With 51 days to go be­fore the first ball is bowled in the ICC Un­der-19 Crick­et World Cup, the man who cap­tained the first West In­dies U-19 team, 51 years ago, has thrown his full sup­port be­hind the re­gion­al team.

The West In­dies will bowl off the tour­na­ment against Aus­tralia on Jan­u­ary 14 in Guyana, and Dud­nath Ramkissoon, re­called his time as a youth crick­eter in the class of 1970 and of­fered ad­vice to the class of 2022.

“This is a won­der­ful op­por­tu­ni­ty for these young men to rep­re­sent the west In­dies and I want them to grab the chance with both hands. A Crick­et World Cup is a ma­jor event and to play it at home is some­thing ex­tra spe­cial as well,” said Ramkissoon.

“We need to sup­port them. The whole re­gion should come to­geth­er and give them their full sup­port. This is a cru­cial stage of their de­vel­op­ment, and this is a pres­ti­gious in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et event we will be host­ing.”

Ramkissoon led the first-ever West In­dies Youth Team on their tour of Eng­land in 1970. That sum­mer, they played match­es all across the Unit­ed King­dom. The team man­ag­er was leg­endary West In­dies fast bowler Wes Hall, and the squad in­clud­ed Lar­ry Gomes, and Richard Gabriel, who both went on to rep­re­sent Trinidad and To­ba­go and the West In­dies.

“It is more than 50 years ago but I still have some won­der­ful mem­o­ries of that tour, and 50 years lat­er we are still good friends. We had a fan­tas­tic team, and we played some re­al­ly good crick­et. Trav­el­ling around the coun­try we played in, was a great ex­pe­ri­ence and we were well sup­port­ed by the fans who came to see us play. It was a mem­o­rable tour and it was an ho­n­our to rep­re­sent the West In­dies.”

Crick­et West In­dies will host the 14th edi­tion of the for the first time ever, as the event which show­cas­es the fu­ture stars of the game will see 16 teams trav­el­ling to the Caribbean to com­pete in 48 match­es from Jan­u­ary 14 to Feb­ru­ary 5 across four host coun­tries.

The 16 teams com­pet­ing will see cur­rent hold­ers Bangladesh, Eng­land, Cana­da and the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates form Group A, with debu­tants Ugan­da placed in Group B along­side In­dia, South Africa and Ire­land.

Group C com­pris­es Pak­istan, Afghanistan, Zim­bab­we and Papua New Guinea and Group D sees host West In­dies, Aus­tralia and Sri Lan­ka. Scot­land com­pletes the tour­na­ment line-up in Group D af­ter New Zealand with­drew due to the ex­ten­sive manda­to­ry quar­an­tine re­stric­tions for mi­nors on their re­turn home.

The four host coun­tries have been con­firmed as An­tigua, Guyana, St Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and To­ba­go with 10 venues host­ing match­es. The for­mat will see the top two teams from each of the four groups ad­vance to the Su­per League while the re­main­ing teams fea­ture in the Plate across 23 days of com­pe­ti­tion.