The Independent Voice of West Indies Cricket
On the cricket field, the West Indies have a reputation of being the most unpredictable and exciting team. This reputation was enhanced, confirmed, and mirrored in off field events when on Sunday 13th July 2003, the WICB stopped on the edge of the precipice and avoided plunging into the abyss of disrepute.
In an emphatic show of political and moral resolve the shareholders of the WICB in AGM ended Chetram Singh's Presidential bid without even a vote being cast.
The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) is moving ahead with plans to 'elect' Guyana's Chetram Singh as its new president on Sunday despite a frantic last-minute effort to postpone the vote.
The WICB board of directors huddled all day Saturday at the Fort Young Hotel here, brainstorming an agenda that ranged from the restructuring of the Red Stripe Bowl championship to long-term contracts for elite players but all those issues took a back seat to the behind-the-scenes battle to force a delay of the vote until new nominees can be identified.
The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) will formally, and predictably, confirm the appointment of Trinidadian Gus Logie as head coach of the regional team, but a plan to hire Kenny Benjamin as an assistant is being met with stiff resistance.
Benjamin, the former Antigua and West Indies fast bowler, is favoured by the WICB?s Cricket Committee to land the job as assistant coach, but insiders say the board has soured on Benjamin?s suitability after he was picked to work at the Shell Academy in Grenada, but never communicated his acceptance of that job.
Despite all the fuss over his perfectly legal business activites in Guyana and the way the WICB's Executive Committee engineered his ascension to the throne, Chetram Singh will most likely still find himself the next boss of West Indies cricket.
This is, after all, how we do business in the Caribbean -- the backroom deals, the power brokering, and the secret agreements to make sure that nothing really changes no matter how much it appears to.
Having done nothing to take advantage of the potentially lucrative lottery project, as discussed in part two of this series, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) needed a make-up plan.
The plan involved a boat. A SAIL. The South African Investment Limited, a sports investment firm out of South Africa who wanted to expand their investment portfolio in what they concluded was the most dynamic and exciting cricket sporting business in the Western Hemisphere. SAIL contended that they were full of money and could contribute management to the WICB marketing initiatives.