Late arrivals out to make mark

The following article appeared in this summer's England Disability Cricket 2008 programme.

Miles Northwod, International Cricket Secretary for BCEW, provides an overview on the history of blind cricket between England and West Indies...

The West Indies were the last of the major Test playing nations to start playing Blind cricket. Up until five years ago there was no such thing as Blind Cricket anywhere on the islands.

Andy Sellins from LCCA and Tim Guttridge from the World Blind Cricket Council were the two people who introduced the game in Barbados. After their first visit, England players of the time joined the effort, travelling to the West Indies to help WBCC run coaching clinics for both mainstream cricket coaches and visually impaired players.

From those early beginnings the game has spread through the Islands to the point where they now have an annual regional tournament as well as domestic competitions on individual Islands and were able to participate in the third Blind Cricket World Cup in Islamabad Pakistan in December 2006.

The tour to England in August this summer will be their first international competition against an individual country, outside of the World Cup. It is an honour and a privilege as well as being totally fitting that their first international series should be against England considering the close bonds that have been developed between the two nations over the five years.

They play the game in the way that we have come to expect from their fully sighted counterparts over the last 30 years. They play with flair and flamboyance, and with overwhelming enthusiasm and enjoyment.

We have seen the progress they have made up to the World Cup a year and a half ago and know they have moved on to even higher levels in the time since. Whilst we hope to win the series, we must make sure that at no point do we take them lightly. They are an exceedingly talented group of players with boundless hunger and determination, and there is nothing they would like more than to put one over on their previous coaches.

It has been a time of change within both the England coaching structure and the playing party over the last 18 months and this will be the first series the new unit will have competed in together.

It is vitally important that with highly experienced members of both the coaching and playing staff having moved on, and with young, exciting but inexperienced people coming through that we make the most of the three games against the West Indies this summer to gain competitive international match experience, bond together as a group and hopefully develop a winning habit before an even tougher test in a five match Ashes series in Australia in December of this year.