30 Years On: England’s Miracle at Kingston

Today we welcome friend of the site and longtime reader Garreth Duncan to TFT. Here are his recollections of one of the unlikeliest wins in England’s Test history. What a superb performance …

It can be hard to believe given the rabble they’ve looked like since, but as the 1990s began, West Indies were still unquestionably Test cricket’s top dogs. Their fast-bowling battery was still as fearsome as ever, led by the peerless Curtly Ambrose and Ian Bishop, with Courtney Walsh providing fine support and Malcolm Marshall perhaps past his peak but still a class act.

With the bat, Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes were still a rock-solid opening partnership, Richie Richardson a cracking no 3 (before the strain of leading a declining team consumed him) and led, of course, by the Master Blaster, Viv Richards. They hadn’t lost a Test series in the whole of the previous decade.

By contrast, England couldn’t have finished the last decade at a lower ebb. We were destroyed 4-0 in a home Ashes series the summer before, where 29 players were used over the six Tests. A host of defections to Mike Gatting’s rebel tour to South Africa further depleted our playing strength. We’d lost 14 out of the last 15 Tests against the Windies, and few gave us much hope of avoiding another hammering.

But the spring of 1990 was one that threw up some results that shocked the world of sport. In Tokyo, the seemingly unbeatable Mike Tyson lost his world heavyweight title to James “Buster” Douglas, who was so unfancied only one of the Las Vegas casinos even bothered to give him odds – an incredible 42/1 – of winning the contest at all.

Back home, Crystal Palace, who had lost 9-0 to Liverpool in the league a few months earlier, went toe to toe with them in the greatest FA Cup semi-final of all time to emerge as 4-3 winners. Liverpool’s “bastion of invincibility” was shattered that day, and they haven’t won the league since. Not yet anyway.

The England selectors wielded the axe after the disastrous Ashes summer – David Gower not only sacked as captain but not even making the squad. Ian Botham was also jettisoned. Meanwhile Gatting, John Emburey, Chris Broad and Neil Foster had chosen to take the krugerrand.

Graham Gooch took over as captain, an appointment which was to be the making of him as a Test cricketer, and brought in new blood for the Caribbean tour, including many new names who were to have a much greater impact in years to come.

On the batting side, the uncapped Alec Stewart and Nasser Hussain were to make their debuts at Sabina Park, and there was a recall for Wayne Larkins after a nine-year absence from Tests. With the ball, the selectors chose to fight fire with fire, going for Devon Malcolm’s explosive pace alongside Gladstone Small and the reliable Angus Fraser.

Even after an unexpectedly good showing in the Nehru Cup ODI tournament pre-Christmas and plenty of positives from the warm-up matches (commonplace on tours then, a luxury now), few gave England much hope going into the first Test at Sabina Park, where Patrick Patterson had terrorized us on his Test debut four years previously. Some bookies offered odds of 16/1 against an England win – and nobody was questioning them.

Viv Richards won the toss and decided to bat, and for the first hour or so it looked like business as usual as Greenidge and Haynes started solidly. But the tide was to be turned by a most unexpected source.  Greenidge turned the ball to long leg, where Malcolm, playing on his native island, fumbled it.

The Derbyshire quick had none too good a reputation as a fielder, mainly because of his poor eyesight – but his vision was now corrected with contact lenses and, unknown to the Windies, his fielding also sharpened by hours of practice.

Greenidge made the fatal mistake of going for a second run on the misfield – only for Malcolm to recover and unleash a throw like a tracer bullet to Jack Russell behind the stumps to run the Windies opener out by a yard.

That moment gave England hope, and David Capel, chosen as Botham’s replacement, capitalised by dismissing Richardson and Carlisle Best after lunch before Small smartly caught and bowled Haynes.

Richards strode to the wicket at 92 for 4, unfamiliar territory for him, and soon survived a massive LBW shout and another for caught behind – but, having hit 5 fours in his 21, Malcolm had him pinned in front.

The stage was set for Fraser to blow away the middle order and tail after tea, to finish with 5 for 28.  England had bowled out the world’s finest team for 164, and must have been pinching themselves.

We’d got halfway to the Windies’ total by close on day one, and the next day we rammed home the advantage, with the South African hired guns, Allan Lamb and Robin Smith, to the fore.

