West Indies' return to the Antigua Recreation Ground today seems like a philanderer coming home after a particularly tacky affair. The fling with the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium wasn't even fun while it lasted.
The West Indies board, its head turned by Chinese money, betrayed one of cricket's most evocative arenas for a ground where no one really wanted to go, and you can bet it will be off again as soon as it gets the chance.
Anyone asking himself whether the ARG will be ready for today's hastily arranged Test match between West Indies and England should really know better. Of course it won't be. It wasn't ready for its first Test match in 1981 and it never suggested anything remotely resembling organised preparedness over the next 25 years, right up to its last Test match in 2006.
Yet when the game gets under way it will release such a wave of nostalgia that cricket folk could soon be blubbing like Mary Magdalene. The ARG is not that old. We are hardly talking Pompeii or Thebes here. It became the 52nd ground to stage Test cricket less than three decades ago, and yet it brings out wistful sentiments in faithful lovers of the game, because such great deeds are compressed into its short history.
But it's more than that still. The Rec - and what powerful memories of childhood those two words evoke - is more than just the stage where Sir Vivian Richards and Brian Lara played some of their most brilliant cricket. This is where the cross-dressing Gravy danced and where Chickie's Disco blared between overs, the ground which arrived on the international scene at a time when West Indies were in their swaggering pomp.
It also symbolised Antigua as a major new power in Caribbean cricket. Andy Roberts, the deadpan fisherman who became the groundsman at St John's, could also bowl a bit and had become the first Antiguan to play Test cricket a few years earlier, to be followed by Richards, Richie Richardson and Curtly Ambrose.
Even in 1981, the ground that would see Lara twice break the record Test score was the best pitch among the islands. That year, when I made my first tour with England, the pitches in West Indies were fast and true - unlike those in 1986, which were fast with uneven bounce, the batsman's nightmare, as Mike Gatting would ruefully confirm.
Richards anointed the ground 28 years ago with a century, but Peter Willey scored one too and England had little trouble saving the match against the bowling of Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft and Joel Garner. The inmates of the nearby prison - where Richards' father, Malcolm, was the warden - tended the ground in those days. On the morning of the first Test they were still building the press box.
Yet unlike the white elephant the Viv Richards Stadium would become a generation later, the ARG was always a proper cricket ground, set in the capital, St John's, which encouraged a large and boisterous crowd, who made the Double Decker stand one of the most famous in cricket. Visiting supporters could wander into town during the lunch and tea intervals and see the white baroque towers of the St John's Catholic cathedral, a cool retreat from the teeming life.
On one such excursion three colleagues of mine were approached by four boys. Their school was so poor, they said, that they had to buy their own books, but their own resources were meagre too, and they had to go without (some people forget that behind the rich tourists and five-star hotels the Caribbean is mostly third-world).
My colleagues, moved by the tale - and it takes some to move a hardened hack - pushed folding money into the boys' hands. Two hours later they saw them again, struggling to carry several bottles of pop, their grinning faces smeared, ear-to-ear, with chocolate. When I last saw the ARG it was as deserted as Petra. It was an ignored, dishevelled, tramp of a ground. This week's Test match will stir warm memories. But it will also unleash an anger, a fury at West Indies administrators who left a great cricket ground out in the cold to die.
