Nelson Betancourt played just one Test match in a first-class career that spanned 25 seasons, and made cricketing trivia that would make a 50-Test veteran proud.

He was captain of West Indies in that Test match (not too unusual in those early days, to be fair), in what was their first home cricket series. So in his first and only Test, he led the team. According to available records, there has only been one cricketer older than Betancourt on captaincy debut. Warren Bardsley was 43 years and 216 days old when he led Australia in July 1926. Betancourt was 42 years and 242 days old when he led West Indies against England in Port of Spain in February 1930. He remains one of the oldest Test debutants in cricket history. And, not to forget, the record for the longest gap between first-class and Test debuts belongs to him - more than 24 years - and the fact that his first (and last) Test was also his last first-class appearance.

The gap was primarily because very little first-class cricket was played in the Caribbean at the time. From 1905, when he debuted for Trinidad against Jamaica, to the end of his career in 1930, Betancourt played regularly (bar the war years), but finished with just 18 first-class caps. The captaincy, meanwhile, came because, as Steven Lynch explains in these pages, "it was West Indies' first home series, and they decided to appoint a captain from the host territory for each of the four Tests". Betancourt didn't do too badly as a lower-middle-order batter, scoring 39 and 13 against Wilfred Rhodes, Bill Voce and Ewart Astill, among others, but West Indies lost by 167 runs.