Georgetown: Like a slumbering relic of bygone colonial days, Guyana’s famed Bourda is crumbling slowly, the victim of modernisation and of demand for gleaming new stadiums.

In the members’ bar, a steward dressed in shirt and tie serves the occasional member of Georgetown Cricket Club who has popped in for a drink. But the days of watching the world’s finest playing on the Bourda’s dark brown, shiny wicket are mostly over.

International cricket has probably had its day at Bourda, an idiosyncratic stadium famed for being the only cricket ground in the world below sea level and one which consequently floods dramatically whenever tropical rains sweep in from the Atlantic Ocean.