“The visitors had played some shots unworthy of a Test side. In the tabloid versions, England’s performance was ‘shocking … inexcusable, almost beyond belief’ and ‘miserable … appalling … pathetic … awful.” Not a summary of England’s recent Ashes disaster, nor even a throwback to the not-so-nicey-90s: for this particular instance of English collapsibility you have to cast back to 1953-54 when an all-star MCC team was facing West Indies in what was supposed to be cricket’s unofficial world championship. It turned into a series as controversial and downright unpleasant as cricket has seen. Some who played in it – including Tom Graveney and Clyde Walcott – have argued it was more acrimonious than Bodyline.
Curious, then, that so little has ever been written about it. Its legend was passed down by the increasingly unreliable memories of its leading players – by the club-circuit anecdotes of Fred Trueman or the scrupulously diplomatic memoirs of Sir Everton Weekes. It deserves to be more widely known and far better understood – not least because some of its most discordant notes still resonate in our current sporting and political climates. Today, players taking the knee before a game can cause conniptions; in 1954, a Guyanese cinema audience refusing to stand for the national anthem would have had the same effect.
