Title: Through the Years: My Life in Cricket, by Leonard Chambers
Reviewed By: Garfield Myers

Those captured by cricket are taken heart and soul.
That’s very possibly an overriding feeling for anyone reading Leonard Chambers’ book, Through the Years: My Life in Cricket.
A middle-order batsman and off spinner, Chambers was among the leading Jamaican cricketers of the latter 1960s to mid ’70s although national senior selectors of that period were seemingly less than convinced.
Over nine years, Chambers played eight first class games, scoring 185 runs for an average of 20.55 with a highest of 52 against Trinidad and Tobago in 1974. His off spin earned him 11 first class wickets at 25.36 with a best of three for 22 against Combined Islands in 1973.
The reader detects more than a hint that Chambers doesn’t believe he was given a fair chance to maximise his potential.
But his 364-page “labour of love” focuses much less on his on-field achievements and far more on his service to a game in which his whole life was, and remains, wrapped.
Now 83 years old, and a resident in the United States for three decades, Chambers, of Afro-East Indian ancestry, grew up in the 1940s and 50s in the vicinity of Spanish Town, St Catherine.
In an age when smartphones, related audio-visual technologies, and so forth, were only imagined in scarcely believable science fiction books and movies, young boys were addicted to outdoor sports, especially cricket.
With expensive, store-bought equipment out of reach, young Chambers and his friends carved cricket bats from coconut boughs and assorted pieces of wood and board. For cricket balls they often turned to premature fruit, round stones elaborately wrapped, and the root of the bamboo tree.
We are amused by the revelation that cricket helped to widen Chambers’ vocabulary. While batting on a small open space at primary school he heard the word “methodical” for the first time. “You are so methodical when batting, keep it up,” the school’s headmaster declared from the side lines.
That approach gained him rapid recognition in domestic cricket, including community level — there were even ethnic-based teams such as All Indian and All Chinese — and the well-organised sugar estate competitions.
Sugar cane as an industry was still king and the leading employer of labour in rural Jamaica in those days, and sugar estates backed cricket to the hilt.
In his late teens to adulthood, Chambers excelled in Jamaica’s top club competition the Senior Cup, mainly representing St Catherine Cricket Club. His performances gained him selection to national colts’ teams, a development stint in England that earned him priceless experience and new vistas, and the Jamaica senior team.
Obvious leadership skills gained him captaincy roles at club and other levels in domestic cricket.
But it was as administrator, mentor, manager, selector, that Chambers would make his most impactful and long-lasting contribution — starting when he became a member of the Jamaica Cricket Association while still young and very active as a player.
Chambers’ book provides insights strengthened by first-hand experience of a time when varying prejudices strongly influenced team selections to the detriment of Jamaica’s cricket.
He speaks of a campaign — seemingly significantly hindered — to get rural cricket including the talent-rich sugar estate competition properly embraced at the national level.
His extreme disappointment that some highly talented players with much to offer, dropped out of the game and/or failed to maximise their true potential because of flawed selectors’ and administrative decisions, is palpable.
Equally though, Chambers soars to great heights on the memory of the many young ones who came good under his care and mentorship through the 1980s and 90s as he served as manager and selector at Under-19 and national level.
That aspect is suitably hailed by former Jamaica and West Indies captain and batsman James Adams in the book’s foreword.
Priced at US$55 in hardcover and US$45 in paperback, Through the Years: My Life in Cricket by Leonard Chambers is available at Amazon.com.