West Indies cricket icon Clive Lloyd has now joined the chorus of Caricom countries that include Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Guyana, who are saying the time has come to rein in the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB).
Lloyd, who resigned as a director of the WICB last year to join Guyana’s Interim Management Committee, yesterday spoke with reporters in Suriname, where he was a guest at the Caricom Heads of Government Intersessional meeting.
Lloyd said the WICB went too far when it accused Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller of not “[having] the benefit of the full information pertaining to the matters on which she spoke”.
“We have to respect everybody. You can’t just, you know, tell a prime minister of a country anything and then you want to apologise. The point is we have to respect people. If you don’t respect somebody, you have to respect the position and a prime minister here is very, very important in any one of the islands. So we need to respect that,” Lloyd said.
Simpson-Miller had complained Jamaica was not being granted a Test during the upcoming Australian tour. She also complained about the continued exclusion of Jamaican cricket star Chris Gayle from the West Indies team.
“It was a mistake and I hope they rectify that,” Lloyd said of the WICB’s statement in response to the comments made by Simpson-Miller.
Lloyd says regional cricket can no longer continue with business as usual.
“The point is that we have a country like Jamaica for two years there is no cricket and they have been at … the forefront of our cricket for quite a while. Guyana had games taken away from them at a stroke and is that right? I don’t think that’s the way to go about it,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd recommended that the WICB president be appointed from each Caricom member-state on a rotation basis.
Guyana Attorney General Anil Nandlall told reporters he feared that unless there are serious “reformations done at the level of the West Indies Cricket Board, we stand the risk of further decline in our cricket.”
“And how much further can we go? Look at the level we are at. We have about 15 million people in the Caribbean or thereabouts in the English-speaking Caribbean who want to see Chris Gayle play cricket and there are four or five people who say that he can’t,” said Nandlall.
And the will of four or five persons has effectively subverted the will of 15 million people. That must change,” Nandlall said.
He said that while the political directorates of the region are not seeking to manipulate West Indies cricket, the WICB must be held accountable.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar continued to support Simpson-Miller as they both maintained the time has come to address the problems with West Indies cricket. (Trinidad Express)
