Grenada’s Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell fired a powerful salvo last week at the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) in the course of his Frank Worrell Lecture at the UWI Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. Referring to the Board as “antiquated”, and urging it to “reform itself” he stated: “This is not a personality issue. The one thing that has remained constant over the years is the board’s rigid and antiquated structure. By now the board should have learned that reshuffling its leadership, without changing its thinking and structure, is just a futile attempt at adjusting its structure without reforming its leadership. It can’t work. The two things must be done together.”
Mitchell focused on modern business practices. “Today’s complex, competitive and rapidly changing world requires a fundamental shift in our thinking. Organisations everywhere are being forced to change their self-image, their thinking and the way they conduct business,” he contended. Without mentioning them specifically, he was clearly alluding to the recent re-organisations of cricket bodies in Australia, New Zealand and England. He said: “They are re-examining the design and alignment of their structures and systems, reviewing traditional strategies and policies and looking closely at the quality and effectiveness of their leadership. Governments, trade unions, companies in the private sector, the public sector and sports organisations are all going through this process of adaptation. Sticking to the status quo in the face of rapid change is certainly not an option.”
The politician, long known as a critic of the WICB, said, “The attitudes of today’s young people is very different to that of previous generations. We have to accept it. Their expectations and values will not allow them to accept the decisions and actions of the WICB that their predecessors agreed to or tolerated. The WICB must come to terms with that reality and alter its approach accordingly. It must build trust and new mutual respect by changing the way its managers operate and motivate its players and itself.”
Mitchell, who stressed he had nothing to gain personally from the effort to restructure West Indies cricket, said the board was unaware of the new challenges that lay before it and was not preparing itself to face them. He argued that institutional change was no longer optional but a demand, and this stretched way beyond cricket into government, the private sector and the labour movement.
“The leadership of the WICB has changed repeatedly, to make my point, in the last few decades. Yet the board’s governance and performance has not improved,” Mitchell said at the UWI gathering where he delivered the 19th Sir Frank Worrell Memorial Lecture entitled ‘West Indies Cricket in the 21st Century: Continuity and Change’. Mitchell, who has been in the forefront over the past year in efforts geared towards getting the WICB to re-structure, repeatedly hammered the governing body in his hour and 10-minute long presentation, also arguing it had lost touch with the players.
Referencing the tension that existed between the WICB and the players, Mitchell said it was incumbent on the board to modify its management style and operations to reflect the needs of the new generation of cricketers.
These kinds of urgings with regard to the performance of our governing cricket body have been made repeatedly over the years and particularly recently with the West Indies Test team now close to the bottom of the international rankings. Reams have been written in the press. Former greats such as Michael Holding and Brian Lara and the late Tony Cozier have made the call for change repeatedly. A few years ago I wrote a somewhat comical song about it, ‘Take A Rest’, which aired on regional radio stations and is still available on You Tube. Recently our cricketing legends added their voices to the wail.
The outcry has actually been there going back for decades through a succession of prominent WICB leaders including Alan Rae, Clyde Walcott, Pat Rousseau, Wes Hall, Julian Hunte, Ken Gordon, and now Dave Cameron, emphasising Mitchell’s contention that the problems have not been solved by changing leaders.
However, valid as his comments are (and I admit not having seen the Prime Minister’s full speech) there are two points that need to be added to the discussion, and while for Mr Mitchell, a prominent politician, they may be controversial territory, I am quite free to make them. The first is that the kind of sweeping organizational changes that Mr Mitchell and others have been calling for have been successfully achieved in countries where such boards represent a single nation. By contrast, the WICB is a combination of several nations – at least 6 and potentially as many as 12 – where the varying and often conflicting national agendas make concord difficult if not impossible, and in practice we have continually seen rancour infecting our cricket from a variety of sources in a range of scenarios. Further, proceeding from that first point, our history in the Caribbean is one that shows us generally unable to achieve consensus whenever we try – from the Free Standing Committee that pre-dated Federation, or Federation itself, or Carifesta, Caricom, EPA, the Single Market, the CCJ, elimination of economic barriers, Customs Union, etc; all those attempts have failed. Where is the evidence that the same attitudes and constraints that have plagued the Caribbean in such a variety of arenas will somehow magically produce success when applied to cricket? We seem to be positing that the magical transformation will take place in our cricket simply because some of us – okay, many of us – have been calling for it.
The reality is that the impediment of regional insularity is in the way like a Mount Roraima blocking any possibility of correction in much the same way as the racial voting in Guyana stubbornly resists all the virtually daily exhortations for an end to it. We clearly need a completely new way of looking at this problem, we need a brilliant innovative mind, or perhaps a charismatic leader, with some revolutionary completely out-of-the-box view. Trying to reform the present structure, as necessary as that sounds, will be like trying to get a mango tree to produce rice.
The multi-nation creature of our cricket establishment is, by its very composition, destined to wallow in suspicion and narrowness and discord. Of course, we can resolutely hope that such a contra-indicated turnaround will take place, but in my ‘Take A Rest’ song, there is a line that sums up the situation, albeit comically. It goes, “Patience and she sister Hope have migrated to Zimbabwe.”
