West Indies-England Tests will now be known as the Richards-Botham series, but it would have been an opportunity to pay tribute to a man whose biggest influence came off the field
Call it the law of unintended consequences. Three weeks ago I wrote a column about the way in which black activism is intertwined with the history of West Indian cricket. You can’t write about that without mentioning Learie Constantine, and, rereading the details of his life, I was struck all over again by the magnitude of what he accomplished. Constantine was the grandson of a slave who grew up to become the UK’s first black peer. He was the man who fought and won the groundbreaking discrimination case against the Imperial Hotel, the man who wrote Colour Bar, his seminal book about race relations in the UK, the man who was instrumental in passing the 1965 race relations act.
So I wrote that they ought to scrap the Wisden Trophy and cast a new one in Constantine’s honour.
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