IT’S April and the weather is mostly awful — so it must be the start of the cricket season.

When I was growing up, I had just two small ambitions for my future. One was to play football for Aston Villa in the winter, and the other was to come in at first or second wicket down for the West Indies cricket team in the summer.

Sadly I was never good enough at either to succeed, although at times over the years, I still felt I could do a job for Villa given some of the rubbish being served up — thankfully now, under Unai Emery, things appear to have turned the corner.

Football, or rather Aston Villa, has always been a real passion that could make or break my weekend — and that of anyone around me. But it was through cricket that my love of sport and politics came together.

Even before I knew anything about politics I had an awareness of the place cricket had in the West Indian community and why it did.

It’s worth me being honest from the beginning: for me, it is and always has been “anyone but England” in cricket or any other sport.

It’s a part of my personal anti-colonialism that I fully accept not everyone shares — but I plead guilty to having failed the so-called “Tebbit test” well before he even set the exam.

The former right-wing Tory minister Norman Tebbit actually aimed his “test” during the 1980s at the Asian community in Britain to measure their loyalty to the country by which international cricket team they supported.

I made my pro-black and anti-colonial choice alongside many other young black men growing up during the seventies as the National Front marched against us and as we took extra care over which road we walked down (and at what time) for fear of being attacked and where we might get turned down for a job because of the colour of our skin.

Many of us never felt wanted in Britain — we were told so in no uncertain terms time and time again. We were harassed in the streets, at work and, all too often, even where we lived by racists who decided it would be fun to attack our homes.

So the Tebbit test was failed miserably by countless numbers of us who decided we would rather support the countries that gave birth to our parents though not most of us.

I started following the West Indies cricket team long before I ever visited Jamaica — the land where my ancestors were enslaved from Africa and in which my parents were born.

In a future column, I will tell the story of my family attending our first live cricket game — the “bomb scare” test at Lords 50 years ago in August 1973.

Us kids, my brother, neighbours and I, used to chalk a wicket in the street and play cricket for what felt like most of the day when we were growing up. A makeshift bat and usually a tennis ball was all we needed to bat like Gary Sobers or Viv Richards or, if you were bowling, Michael Holding or “Big Bird” Joel Garner.

My nickname from one of my dear uncles for as long as I can remember was “Sobers.” What an honour to be named after the great cricketer — but for me the main man was Viv Richards.

“King Viv” was the epitome of why cricket was so important to people of African descent. I dare say many of my Asian brothers and sisters felt the same way about amazing players like Sunil Gavaskar and later the great Sachin Tendulkar or Imran Khan.

Watching Richards stroll nonchalantly to the pitch, with his team cap on and those green, black and gold wristbands, to destroy, seemingly at will, any bowler he felt like, was more than about cricket. You developed that same swagger — well at least I did — in everything that you did.

You felt hundreds of years of resistance and pride flowing through your veins every time that Richards but also Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Clive Lloyd, Holding, Garner and, later Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh and others, took to the pitch.

Beating Australia and the other test and one-day teams was important, but nothing was better than victory over the old colonial power England.

We knew that it was important to England supporters too. Whenever they had a good half an hour against the West Indies they would let us know about it.

If England somehow managed to eke out a win against the West Indies we would never hear the last of it. Thankfully — at least when I was growing up — that didn’t happen very often.

Cricket to us was even more than a way of showing our resistance to the racism we were all too familiar with as black people in Britain.

It was about maintaining our sense of pride that racist individuals and the state, many employers and, in particular, the police with their continual harassment, had worked hard to smash out of us.

When I was growing up there were precious few places where one could see positive images of people of African descent. Cricket and music were just about it. Certainly not football until the emergence of Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson at West Brom down the road from us.

But, as so often happens when we start to win, the authorities changed the rules back in their favour. They limited the number of bouncers in an over and even stooped to banning West Indies fans from banging tin cans together during the game.

Yes — they really did ban us from banging tin cans together because it might somehow help the West Indies to win. Such a far cry from the antics of some in the so-called “barmy army” of England supporters these days.

Of course, we didn’t have Black History Month in my youth. That didn’t officially start until 1987 and took a few more years to properly catch on.

All we had was the portrayals of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, the Black Panthers, and Angela Davis that we were given in the limited media we could get or could somehow find out for ourselves.

So watching and feeding off these demonstrations of black pride and power on the cricket pitch was critical for not just a sense of survival but for making us straighten our backs and lift our heads and realise that we were somebody and that we could actually win.

No matter the lack of success of the current West Indies cricket team. The damage has already been done by those who went before them.

I can’t help thinking how much more successful the West Indies might have been though if they could have made room for one Roger McKenzie coming in at first or second wicket down while refusing to wear a helmet but battering the England attack to all parts of the ground.