From awesomeness to awfulness

May 30, 2010 Editorial

On the day South Africa won the ODI series (after sweeping the 20/20 series) Zimbabwe had just trounced India in their ODI match and Bangladesh had taken the day’s honour in their Test match against England at Lords. So where are we on the Minnow Rankings?
Three days before, in a panel discussion on “Nationalism And The Future Of West Indies Cricket,” held on the Cave Hill Campus of UWI, Principal of the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus (and self confessed “cricket tragic”), Sir Hilary Beckles had commented on the WI’s fall from” awesomeness to awfulness”. The manner of the latest WI debacle only confirmed Sir Hilary’s candid diagnosis.
Pointing to the almost unique precipitous collapse of our cricketing greatness over the past decade and a half, Sir Hilary identified several contributory factors. Among these were competition from other sports leading to a diminution of cricket’s popularity, the restricted professional pool where only some 15 players can make a living solely from cricket, the loss of technical cricketing skills, the poor educational background of our cricketers and the overall “fall in cultural excellence”.
Head of Cave Hill’s Department of Management, Dr Justin Robinson, indicated that the club model, exemplified by the IPL, might be the wave of the future, with players from these clubs opting to play for national teams if they so desire.
Rawle Brancker, chairman of the ICC World Cup 2007, was the only member of the panel that identified the WICB as a possible contributory factor. He allowed that maybe the 18 directors on the Board might make decision-making a tad “untimely” and it needed “restructuring”. Not surprisingly, the CEO of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), Ernest Hilaire, disagreed. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of the present crop of players. They are focused only on “money and instant gratification” rather than “WI pride” and are terminally uneducated. As a reflection of “the wider societal ills of the Caribbean”, they are also the victims of the region’s historic insularity. From every island for itself, it has become every man for himself.
And it is this head-in-the sand attitude about the responsibilities of the WICB, coupled with its demoralising finger-pointing, that guarantees WI cricket will only continue its downwards slide in the foreseeable future. CEO Hillaire promises that things will not get better until the High Performance Centre (HPC) of the WI Cricket Academy at Cave Hill begins to presumably deprogramme the next generation of cricketers and produces a team that will not be all about “money and bling”.
But he admits that the academy should have been in place a decade ago. Whose responsibility was that? The HPC – which can only cater for 15 players — was supposed to have kicked off since May 1, and promising players from all the territories have been selected (some were even taken off the “A” Team that is touring Bangladesh) but we have no word on the reason for the delay.
Our position is that the relationship between the players and the board has to be restructured. And this can only come about with a restructuring of the WICB. It is three years, after great agitation in all sections of WI society, that a “Governance Committee on West Indies Cricket”, led by former P.M. Jamaica PJ Patterson, was constituted by the WICB to come up with recommendations to resuscitate the game.
They duly presented their findings to the board – a 134 page extremely nuanced document that touched on all the key shortcomings of cricket in the Caribbean.
We have to quit with the analysing. Implement the recommendations of the Patterson Report. Reform of the cricketing administration is a threshold issue – and not only with the WICB. The recent acid attack on Mr Pretipaul Jaigobin, assistant Treasurer of the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) should be a wake-up call to the authorities.
The Vice President of the GCB has stated that “there is no doubt in (his) mind” that the attack was linked to Mr Jaigobin’s consistent identification and criticism of “issues of mal-administration, nepotism, cronyism, illegalities and financial improprieties” on the GCB. The government should initiate an official Inquiry into not only Mr Jaigobin’s attack, but into the entire functioning of the GCB.

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