Ghana

Lagos, May 1904: the Gold Coast sends a team to play the Lagos Colony, and the fixture is set. Ghana would not exist as a state for another fifty-three years; the men on that field played under the British Gold Coast, and the opponent across the pitch would one day be Nigeria. The contest survives the border change intact and is still known, on both sides of it, as the Jollof Derby.

The team took the name Ghana after independence in 1957, but international recognition came far later: affiliate status with the International Cricket Council in 2002, and Associate Member status only in 2017 — the same year the side won the ICC World Cricket League Africa Region Qualifiers. That tournament followed the 2008 World Cricket League Africa Region Division Three and the 2014 ICC Africa T20 Championship Division Two, a run that pushed Ghana's T20I ranking to 28th in May 2019, the highest the team has reached.

Obed Harvey captained the side through the 2017 qualification, leading both the batting and bowling figures that year — bat and ball carried by the same man in the tournament that mattered most. Kofi Bagabena's contribution is narrower but on record: the first Ghanaian to take a hat-trick in T20 international cricket.

Red and yellow, the colours of the national flag, are worn without a settled nickname to go with them; Black Stars belongs to the footballers, and Black Batters has never quite displaced the plain use of the country's name. What has not moved is the fixture list: a match in Lagos, in May 1904, against the side that is now Nigeria.