Time to change the WI Cricket Board

THE EDITOR: For too long the West Indies Cricket Board has been an embarrassment to our region. It is time that the sponsors of this organisation take charge and address this situation to salvage cricket in our region. The latest faux pas made by the Board in electing a bookie as Board President is just one of its many recent poor decisions. It is unfortunate to see how over the past ten years, the cricket board has sat aside and allowed the demise of our beloved regional and once national pastime. While the West Indies cricket team continued to fail at successive World Cup tournaments and foreign tours, the Board rode the backs of our ageing cricketers without a strategic plan to retain cricket supremacy, or even competency. So, the proud West Indies fans saw their cricket stars age without any well-trained replacements and the Board executives sat back like fat cats and collected revenues from foreign tours and television rights.

It is time for us to have a team of professionals undertaking the affairs of the Board. Not only former cricket professionals should be involved in cricket administration, but men and women who have a passion for the game but have proven themselves in their chosen fields. Attorneys, marketing and sales executives, accountants, medical practitioners with expertise in sports and conditioning and even entrepreneurs all have a part to play in the development of a new cricket board. This “old boys” network that dates back to colonial days needs to be disintegrated. It is time for us to have persons with these skill-sets taking reign of our cricket board instead of a figure-head whose agenda has been set by those islands who have elected him. In the United States, for example, the commissioner of the NBA is an attorney by profession. It has been under David Stern that the NBA has experienced unprecedented growth and is now a globally recognised league that plays exhibition games all over the world while its players enjoy international fame and are globally marketed as product endorsers.

Couldn’t we have done the same for Lara or many of our other top players? Why can’t we take a page from organisations such as these and also elect a President that has the interest of all of his or her constituents rather than just a select few. From as far as I can remember, Alloy Lequay has been an executive of the Trinidad Cricket Board, and is still a representative on the West Indies Cricket Board. I am sure that this is true for many of our neighbouring islands. I have nothing against Mr Lequay but I am sure that there are much younger, vibrant individuals with new ideas who can contribute to the growth of West Indies cricket. If we allow the same administrators to sit for years without any accountability, we will fail to allow new perspectives and new ideologies to enter into the realm of West Indian cricket. I hope that the Board becomes Y2K compliant before we attempt to host the 2007 World Cup here in the West Indies!

BLAIR A WILLIAM
Harrisurg, Pennsylvania