Cricket had never been played like this. Cricket had never meant so much.

The West Indies had always had brilliant cricketers; it hadn't always had brilliant cricket teams. But in 1974, a man called Clive Lloyd began to lead a side which would that last throw off the shackles that had hindered the region for centuries. Nowhere else had a game been so closely connected to it people's past and their future hopes; nowhere else did cricket liberate a people like it did in the Caribbean.

For almost two decades, Clive Lloyd and then Vivian Richards LED the batsman and bowlers who changed the way cricket was played and changed the way a whole nation - which existed only on a cricket pitch - saw itself.

With pace like fire and scorching batting, these sons of cane-cutters and fishermen brought pride to a people which had been stifled by 300 years of slavery, empire and colonialism. Their cricket roused the Caribbean and antagonised the game's traditionalists.

Told by the men who made it happen and the people who watched it unfold, Fire in Babylon is the definitive story of the greatest team that sport has known.