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‘Their game is founded on vengeance and violence and fringed by arrogance,’ said Frith.¹¹

‘Most people on whose support English cricket depends, believe monotonous fast bowling to be both brutalising the game and boring to watch,’ said the Sunday Times’ Robin Marlar.¹²

English journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse was ‘sickened’ by ‘the downright thuggery of fast bowlers working in relays to remove batsmen by hurting and intimidating them’.¹³

John Woodcock, editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, wrote an article with a picture captioned ‘the unacceptable face of Test cricket’.¹⁴ He had also classified the West Indies’ fast bowling as ‘chilling’ and warned that its ‘viciousness was changing the very nature of the game’.¹⁵

‘It seemed that cricket had been transformed into something really ugly,’ said Frith.¹⁶

West Indian supporters felt every comment. And we probably only heard or read about a quarter of them. I did not realise until much later, when books such as Mike Marqusee’s Anyone But England and Simon Lister’s Fire in Babylon were released, just how bad the commentary and views published had really been. Seven-foot monsters, devilish-looking, vengeance, violence, brutalising, thuggery, viciousness, ugly. Shut your eyes. Hear those words and those phrases. Not describing slavery, colonialism or apartheid, but cricket. Twitter language. YouTube comments. Comments that can easily be traced to age-old stereotypes of black folks.