Cricket: The glories of Bourda skirmishes

Magical history tour: Henry Blofeld sets the scene for the Fourth Test

ONE of the most fascinating aspects of a tour to the West Indies is that each island or territory is so different. After just over two weeks and two Test matches in carnival-mad Trinidad, the caravan has moved on to Guyana on the South American mainland.

This is an extremely poor country, having endured 20 years of Marxist rule under Forbes Burnham's leadership up to the mid-Eighties. Georgetown was once an elegant canal-lined Dutch colonial city, but is now sadly run down. It does, however, still have a delightful cricket ground in Bourda, one of the inner suburbs. It is not just a small ground, rather as Sabina Park used to be, it is a big ground in miniature.

In the five years since I was last there, new stands - including a large media centre - have sprung up. None the less, it is all in proportion and one still gets the impression that it needs to be looked at through a magnifying glass. Until recently, during a Test match mounted policemen stood solemnly on duty on either side of the sight screens - another curious hangover from the past.

There have usually been plenty of runs here although with the problems both sides are having with their batting, a high-scoring Test match on Friday is by no means guaranteed. Even so, the art of pitch preparation has, by all accounts, survived here.

My own best memories go back to the remarkable tour in 1967-68 when Colin Cowdrey's side came to Georgetown the day after winning in Port of Spain as a result of Gary Sobers's generous declaration. In those days if there was no more than one match between the sides, the final Test of a series was given an extra day. The West Indies won the toss and batted and Rohan Kanhai and Sobers made 150 apiece, although every Englishman there will swear that Sobers was lbw for nought to John Snow, who took 27 wickets in four Tests during the series.

Fred Titmus had lost four toes when they were caught in the propeller of a speed boat earlier on the tour, and Tony Lock, who was captaining Western Australia, flew in as a replacement. The middle order collapsed after a century from Geoffrey Boycott and Lock, batting at No 9, made a gallant, joyful and noisy 89 - his highest score in first-class cricket.

He and Pat Pocock added a record 109 for the ninth wicket and Pocock batted for 82 minutes before he scored - only Godfrey Evans in Adelaide in 1946-47 had batted scoreless for longer. England made 371, conceding a first-innings lead of 43, and the bowlers were again frustrated by Sobers who made 95 not out in the second innings. England were left to score 308 to win but their main hope was for the draw, which would enable them to win the series.

On an agonising sixth day, Cowdrey batted brilliantly for 82 and Alan Knott, in his second Test, held things together at the end. England lost their ninth wicket at 206 but the last man, Jeff Jones, somehow survived the last over against Lance Gibbs who took 6 for 60 in 40 overs. Knott and Jones met mid-wicket before that last over began and when asked later what they talked about. Knott said with a smile: "We sang the first verse of Land of My Fathers." Who says a draw is always a boring result?

Any number of cricketing dramas have unfolded in Georgetown. In March 1978 the Packer affair came to a head there. For two Tests the Australian side, without Packer players and captained by Bobby Simpson, played the West Indies with all their Packer players and were slaughtered.

The West Indian selectors then wanted to drop some of the Packer players for the Bourda Test. The captain, Clive Lloyd, felt they were being victimised. The dramas of midnight meetings and rumours that Packer himself was flying in helped to spice things up. In the end the Packer players withdrew from the West Indies team, who then fielded an "A" side for the rest of the series.

When England were the visitors in 1981, Robin Jackman had just arrived as a replacement for Bob Willis. Jackman is married to a South African and the government declared him the persona non grata. The Guyana Test was not played and the England party limped across to Barbados, where the foreign secretaries of the four island governments involved in the remainder of the tour agreed that it should continue.

It can also rain heavily and for a long time in a country which possesses the highest waterfalls in the world, the Kaiteur Falls,two huge rivers, the Demerara and the Essequibo, and an impenetrable interior where there are still tribes of Amerindians who to this day do not know the meaning of money.

Georgetown also has the highest wooden building in the world, the cathedral, not to mention some of the most friendly and charming people in the cricketing West Indies. This fortnight promises to be a great experience for all of us - on and off the field.