In a previous editorial we have commented on some aspects of the controversy on West Indies cricket and, in particular on characterizations of the functioning of the West Indies Cricket Board. Now, following the collapse of the talks between the WICB and WIPA, mediated by Sir Shridath Ramphal, more fuel has been added to the fire. With the brunt of the attack coming on the WICB, the President of that organization has sought to put their view of the breakdown of the talks, with the blame being placed on the precipitate departure from the last session by the President of WIPA itself.
The board has apparently been stung first by the criticisms of Sir Shridath, probably feeling that in the current hothouse atmosphere the experienced negotiator was himself precipitate in his anxiety to meet the deadline of an end of August solution in going public about the breakdown of the mediation process. But a second sting came on the heals of the first from the normally diplomatic PJ Patterson, Chariman of the Governance Committee, restating the criticisms of the board, denying the board’s contention that it was in process of implementing his Governance Committee’s recommendations including those proposing a more extended, or we could say populist, system of representation on the board, and reiterating the urgency of arriving at a solution: “the status quo is unacceptable… tinkering will not suffice…. while the Board is fiddling, West Indies cricket is sinking.”
The tenor of the Patterson document ‘Wanted: A new governance for West Indies Cricket’ to which we have previously referred, quotes in support of its contentions, a stringent criticism of the WICB made by a Barbados Joint Submission: “The Board as it is presently structured and constituted… suffers from a high level of arrogance and incompetence and continues to be a high profile source of embarrassment to West Indian Government, cricketers and people.” This view has been largely supported by some high-profile persons previously associated with the management of West Indies cricket, including Mr Ken Gordon and Mr Bruce Annensen, a former Secretary, and by implication by Mr Derek Murray, the President of the Trinidad Board which refused to participate in the recent Annual General Meeting of the WICB. And yet there were many who held exactly that view of Gordon and Annensen not too long ago.
We would like to ask some questions. Is all this contention involving men of experience and distinction in the governance of the Caribbean likely to advance the cause of obtaining a reasonable atomosphere for negotiaiton and then resolution of the dispute? Is all the criticism thrown at the present President, Mr Julian Hunte, recently re-elected to the position, and at one time a long-standing Vice President of the board, likely to induce an easing of tensions and cooperation? The recent communication by Mr Hunte to President Jagdeo, in his capacity as Chairman of Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee (PMSC) on Cricket, does not suggest that his board accepts the interpretation of events being parlayed by his critics, and suggests that the form of virtual co-leadership suggested by the Patterson Committee in its recommendations on a new structure for the WICB, is not justified in the context of the status of the WICB as an essentially private organization.
In the middle, the governments’ PMSC seeks to justify a serious role in the present controversy by reminding the WICB that to ensure that Cricket World Cup gets off the ground in order to meet comments made by the cricket authorities to the International Cricket Council, “the governments were intricately involved in supporting the WICB in the bidding process, and subsequently invested substantially in large scale infrastructure through enhanced or new stadia and facilities for cricket throughout the Region – all this at great cost to its tax payers.” In other words government is already in cricket planning and implementation.
The variance between the perspectives of the board, and the Governance Committee and its supporters is indeed startling, arising from men who, in some degree have trod the same road in Caribbean post-colonial life: Mr Hunte (a St Lucian), like Mr Patterson, has been long engaged in his country’s politics and up to two years ago was a Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the General Assembly. In addition, like Mr Ken Gordon, who was for a short time Minister of Trade and Industry in Trinidad & Tobago, Mr Hunte has been one of the outstanding business personalities in his country. None of these men has come from the top of colonial society, but mainly from the ‘bottom-up.’ If persons with these social credentials cannot come to accommodation, who can? For as we suggested in our previous editorial, we are loathe to accept that the source of our region’s cricketing problems lies in the holding by ‘management’ of old colonial attitudes. There must be something more to it.
It is easy to forget in the present atmosphere of feverish furore, and it seems that hardly anyone wishes to remind us, that the troubles of West Indies cricket have been going on for the last twenty years or so. We need not speak of the dispute by giants like Clive Lloyd with the board over their allegiance to Packer. But closer in time, have we forgotten the pain that cricket lovers went through as, in advance of a West Indies tour to newly liberated South Africa, giants like Lara and others were holding out for better terms? Surely too, before the WICB felt it necessary to resort to a second string team, were we not all crying over the succession of defeats of our star-studded team under Chris Gayle? And can many taxpayers in the region claim that they think that the construction of stadia, used in many countries for serious cricket once or twice a year, make government intervention in World Cup Cricket a “success”?
Does the institutional pattern and modus operandi of WICB governance not bear some resemblance to that of general Caricom governance? We alluded in our previous editorial to this. There are some, like the distinguished cricket commentator Reds Perreira, who have reservations about the sense emanating from the governments that they have some superior legitimacy to make recommendations on the “governance of sport” – the usual phrase is “keep politics out of sport.” Would political commentators not accuse Caricom heads of “fiddling” (the Patterson Committee’s words) since 1992, with the issue of the governance of the Caribbean Community, and virtually forgetting about it? Last July the matter came up for discussion, once again, and was referred to a committee under President Jagdeo, the present Chairman of Conference, after having been referred in 2007.
Some cynics might well feel that the Patterson Committee’s critical statement might well apply to the heads: “…the matter cannot rest with an affirmative view by the Board of how our Report has been received. Unfortunately, there is all the difference in the world between agreeing objectives and implementing and acting, between the announcement of good intentions and the generation of solutions to problems”.
Does this not sound almost too much like the now persistent criticism of the process through which proposals on the governance of the Single Market and Economy has gone over the last 27 years since Sir Shridath’s West Indian Commission reported?
Let us hope for better luck with our cricket. For while the CSME will hardly have conquered the hearts and minds of our people, the people’s concern with cricket, as both the heads of government and the Patterson Committee insist, is deep and fundamental to the West Indian psyche.