With both of them relishing the contest with the Windies’ pace quartet, Lamb made Jeff Dujon pay for dropping him early on with a courageous century, and Smith provided strong support with a fifty of his own as the pair added 162 for the fourth wicket.

England finished the day on 342 for 8, and added a critical 22 the following morning. As Gooch remarked in his autobiography, when was the last time the Windies had to start a second innings 200 behind?

With their pride and reputation on the line, West Indies fought back strongly second time around. But Malcolm, playing in only his second Test, was inspired, blasting out Haynes’ stumps and having Greenidge caught by debutant Hussain.

Fraser was relentlessly accurate as always, and trapped Richardson leg before. Best and Richards put together a promising stand of 80, and with six wickets still standing the Windies had almost wiped out the deficit – only for Malcolm, once again, to find a perfect delivery to wreck Richards’ stumps.

The lower middle order showed little resistance again, and by the end of day three the Windies were only 29 ahead with only the tailenders left. Surely game over?

But England had forgotten the elements. Following the rest day (remember them?), a Caribbean deluge wiped out day four, and suddenly we had a nervous night’s sleep and praying for better weather.

Happily the sun shone on the final day, and England wasted little time in finishing the hosts off. Gooch couldn’t quite get his team over the line, but it was Larkins who had the honour of hitting the winning runs in a 9-wicket victory. We’d beaten the Windies in a Test match for the first time in 16 years.

The reaction was astonishing. Nobody had seen this coming – least of all Richards, who said his team had been given “a kick up the arse”. England had almost overnight gone from zeroes to heroes. The “VICTORY!” video was in the shops within a week. Even Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher, hardly known as a cricket lover, sent her congratulations to Gooch and his men.

From a personal perspective, this was the moment cricket really caught my imagination. As a teenager, the game was still finding its place in my sporting life – no doubt dampened by England’s miserable showings in the eighties – but with our unexpected success, and the time difference with the Caribbean meaning TMS was on in the afternoon and evening, I was hooked.

Hopes were high that this new and exciting team could continue to challenge the greatest – and, after a total washout in Guyana, it looked like we were going to do it all over again in Trinidad.

Having bowled out the Windies again for a sub-200 score – even if it should have been half that, the hosts recovering from 29 for 5 thanks to Gus Logie’s defiant 98 – Gooch played a captain’s innings of 84 to take us to a first-innings lead of 89. Malcolm once again came to the party, taking three wickets in an over on the way to a ten-wicket haul, and we needed only 151 to win on the final day.

At lunch we were already halfway to the target, despite losing Gooch retired hurt with a broken hand. But the afternoon session was rained out, and on the resumption the Windies cynically slowed down the over rate – 16 in two hours – to avoid defeat.

We would no doubt have done similarly had the tables been turned.  But as darkness descended on Queen’s Park Oval, I listened in despair under the covers, thinking what a cruel game cricket can be.

In the final two Tests, with Fraser also having to go home injured, the Windies finally asserted their superiority. England were behind the 8-ball from the beginning in Barbados, but still made a heroic attempt to save the game on the final day – led by Russell, who batted for five hours, and Smith.

Russell suffered the most heart-breaking of dismissals, bowled by an unplayable shooter from Ambrose – who then showed what a world class bowler he is by demolishing the rest to finish with 8 for 45.

Disheartened and depleted, England were steamrollered in the final Test in Antigua, Greenidge and Haynes putting together a monster opening stand of 298 as the Windies won by an innings to take the series 2-1.  But we’d given the world’s best team one hell of a fright, and were desperately unlucky not to at least share the series.

Looking back, it was this Caribbean tour which gave England solid foundations for the future. While not always the most inspired of tacticians, as captain Gooch’s batting went to another level – his 333 was to follow that summer, followed by perhaps the greatest Test innings of all, his unbeaten 154 against the Windies at Headingley the year after.

Stewart and Hussain both went on to follow him as captain, and Fraser, when fit, and Malcolm, when his radar was on, also enjoyed great days in an England shirt.

It was also a ray of hope to the rest of the cricketing world that the Windies might, just might, be beatable – though another 5 years were to go by before Australia finally dethroned them, with Glenn McGrath coming of age in the Caribbean and a bloody-minded double century from Steve Waugh clinching the series victory in Jamaica.

