Following a year foiled by the Novel Coronavirus pandemic, Caribbean people can look to a prosperous 2021 with an unprecedented amount of cricket coming to the region.
This is according to Chief Executive Officer of Cricket West Indies, Johnny Grave who gave an early Christmas gift to devoted fans of the gentleman’s game during a recent interview on Mason and Guest Radio programme.
Grave said that the West Indies traveling to Bangladesh at the start of the new year is the last obligated tour for the side on the International Cricket Council’s future tours programme (FTP).
“Bangladesh is the last away tour that we have under the FTP and then we are going to have an unprecedented amount of Caribbean cricket all being well,” the CEO said.
“We are going to host Sri Lanka in March, we are going to host South Africa followed by Australia followed by Pakistan leading into the Caribbean Premier League so while we’ve had a run of six months or so on the road, we are going to have in return, an unprecedented amount of cricket in the Caribbean from February,” he disclosed.
Grave indicated that the matches on home soil are expected to begin with the staging of the Super50 tournament in Antigua then rolling into the hosting of the international tours.
The CEO was grilled on the rationale of the FTP which saw West Indies traveling to England and New Zealand during the pandemic and will once again tour another nation but has not received any financial profits. This is because the FTP regulates that host countries keep the profits from the tours. Grave explained it was an obligation, not an option.
“One of the first thing to say is touring is not an option. It’s not something where we sit down and say `hey do we want to go to England or do we want to go to New Zealand’. Touring is a contractual obligation under the ICC future tours programme and we signed up for that, it’s not option to do so, it’s an obligation,” he stated. “Once it is safe to do so, we made it very clear at the start of the pandemic that we would try and go on tour and try and fulfill our obligations as did everyone else in world cricket and we have very robust medical and operational plan and we’ve had the best medical practitioners in the Caribbean working with our counterparts at the ECB and New Zealand and now in Bangladesh to ensure the players are safe in what is the first of its kind…It’s not a choice where we can pick and choose, it’s an obligation and we take that obligation very seriously,” he said.
Nevertheless, Grave indicated that in light of all the doom and gloom, West Indies were able to restore confidence in commercial broadcasters that the sport can be viably played in the new conditions which has set them close to securing a much needed long-term television rights deal.
“I think what has been commercially good for us has been what we’ve done and is provide confidence to the broadcast market that live cricket can be delivered, the contract can be honoured and we are on the brink of signing five long-term TV rights deals that will provide much needed revenue and security to us from now until 2024,” he pointed out.
Caption: Cricket West Indies’ Chief Executive Officer has given West Indies fans a lot to look forward to in 2021 with four international tours set for the Caribbean and a much-needed financial boost through broadcasting deals.
