With a huge bill facing the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) due to the aborted tour of India, Caribbean citizens are worried that their leaders would dip into their taxpayers fund to bail out the regional body.
Initially the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Dr Ralph Gonzalves said he would look to seek Caricom’s help with the problems facing the WICB but quickly indicated that he was not going to ask the governments of the region to foot the bill.
In between his call and explanation citizens started to make noise from Woodford Square in Port-of-Spain, across to Oistins Fish Market in Barbados right down to Stabroek Market in Georgetown. With their nerves now calm because of the fact that no one has continued to push the idea of a government bailout, they are still concerned of the fact that the board has this bill facing them.
Sometimes good comes out of a bad situation and I am thinking that the Board should go public—sell shares and allow people to invest. The money accrued from this can go towards assisting with settling the bill and more importantly it makes the WICB accountable to the investors.
Many years ago Brian Lara had made mention of this and used the Green Bay Packers as an example but the idea fell on deaf ears. Time and time again you hear people criticising the board and saying that they are doing what they want. Well I hold no brief for anyone but would like to add that the guys at the board have been trying their best to serve the game. What you do in a situation like having investors is holding these guys accountable for their actions. It would mean that they now become paid employees of the board instead of volunteering their services and this would ensure that they give top value.
I am not suggesting that the directors of the board are money hungry men. What I am saying is that we all have to live and while these guys carry about their day to day work in order to survive financially, they have to find time in between to serve West Indies cricket. What you do now is to pay them well and allow them to focus on the job of taking West Indies cricket forward. Right now you have people on the different committees that are volunteering their services and sometimes we look to criticise them for untimely delivery.
Personally I think that the marketing committee of the WICB can do a lot more. We have the Nagico Super50 series starting here in two weeks time and they seem to be depending on the media to project the series. We are not seeing advertisements about the place, so that an awareness of the tournament is achieved. I remember last year visiting Dharamshala for the fourth and what was to be final ODI of the ill-fated West Indies versus India series. This was just a simple limited overs match during a bi-lateral series and I was amazed at the degree of advertising that was taking place. There were huge billboards all over the place, advertisements on the television and even flyers at the various food joints.
We keep on looking at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and saying that they are well off and they control cricket. I took the opportunity to observe close at hand their dealings when it comes to cricket administration and let me tell you, we will do well to follow them. When you visit India to look at, or in my case cover cricket, you are greeted with professionalism. In a press box of over 100 journalists, everyone is taken care of, there is a structure in place to do things and do it properly yet we in the region fall down when we have even three journalists in the press box.
We continue to make the call for professionalism from our players but are our administrators carrying our their duties professionally? Trust me, if we decide to go the way having men financially invest in the WICB, not as sponsors but as owners, professionalism is sure to become the order of the day. Our cricket has hit rock bottom at the moment and the only way we can go is up. Hard tough decisions need to be taken and probably we have gotten to this state in order to make the right changes in our cricket to once again command the respect of the cricketing world. As it is right now we are the laughing stock on and off the field and as one of my journalist friend from Dhaka recently told me, Bangladesh will soon pass us on the pecking order because they are starting to handle their cricket like big business.
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