WICB on a Sticky Wicket

Why is it not surprising that the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has got itself and the future of the game in the region into another pickle?

Simply put, the WICB in its structure, outlook and functioning is programmed to de-materialise West Indian cricket; indeed, there is no assurance that a settlement will be reached in the interest of all in the matter of the Board?s attempts to manhandle the players and their association over individual rights.

The WICB?s contribution to the decline of WI cricket over the last ten years is too well known and too painful to recount.

In the sense that this column argues that the Board is structured to non-achieve, the signing of the sponsorship deal with Digicel and its treatment of the West Indian players are not truly failures but inevitable outcomes of such a tragically flawed institution.

To have so ignored the players before signing away their individual rights is indicative of its perception of itself as an institution that does not have the responsibility to consult. In this regard the Board has absorbed the political culture of the Caribbean.

Desperate for funds to fill the holes left by its own accumulated and continuing incompetence, the WICB anxiously signed on Digicel.

That refusal to reach a mutually satisfying arrangement with WIPA before signing the Digicel deal could only have aggravated the delay by the Board in paying players? fees and sponsored incentives months after the England tour had ended in victory for the West Indies after years of heartbreak.

The absence of comity also left the door open for C&W to race back to the centre to sign up the likes of Gayle and Sarwan: C&W was not seeking the welfare of the players but rather ensuring that it does not remain outside this vast arena of visibility while the emerging competition is seen on screens all over the Caribbean.

It is a classic case of transnational corporations playing a backward, undemocratic Third World institution off against itself: the WICB anxious to lay its hands on finances to pay its debts and generally untutored in the ways of international capital; the players, mostly underpaid, living in a materialistic culture and having the knowledge that only a few of their illustrious predecessors ended their playing days with something substantial in hand and eager to make use of their present marketability, were really easy pickings for the two telecommunications giants.

The real ole mas is going to start on potential conflict over how C&W and Digicel are to extract their pound of flesh from West Indian cricket and cricketers. The Board and players will come to understand that the telecommunications giants are not in the business of philanthropy with shareholder funds.

The continuing incompetence of the Board is made stark given that the Indian cricket team and board recently went through a similar impasse.

Moreover, given its penchant for things Australian, even if it means trampling on West Indian pride and cricket history, could the WICB not have analysed and learnt from the model developed by Cricket Australia.

Read the words of Tim May and you get an appreciation of how Australian players and their rights have to be conceived of and catered for by the administration.

Further, the WICB operated without an institutional memory of the crisis into which boards all over the cricket playing world were immersed a mere 25 years ago, when Kerry Packer offered cricketers a decent return on their talent.

But it may be foolish to expect the WICB to have an appreciation of historical development and an understanding of international marketing and financing of sports. Such a perspective requires proactive, critical thinking, not a feature to be associated with backward Third World institutions.

Interestingly, there is emerging an observation or two from a few of those cricket scribes who, without clear thought and incisive thinking, supported the hiring of the Australian coach. A couple of them recently wanted to know why a West Indian was not made understudy to the Australian/s to assume the role when the three-year contracts end.

At the same time the query was made, lightheartedly but with a new sense of what this foreign invasion means to WI cricket and society, one of the scribes joked around with images of the Australian takeover.

The answer to the question on why no West Indian assistant is simple and was given two months ago in this column in a series on the absurdity and indignity of hiring an Australian to teach West Indians to play cricket.

The column said then what Greg Chappell came to observe in frustration over not being hired: the WICB was/is only interested in a ?quick fix? to cover its historical incompetence and to hope for a good showing in the 2007 World Cricket Cup; no consideration in its calling in the Australians for the development of West Indies cricket.

Thankfully there are those amongst us writing in the press who have a greater insight into the West Indian personality, our civilisation and how they are indivisibly connected to our cricket.

I am speaking about Owen Thompson writing in the T&T Review. The Madrid-based national makes a very deep observation: essentially that Sir Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara are playing what he calls a ?masterstroke,? collaborating to ensure that the voice of West Indian cricket will be heard when the schemes of the WICB begin to unravel. If you have not read it, you should.

I had thought, and still do (and my thoughts are not in conflict with Thompson?s analysis of why Sir Garfield agreed to be a part of the WICB masquerade), that having expressed his initial disagreement with the importation of the Australian, he agreed only because it was his first and probably last chance to return to West Indian cricket what he had received from the generation before him. Does it not want to make you cry out in rage that the greatest of all cricketers has been so ignored by successive boards?

No credit to the present WICB, it seems clear that Sir Garfield was only called at the last minute when he threatened to expose the Board in all its nakedness of thought and West Indian pride.

But if Thompson?s analysis plays out, then, like Anancy, the WICB will be skinned alive.

* This column first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian newspaper.