IT is 26 days since the West Indies team prematurely exited its tour of India with one ODI, one Twenty20 and three Tests left abandoned, a week since the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) formalized its claim against the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) for US$41.97 million compensation for the consequent losses, just six days before its deadline for an explanation of how the WICB intends to pay.
Such a time frame indicates the need for urgency.
Yet, in spite of three meetings of the WICB directors and the intervention of prime minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in arranging and supervising talks between the parties involved in the unprecedented abandonment in India – the WICB under president Dave Cameron, Wavell Hinds and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) he heads and ODI captain Dwayne Bravo and the attorney for the players in India – no tangible progress has been made in reaching an agreed settlement.
The indecision has simply become more indecisive, the confusion more confused, the acrimony more acrimonious.
At every turn, rumour has followed rumour.
One is that all three team captains, Denesh Ramdin, Dwayne Bravo and Darren Sammy, are to be replaced by Kraigg Brathwaite for Tests and Jason Holder for the shorter versions.
That, Gonsalves commented, would be “absurd”. Brathwaite, at 21, and Holder, at 23, are fledglings just acclimatizing to the demands of international cricket and the intricacies of internal West Indies politics.
They play for my club, Wanderers in Barbados; I know them to be level-headed young men with leadership potential. To throw them into the present unsettling milieu would be an unreasonable burden.
Another story going the rounds was that the manager, Sir Richie Richardson, would go too, to be replaced by Joel Garner. The WICB quickly squashed it, making it “explicitly clear” that it was a fabrication.
When the WICB stated that “all players of the India tour remain eligible for the (upcoming) South Africa tour” and that “the selection process would be conducted and applied in a fair and transparent manner”, the players’ attorney questioned why the words “non-victimisation” and “non-discrimination” were not used, as had been agreed at the Port-of-Spain meeting.
You really couldn’t make it up.
The headline on one website reflected the chaos after Test skipper Denesh Ramdin’s assertion that he had been stripped of the Trinidad and Tobago captaincy prompted a convoluted denial from the board. “TTCB confirms and denies true lies about Ramdin,” it read.
The WICB has optimistically proclaimed that it “believes that a way can be found to repair the damage that has been caused and to ensure that similar events do not recur”.
Yet throughout the upheaval, there has been hardly a mention, from any of those involved, of the changes clearly required to make good the WICB’s expectation. To identify them, they need only revisit two reports, commissioned by the WICB itself to examine the question of governance.
The extensive document prepared by former Jamaica Prime Minister P.J.Patterson and his two eminent committee members is frequently referred to as the guide to be followed.
It is now seven years old. Patterson has complained that its main points have been ignored; he had, he protested, wasted several years of his life in its preparation.
Perhaps its recommendations have been lost in the mist of time or are so heavily covered in dust in some backroom of the WICB headquarters in Antigua they are impossible to decipher.
This cannot be the case with the 2012 report of the WICB’s governance committee, headed by Kittian Queen’s Counsel Charles Wilkin, that listed similar proposals.
Wilkin’s group noted that there had been five presidents, six CEOs and seven captains since 2000 (the count since their report has risen to 6-7-8) with a corresponding “enormous” turnover of players.
In that time, no matter the identity of administrators, captains and players, West Indies cricket has been in constant turmoil.
“Those facts in and of themselves serve as an indictment of the board of directors and justify substantial structural changes to the board of directors,” Wilkin’s report charged.
Patterson’s committee based its argument for urgent transformation on the need to “respond to the testing requirements of managing an international sport in today’s environment”. The WICB’s record in this regard requires no elaboration.
Its proposals were for the rebranding of the WICB as Cricket West Indies, “partly to give the organisation a new image and also to indicate explicitly that it will no longer be business as usual”. It is a course subsequently adopted by other national boards.
The new entity would comprise a council of “about 23 members drawn from a wide cross section of stakeholders” to meet once a year to assess the state of West Indies cricket.
It would appoint president, vice-president and 13 executive directors, six nominated by their territorial boards and the others chosen from among the various, identified stakeholders, to run day-to-day affairs. That would reduce by half the territorial board directors, from two to one each.
The Wilkin plan was along the same lines, trimming the board members to 15 (president, vice-president, six appointed by their territorial boards and six elected by a nominations committee on the basis of their expertise in other fields).
When his report was, in his words “flatly rejected” by the WICB directors at a meeting in Barbados, Wilkin immediately resigned. Clearly incensed, he identified the reasons.
“Knowing full well that they wanted to preserve at all costs all of their positions on the board, a conclusion I draw from listening to them for the whole day at Friday’s (Barbados) meeting and at the earlier meeting in St. Lucia to which I was invited, the territorial board members should have spared the governance committee our valuable time and saved the board the cost of the review exercise,” he fumed.
Therein lies the root of a crucial problem for so long plaguing West Indies cricket. It will continue unless the directors recognize the necessity for change and accept that it requires a different mindset on their part for that to happen.
I ended an earlier column with the hope that “the latest crisis may just be the catalyst that forces them to”. I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting.
