Johnny Grave, CEO of Cricket West Indies (CWI) has rubbished reports that suggest that one of the three Tests Windies are scheduled to play against Sri Lanka could be scrapped in favour of One Day Internationals because of a downturn in the board's financial fortunes.
The Windies host back-to-back tours against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and according to Grave, CWI stands to lose in the region of U$6 million for those tours, but scrapping a Test against Sri Lanka is not on the table, arguing that the cost to host a Test and two ODI's are basically the same.
“What we have done is that we have reached out to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to see if there is any way in which they can help us effectively with covering the costs of the tour. These two tours, in particular, attract very little revenue from a broadcast point of view therefore with the significant investment by Cricket West Indies to make it happen, we just asked both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka if they can cover any of the cost of the tour with us paying them back next year,” Grave explained to SportsMax. TV on Wednesday.
He said the cost of the tour other than the teams getting to the Caribbean is all costs undertaken by CWI, which is why under the current financial circumstances, CWI is asking the visiting teams to cover their share, which is 50 percent of the costs. Some of those costs include line items like accommodation and airline charters.
“I think they fully appreciate the situation we’re in because they find themselves in a very similar situations more often than not because of the size of their economic markets, so they are very sympathetic to the challenges we face and also support our wider concerns which is the financial model for cricket,” Grave said.
“So Bangladesh have suggested that their board has approved helping us out so we are just working through the details. Sri Lanka Cricket is considering our request.”
Grave explained that even though CWI had realized a profit for three years running, for a number of reasons they always knew that 2018 was going to be a challenging year.
“We took over US$10 million in surpluses into this year and because we have run without any overdraft facility for three years it is taking us longer than anticipated to get the financing in place for this year. Revenues can change year on year depending on who is touring. Next year our revenues will more than treble with England and India coming,” he said.
“For CWI to have made surpluses in the past three years is a great achievement by the board and clearly taking big surpluses into this year was good but clearly it was never going to be enough and it coincided with 2018 being a difficult year for the ICC because there is no major global event. Since the Champions Trophy last year there have only been loss-making events in the Women’s World Cup and the Under 19 World Cup and they have got no global events this year outside the world cup qualifiers which again would have been a big loss making event.
“So 2018 will be a bad year for CWI and it will also be a bad year for the ICC, so we have always known we had to get financing in place but it is taking a bit longer than we would have hoped and we have asked Sri Lanka and Bangladesh if they can help us.”