This tour was also the moment when Sky – still without a dedicated sports channel at that point – announced their arrival on the cricketing world by broadcasting an England away Test series live for the first time.

Who would’ve thought back then that 30 years later they’d have it all to themselves and it’d be the BBC, shorn of both TV and radio coverage, who’d be feeding on scraps?

Garreth Duncan

8 comments

  • That match in Jamaica was indeed extraordinary (yes, I remember it). England managed to dominate it even though they had a batting collapse of their own (they were 288-3 at the high water mark of their first innings). It was particularly impressive given the catalogue of disasters that had preceded it (0-4 home loss to the Windies in 1988, 1988-9 winter tour to India cancelled, 1989 Ashes that can only be fairly scored as Australia 4, the weather 2, England 0 (it was a six match series).

  • I remember the match and the series fondly – but I think with hindsight it planted some harmful long-term seeds in England’s cricket culture.

    The first was that Gooch took it as vindication of his decision not to select Gower (or anyone not signed up to a Goochian work ethic). The “one size fits all” approach had its roots here.

    The second was abandoning a specialist spinner. Of course West Indies had done this for most of the decade and enjoyed great success but the quality and number of their top pace bowlers was exceptional. Chickens would eventually come back to roost on that one in India when England went into the first test with four seamers and started the plunge to a series whitewash. The siren call of dumping the specialist spinner has lurked near the surface of England’s culture ever since.

    In retrospect, England did better than expected in that series because West Indies were starting to decline (their 1987 WC performance had been the first hint of that) and England had a couple of very good players of pace plus some decent seamers (everyone says it was Gooch getting injured that was the turning point of that series – but Fraser’s injury was probably more important). I’d also add that although England had been badly beaten up on the previous Patterson tour, on the tour before that they played rather well to only lose 2-0 to the Roberts-Holding-Garner-Croft attack with their own best bowler Bob Willis missing through injury (Gooch, Boycott, Gower and Willey all scored centuries and Dilley bowled well).

  • The Windies were, perhaps, just on the way down as the 1990s began – Richards and Marshall in particular were certainly past their best – but they were still way ahead of the rest of the pack.

    Think the dump-the-spinner culture goes further back than that – we’d tried it (without success) in the first Ashes Test the summer before. It tended to reassert itself whenever we played at Headingley, based largely on the Botham-Willis miracle of 1981 rather than how the pitch and conditions there actually are now. Four seamers and one spinner in India was bonkers though.

    The Gooch work ethic was a vital first step in turning England around after the disastrous 1980s – even if Gooch eventually took it too far, and Gower was undoubtedly the biggest loser.

  • Good to hear a mention of Allan Lamb, for me the best player of fast bowling, in an era of it, to play for England. With a technique made for it, still at the crease, compact with little backlift and a heavy bat, so even edges flew off a decent amount of wood, it was no surprise he made so many decent scores against the Windies pace men. He always seemed to be in line and above all had the bottle for the fight. He had plenty of good batsmen around him with Gooch, Gower, Gatting, Smith and Botham, but his was always the presence at the crease that seemed to calm things and as a punter gave you an air of confidence. If you pitched it up he’d drive you straight, often with just a block and if you pitched short he hooked and cut using immensely strong wrists to keep the ball down and was also one of the best leavers of a ball I’ve seen.
    Although he’s a different build, Banton reminds me a bit of him today.

    • Great shout. Lamb was a superb player of pace bowling. Terrific cricketer. I wore ‘Allan Lamb autograph’ pads at school :-)

      • 3 players there greatly respected by Australian cricket followers (this one at least) – Smith, Russell and Fraser. None of whom ended up playing nearly as much as they might have – spin issues for Smith, injury for Fraser and I was never totally sure what for Russell (couldn’t reproduce the batting form he showed against Australia against others presumably).

  • I still remember the headline on the front of The Cricketer after this game: ‘England’s Glorious Rebirth In Jamaica’. Remember it so well. One of my earliest good cricketing memories. Thanks Garreth.

  • A big surprise certainly, but surely not a miracle to compare with the Kingston test of 1974, where Dennis Amiss scored 262 not out (next highest score 38) to secure the draw with nine wickets down.

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