A West Indies tour without the Caribbean spirit

Mike Selvey, writing for the Guardian, believes that the days of visiting teams in the West Indies soaking up the beach and the sun, and later being blown away the pace in the pitches, are long gone.

All this is in contrast to how it once was, back in the days where West Indies were the supreme cricket machine. Tours then, much less concentrated than they are now, seemed to conform to a template. First came some seductive island warm-up matches, what we would term beach cricket: St Kitts, St Lucia, Grenada, that sort of thing, and all very nice. For the most part, unless they happened upon the fearsome Antiguan trio of Vaughn "Hungry" Walsh, Randy Challenger, and John "The Dentist" Maynard, they would find numerous overs of spin confronting them, hardly the preparation they required for facing Curtly, Courtney, Bish and Kenny Benjamin over the course of the next five matches

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