Cricket West Indies (CWI) Presidential candidate, Anand Sanasie will look to install a Director of Cricket specifically to manage women’s cricket in elected.
Sanasie and vice-presidential candidate, Calvin Hope, will challenge incumbent, president Ricky Skerritt and vice-president Dr. Kishore Shallow at Sunday’s CWI’s election. According to Guyana Cricket Board secretary, Sanasie, “I really think this is important for Cricket West Indies (CWI) because we have ladies in the region who are naturally athletic and who can get into the sport easily. We can develop them but we need to put more funding into this cricket and a Director of Women’s Cricket solely concentrated on that will surely take a lot of Jimmy [Adams, Director of Cricket].”
The CWI Director explained that women’s cricket need to be played more within the six territories and said that funding will play a huge part in making that a reality.
“We certainly need more women’s cricket played in all of the territories. I am not sure all the territories have a vibrant women’s cricket programme and this may very well be because of funds.
“We, after our deliberations, have come up with this idea that we must have someone specifically in charge of women’s cricket,” he explained.
Sanasie added, “I know our current Director of Cricket is doing his best. He may have a staff to back him up but it is certainly not enough. Women’s cricket should be something earmarked to come up to par to get right up there.”
The Presidential candidate, who has a decade-long run as a director on CWI’s board and has built a reputation as a successful businessman said, “The reason for that is women’s cricket throughout the world is now a big commodity. Commercially it is growing, so we think we can get enough funding and once you get the product and the product is improving you are going to get sponsorship and more enhanced sponsorships are going to come along.”
Sanasie spoke of the developments made in Guyana where the territorial board introduced a female under-17 franchise league which he credits for producing a larger pool of women cricketers.
“What we need to do down in the territories is to start at the under-15s and under-17s level. Here in Guyana we started with an under-17 franchise cricket and now much of the young ladies coming through are coming through from that. Last year was kind of difficult with COVID-19 and so on but while we were able to run off most of the programmes, because of the Women’s World Cup being on hold we tried to push that down a bit into the year. So we are hoping to have two of those league tournaments later on this year so we can bolster the senior girls with the young ones coming through,” Sanasie stated. Currently, West Indies Women are ranked sixth in both 50-over and T20Is having finished in second place (2013) in a 50-over World Cup and winning the T20I World Cup in 2016. In last year’s T20I World Cup, West Indies Women failed to make it past the group stage with just one win.
