I T IS AN odd sports fan who travels halfway around the world and is happy to see his team lose. Yet that describes many of the 5,000 sun-pinked English cricket fans who watched England play the West Indies on the Caribbean island of St Lucia this week. Asked whether he minded that England had already lost the three-Test series, having been beaten in Barbados and Antigua, Steve, a retired building-society manager from Somerset, looked almost put out. “Not remotely!” he exclaimed. “We think it’s marvellous,” said his wife Anne.

It would be hard to imagine a set of fans more supportive of the other side. When the Trinidadian bowler Shannon Gabriel charged in murderously, feet pounding the turf, the English contingent murmured contentedly. It was real West Indian fast-bowling: “pace like fire”. Nostalgic for the time when it ruled cricket, and mindful of how much the game has changed since then, they revelled in the sight.

To understand this, consider first that there is nothing in sport—not the Boston Celtics in the 1960s or Brazil’s finest footballers—to touch what the tiny populations of the Anglophone Caribbean achieved in cricket.

The Test match, the game’s five-day format, is the most gruelling challenge in team sport. Imagine two baseball series packed into a single game. Then multiply that by three, or even five, to make a Test series. It is a brutal examination, at which, between 1980 and 1995, the West Indies were undefeated. Their victims included, in England and Australia, two of the world’s richest countries; and in India and Pakistan, two of the most populous. Barbados, by contrast, had a poor population of around 240,000. Yet some reckon the island has produced more great cricketers than India. Trinidad produced the best book on cricket, “Beyond a Boundary”, by C.L.R. James in 1963. It was a crazy over-performance—a real-life case of Asterix and a Gaulish village against the Roman Empire.

But it was unsustainable, if only because mercurial politics was part of the magic potion. After centuries of racial and economic injustice in the Caribbean, the 1970s and ’80s were a time of self-determination and growth. Most of the islands had just or were about to become independent. And cricket was their means of self-expression. It was the only thing at which they were world-beating. It was also, thanks to the English professional leagues, a rare means to earn a living. The hegemony was fuelled by the cricketing mania this stirred, in a unique interlude between colonialism and modernity. With economic growth, outward migration and other distractions (including television, which came to the islands in the 1970s), the frenzy cooled just enough for the world domination to end.

Yet the calamity that has befallen West Indian cricket in the past decade, including player mutinies, threatened bankruptcy and serial defeats, was not inevitable. It reflects the commercial and geopolitical forces now buffeting the game everywhere. This points to a second reason why the West Indians’ first series victory over England in a decade was so poignant.

The growth of club-based cricket franchises, especially in India, has put huge pressure on the culture of international competition that has underpinned cricket since the late 19th century. Attracted by million-dollar salaries in India, some of the best Caribbean players have abandoned their international side to become globe-trotting freelancers. No wonder the West Indies has struggled. And the richest cricket countries, India, England and Australia, have done little to counter this trend. They are mainly concerned to maximise their revenues from the shorter formats the franchises play. The result, everywhere outside England, is that Test cricket is dying. But for the English fans in St Lucia, the stadium would have been empty. As in Barbados and Antigua, few locals showed up.

Contrary to its image as a fusty Victorian heirloom, cricket has constantly evolved. Yet these changes, the downgrading of international and Test cricket, will be seismic. They augur a game almost unrecognisable from its current form, and less loved by its devotees. That is why the West Indies’ latest win is so precious to them. Achieved by the same means—terrifying fast-bowling—as their past greatness, it represents a twitching of the veil of cricket history, sending lost images and emotions tumbling forth. The West Indies will not again be a cricket giant: they face too many impediments. But their mini-resurgence feels almost as unlikely as their domination was, and glorious while it lasts.