The new generation of West Indies fans who have embraced the maroon

Rallying around the West Indies cricket team was never a difficult choice to make. My grandad had grown up with future greats such as Rohan Kanhai and Basil Butcher in Berbice, Guyana, while one of my mum’s earliest memories is of travelling hours and hours across the harsh rural landscape of the country just to see the team play at Bourda cricket ground in Georgetown. This was heritage. Legacy. Having never even held a cricket bat growing up in inner-city London, I made the rational decision to embrace the maroon and pledge support to this team made up of various different nations, in a sport that none of my friends had any interest in.Unfortunately this was also the 90s, so I was witnessing the gradual decline of a once-great team, yet I carried on supporting, from Curtly Ambrose to Chris Gayle, Shivnarine Chanderpaul to Shannon Gabriel. I followed on TV, scorecards, whatever the time of day, through the ups and downs … and more downs than ups. I had resigned myself to this fandom being a life-long solo pursuit, something never discussed within my social circle.

Yet in 2019 the magic of social media put me in touch with Machel Hewitt, 40, who had also grown up in London with an equal passion for West Indies cricket. Machel credited his own love as part of “cultural legacy”, saying: “I benefited from the fact I was going back to Jamaica on holiday every year [as a child], so cricket was a tie to the homeland’’. Machel feels Caribbean cricket became so entrenched in his identity that the isolation of being a fan in England did not affect his commitment to supporting the side. “There was nobody to connect with, I felt I was on a one-man mission.”

We decided to create the Caribbean Cricket Podcast as an outlet to talk