'Yeah, but it was only the West Indies'

I looked at the fellow who had thus interrupted my purring about Michael Vaughan’s and Kevin Pietersen’s hundreds at Headingley last year and realised that he was too young to have 'blackwashes' burned into his brain.

I made my Test debut as a spectator at The Oval in 1976, seeing Viv Richards go from 200 not out overnight to 291 and being disappointed he didn’t break Garry Sobers’s record. For most of the next two decades, West Indies exercised global domination practising a kind of cricket the Pentagon would later call "Shock and Awe".

They scored runs at four an over, impossibly fast to a generation reared on Test cricket going at two-and-a-half. They mounted the most relentless, most fearsome pace attack that had ever been seen, and were constantly able to refresh the supply of frightening demons to hurl the ball at the world’s mostly cowering batsmen.

You might be able to argue that Steve Waugh’s Australian teams were more complete with a champion legspinner to round the attack, but they were also only an excellent cricket team. The Windies of the 1980s were more than that. They tore up most of the principles established since Don Bradman’s time and showed us a new Test cricket; Australia may have done it better since, but they stood on the shoulders of literal giants.

No, “only the Windies” is not a phrase that can ever have a place in my vocabulary. West Indies can have a weaker-than-normal team and they can play badly, but they are still not “only the Windies”.

They were admittedly terrible in England last year, but the transformation in the way the team plays since Chris Gayle’s elevation to the captaincy has been marvellous to see.

Winning the First Test in Port Elizabeth when they visited South Africa at the turn of the year was entirely merited, and now they’ve given Australia a great run for their money. Australia may not be quite the force they were with an undercooked McGill in the side, but the Windies of a year ago would have failed to expose any vulnerabilities at all. The bowling attack may not be up to the awesome standards of 1984, but it now stands comparison with any other country’s, and they now field as though they mean it.

The strange thing is that their batting hero, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, is the unlikeliest Caribbean idol ever. Possessed of a batting style best appreciated on the radio, he sells his wicket so dearly that in the present financial climate opponents simply cannot raise the cash required to dislodge him.

He has no business being a West Indian middle order batsman: he ought to be appearing in 1920s Roses matches so that Neville Cardus can construct myths about him being hewn from millstone grit.

Since the beginning of the series against England last year, which constitutes the post-Lara era for West Indies, Shivnarine Chanderpaul has scored over 1200 Test runs at the phenomenal average of 105.42. In 22 innings he has passed 50 fourteen times and converted five of those to hundreds. In the same period, only Sourav Ganguly and Pietersen have scored more - but they have had many more innings and average less than half as much.

Rahul Dravid and Jaques Kallis play for more successful teams and get more plaudits as a result, but for me, Chanderpaul is currently cricket’s most indomitable batsman. They may write fewer calypsos these days, but he’s a little pal of mine, that Guyanese man Shivnarine.