Opinion Piece: Condemning the Nonsensical Guyana Cricket Board-Wehby Report Opposition

Dec 21, 2024 Sports

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By Colin Benjamin

Kaieteur Sports- “What I would really appreciate is for the President of Guyana and the Prime Minister of Barbados to have a discussion with the presidents of the two associations and hopefully we can get them on a wavelength of change and governance reform. That would certainly help the situation.”

These were the words of Cricket West Indies (CWI) President Dr. Kishore Shallow in a Trinidad Guardian Media Group Interview on December 15th, seeking the intervention of Guyana’s President to deal with the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) opposition to the Wehby Governance report reform.

It should be of no surprise to any keen observer of Guyana Cricket, that it has become such a rogue member in the CWI board room, that the president is imploring Guyana’s President to intervene.

On November 27, 2023, i noted in a Kaieteur Sports article titled, “Warning Signs: Addressing the Guyana Cricket Leadership”, highlighting all the historical and now modern dysfunction traits of the GCB under the failing leadership of “selected” not “elected” president Bissondyal Singh.

Since flagging the issues in 2023 the new comical development from GCB in 2024 was them suing CWI via Guyana’s high court over their nonsensical and without merit claim, that Azim Bassarath was elected CWI Vice President in a “Flawed & Illegal” manner.

While I disagreed with CWI leadership taking the legal advice from its lawyers to ask Bassarath to resign – in the end after Bassarath resigned on August 20th, 2024 – one month later on September 20th, Bassarath was re-elected unopposed.

So essentially the Singh-led GCB spent almost two years railing against Bassarath. Had no CWI board support in putting up a replacement candidate. Bassarath was re-elected unopposed & GCB didn’t even attend the meeting.

A complete waste of everyone’s time.

GCBs failed tirade against Bassarath was no different from very suspicious reasons to remove Hilbert Foster as GCB vice president and CWI Director, due to spurious insinuations that the Berbice Cricket Board financial statements could not stand up to scrutiny.

At all levels in recent years Berbice has produced the vast majority of Guyana’s cricketers that have represented the West Indies. Nobody took seriously any correlation between Foster’s administrative success in producing players from the county & GCB’s accusation.

But West Indies cricket directorship was denied having a man like Foster based on his administrative success record on the inside due to Singh.

This brings us to the GCB’s Wehby governance report opposition.

If it was former GCB/CWI officials Anand Sanasie, Dru Bahadur, Ramsey Ali, Anand Kalladeen opposing Wehby report reform, that would be different.

But for Singh to do it considering he was part of a decade-long Guyana cricket opposition to all the aforementioned guys, is laughable.

He was not a member of CWI when the Wehby report was commissioned, during stakeholder consultation & later completed.

Singh owes his ascent to GCB solely to Ricky Skerritt & Kishore Shallow CWI re-election in 2021.

If Sanasie had somehow won the 2021 CWI election, nobody in the Caribbean cricket world would know about Singh.

So how is it possible that Singh as the novice, newbie CWI director is joining up with the equally failing veteran Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) director Conde Riley in opposition to these reforms?

Singh is ungrateful to the people who helped get Sanasie out of Guyana cricket and the CWI board room.

As the GCB continues to falter along and be a CWI outcast, all leadership and innovative Guyana cricket initiatives are coming from the head of state. Whether it be a commitment to support CWI, the cricket carnival idea around CPL, the Global Super League or the construction of new cricket grounds in Berbice and Essequibo.

Whoever is advising the President on cricket should probably go down to Bourda and give the GCB some ideas.

The GCB hasn’t had a public campaign election free of court and political maneuvering in my time in sports media.

Therefore the democratic sports process means Guyana’s cricket needs the GCB President to be elected after a robust non-outside interference process where a person can campaign on a vision for Guyana cricket & earn the vote of members in the three counties, while the public gets to assess their campaign. All CWI presidents and board directors from other islands go through this process – the GCB continues to be the embarrassing outlier.

Therefore, I will add to Dr. Shallow’s call that not only should the Head of State intervene over the GCB Wehby report opposition, but also over having a public Guyana cricket board election, so that Cricket West Indies can have better Guyana representation.

Colin Benjamin is a current CONCACAF Venue Press Officer & former West Indies communications officer from 2019-2023

(Opinion Piece: Condemning the Nonsensical Guyana Cricket Board-Wehby Report Opposition)

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• Cricket West Indies, President of Guyana, Prime Minister of Barbados, Trinidad Guardian Media Group

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