and Sheldon Cottrell, a left-arm pace bowler who has represented the West Indies in all three formats. The victory was sealed, naturally, with a six off the last ball; Sherfane Rutherford, a 19-year-old Guyanese left-hander, had blitzed 134 not out off just 66 balls. A year later, he was in the IPL too.
‘I remember looking at the team that went to the Global T20 Canada – very young team but the fearlessness with which they played their cricket, it blew me away,’ said Bishop. ‘There’s a fearlessness about them and I think that has been built as a philosophy from the days of the Champions League, Trinidad and Tobago, the Stanford tournament when Trinidad and Guyana did so well.
