West Indies tour of New Zealand 1980-81

[Savak]

I am surprised people don't talk about this tour that often. Apparently it was an extremely heated controversial tour with plenty of angry, aggressive confrontation from the West Indies players against the New Zealand umpires. You can find a video of Holding knocking down the stumps in an anger after a clear edge was given not out by a NZ umpire. You can find a video of an angry Colin Croft angrily barging into a NZ umpire.

Yes you can criticize the incompetence of the NZ umpires and in fact their blatant cheating to give the home team an edge against the West Indies. But surely an all time great West Indies team of that era should have shown much more maturity and professionalism with how they went about their business on that tour as well.

 

[Junaids]

The man of the series was Fred Goodall.

It’s hard to explain just how biased hometown umpiring was until the late-1980’s.

Just look at Javed Miandad’s LBW record at home and away!

 

[ManFan]

West Indies pretty much gave up mid-way through the tour because of the umpiring decisions.

It’s disgusting how for a game led by administrators who take pride in calling themselves “gentlemen” would let a trivial thing such as home umpiring ruin so many games and series for so long.

But to be fair, that was the first time the WI quartet was visiting NZ and the umpires had never seen bowling that fast. So, the timing of a decision was just too short for an untrained eye to make.

 

[BoomBoomCricket]

Long way to travel from WI to NZ for a tour.