Pro-League cricket idea goes to players

IT WILL COST at least $1.5 million United States dollars ($9M TT) to get the proposed West Indies Professional Cricket League underway. But it is likely to incur much more according to the  provisional budget which has been drafted by Dr Trevor Alleyne, the driving force behind the project to establish the league next year. Yesterday, the lecturer in Bio-Chemistry at the University of the West Indies was in serious discussions with Dinanath Ramnarine, Chief Executive Officer of the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA). After failing to convince the Caricom Secretariat and the respective governments of the region to actively support the plan, Dr Alleyne, a Barbadian, is now taking the idea to the West Indies players. He has also enlisted the support of football administrator Jack Warner who has consented to host a symposium next month which is expected to attract the major players in the project where Dr Alleyne’s document on the proposed league will be discussed in-depth.

“We really want to get the West Indies Professional Cricket League off the ground next year. However the logistics of the plan are yet to be worked out but will be done soon,” he said yesterday in a telephone interview. Dr Alleyne said he envisages the first round of the competition, involving six teams, getting underway next November/ December in one country with a break for the Christmas holidays. The Professional League will resume after the year-end holidays with the second round being contested in another territory. In all the competition will extend over four months and fit in with the existing Carib Beer Series regional tournament and any international matches hosted in the Caribbean. He said matches initially will be over a three-day period and the localising of the teams in one country is expected to significantly cut the air travel expenses.

Also yesterday Alloy Lequay, Chief Executive Officer of the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board said the idea of the Professional Cricket League in the Caribbean is hardly new since it was during the Pat Rousseau presidency of the West indies Cricket Board that the idea was first embraced. “They had agreed to contract the players who no longer were able to play in England with an input from the governments of the Caribbean,” Lequay said. “A formula was worked out whereby the governments would contribute a sum of money and the West Indies Cricket Board would put in the rest to initiate the league,” he said. “However, the governments agreed in principle but failed to  honour  the agreement and the plan never got off the ground,” said Lequay. He credited Dr Alleyne for persisting with the plan despite the fact that he has not received any favourable responses to letters written to the Caricom Secretariat, Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell, head of the Caricom Sub-Committee on Cricket and the respective Caribbean governments.

Lequay said the launch of the Professional Cricket League will be extremely beneficial to the cricketers and the game in the region but pointed out that much will depend on the level of sponsorship which can be raised throught the efforts of Warner who has expressed a keen interest in the idea. Dr Alleyne attended the same school as former West Indies cricket captain Sir Frank Worrell and  West Hall, a Test fast bowler and former president of the WI Cricket Board. He has been credited with improving the fortunes of the UWI cricket team at the St Augustine Campus as assistant coach and coach, winning the inter-campus championship among other titles. In the 1990s he was the force behind the effort to stage the World Cup in the Caribbean undertaking several studies and producing numerous reports which later formed the basis of the successful bid for the 2007 championship.