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All parties must come to the table and talk – Baptiste says on cricket debacle

Jul 03, 2014 Sports

Commenting on the ongoing cricket debacle between the Guyana Government, West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and Guyana Cricket Board (GCB), veteran sports enthusiast and former Executive Member of the GCB and veteran educator and Guyana Teachers’ Union sportsman, Mr. Lancelot Baptiste, believes that the parties involved must come to the table and talk.
The GCB, Government and other stakeholders have been in a quandary regarding the state of cricket in Guyana over the past months.
Speaking to this newspaper recently, Baptiste concluded that all sides “seem to have a reason for doing what they are doing.” He remembered a great Trade Unionist Mr. Pollydore, former General Secretary of the Guyana Trades Union Congress for many years, “saying, ‘whenever you are finished fighting…you have got to sit down at the table to settle all your matters.’”
The veteran sports enthusiast is very surprised, “that our situation has not reached to the point where we can sit around the table—have all the aggrieved parties—the Guyana Cricket Board, the Guyana Government, the elected officers of the GCB, the Demerara Cricket Board—all the sub- associations…everybody get around the table and if you have got to spend the whole day…come up with a solution.”
Everybody, he said, seems to have a strong point. “For me, if we don’t do that, our cricket will continue to suffer.” There were the days, he noted, when the GTU ran cricket from the junior level. “We ran cricket from Under 10, 12, 16 and Open…and if one were to look back at the history of cricket, we produced all the youth cricketers.” For over 7 consecutive years, GTU won the cricket competition in the Caribbean, “and we were producing all the top cricketers…from Kallicharran all the way down…there wasn’t a national cricketer who never played under the GTU’s banner.”
He recalled names such as Alvin Kallicharran, Clive Butts, Roger Harper and Shiv Chanderpaul. “I remember going to Mahaica, many-a-days and taking away Chanderpaul from his father who was a fisherman there, just to get him to go into school to have his name marked present, because you had to make a certain amount of percentage [of attendance] to play in our cricket, and since those days, I have noticed a sharp decline of our youth cricketers.”
This has paved the current condition of not many Guyanese serving in the West Indies (WI) team, “and we are now searching for one and two and three.”
Baptiste is saying that the door should be opened. “I don’t know who is supposed to initiate it but I would want to suggest that the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) should initiate that meeting—for everybody to sit down there to trash it out and come up with a solution. We are suffering as a result of it—not only in seeing cricket, but also in participating in it!”
The powers that be, he noted, seem not “to want to have the matter resolved in the best interest of the cricketers and community as a whole.” (Leon Suseran)

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