WEST INDIES cricket today finds itself in a confused and confusing limbo courtesy of the representatives of our rapacious cricketing mercenaries (WIPA) and the bungling, beleaguered board (WICB).
To populations to whom the game has assumed religious dimensions, the antics and pronouncements of both sides suggest that reason may have fled to brutish beasts.
True to our African roots, we are strong in the oral tradition. With calypso deep in our DNA, I look forward to our singers capturing and chronicling the follies and foibles of these troubling times. For the time being, one of yesterday’s masterpieces, the Mighty Chalkdust’s potent parody ’white people laughing at we’ beats loudly in my head.
After dominating the game the colonial masters taught us as part of their ’civilising mission’ and bringing such pride and joy to West Indians at home and in the diaspora, West Indies cricket today is the laughing stock of the world and its people at a sad and sorry pass. The gloom deepens daily and I am not sure that the West Indian people are getting the full facts from both sides.
From what I am hearing, there is a need for better administration, openness and full disclosure by the board of critical information on which key decisions are based. Public attitudes to the players seem driven by perceptions of conspicuous arrogance by men who ate sumptuously of Stanford’s fatted calf now callously turning their backs on those who plucked them from obscurity.
It was a sad day when the efforts of the region’s most accomplished negotiator and diplomat, Sir Shridath Ramphal, came to naught. Now is the time for both sides to sit at the table of reason in a spirit of genuine give and take, bare all the facts in an atmosphere of mutuality, conscious that cricket is bigger than any individual or group and work assiduously to end this embarrassing impasse.
It is difficult to comprehend how, when so close to agreement, two leading negotiators could fly off on domestic junkets. Surely Mr Ramnarine’s family would have forgiven his not joining them on a Tobago beach in the interest of ensuring that his men return to the team. And surely Mrs Pinard would have forgiven her son if someone else had met her at Piarco.
When the players eschew the efforts of distinguished jurists from the Caribbean Court of Justice putting their skills and sagacity at their disposal as arbitrators acting in their personal capacity, we despair. Mind you, the cynics will say the players are behaving just like those governments which have failed to sign on to the court’s jurisdiction. Monkey see, monkey do!
The over-arching incompetence of the board is demonstrated in the Viv Richards Stadium fiasco, the repeated tardiness in providing retainer contracts for the players or sending John Dyson a contract for signature with his predecessor’s name and address. The overwhelming conclusion is that the board endorses the ethos that the way forward is through error compounding error.
Cricket is too important to the totality of West Indian life to continue to have it administered in a way that brings collective grief and makes us an international laughing stock. When the WICB sets up a committee of distinguished wise men, devotees of the game, to write a blueprint for its governance and then ignores its recommendations, regional governments must say enough is enough.
When the WICB ignores the thoughtful and visionary recommendations of regional icons PJ Patterson, Alistair McIntyre and Ian MacDonald, it is clear that having sought enlightenment and guidance on the way forward, they prefer to drop anchor in a time warp, taking one step forward and two back, our governments must act.
When the WICB is weighed in the scale of public opinion and found wanting consistently, it is time for Caricom heads to step in.
When the principals in the WICB demonstrate repeatedly their palpable incapacity to connect with or are inured to public condemnation and fail to fall on their own swords, our governments must act.
Public disappointment and disdain are at their zenith. A cricket aficionado still sprightly in his nineties is so disgusted with recent happenings he vows that for the first time as a devoted supporter of West Indies cricket, he will not listen to or watch on TV a single ball of the upcoming World 20/20.
As things continue to fall apart, we hear of a possible punitive fine by the International Cricket Conference for failure by the WICB to select its best team.
Already the Australians have signalled their unwillingness to entertain a team not including our premium players. West Indies cricket has been brought to its knees and has become the laughing stock of the international community.
A wind of change needs to blow through West Indies cricket. With politics in command, the political leadership must move expeditiously to rescue us from international ridicule and end this shameful farce.
- Peter Simmons, a social
scientist, is a former diplomat.
Courtesy Barbados Nation
