Mindless monuments
Last week, Trinidad and Tobago's outgoing Sports Minister Roger Boynes revealed that the stalled Tarouba Sport Complex was to be expanded to accommodate a reconfigured Brian Lara Cricket Academy.The project had been estimated at TT$ 850 million. Academy costs have now risen from TT$ 275 million to TT$ 558 million – an estimate, the Minister cautioned. Total cost is now a billion dollars – an estimate as: "we're not at that particular level yet."
The Minister seemed unable to rationalise costs and the decision to beef up the Academy, which is still being "conceptually" designed. He finally latched on to Brian Lara's name, obviously hoping to win support by the invocation. Saying it was going to be "one of the most premier academies in the world," Boynes boasted that, "that is what we are going to be doing with Brian Charles Lara. We're going to be asking Brian to assist us in ensuring we establish it as a premier training venue and we're going to make it available to the West Indies cricket team to train here."
Later, he mentioned that Lara had not yet been asked, but that was only in passing, as he was preoccupied with asserting that this was to be the new academic centre for the West Indies team.
Though he would not commit to a finish date (perhaps wary after the CWC letdown), he was sure it would be before the end of the year. It all seemed a bit, well sudden, given how things have languished under the Tarouba sunshine for years.
Why the rush to build a half-a-billion dollar cricket academy in a few months? In the World Cup's wake, calls for a new approach to West Indies cricket have been inescapably vociferous, but this time the concept of a cricket academy has achieved the critical mass needed to make it the common element in each proposal.
Following the collapse of the Shell Academy at St. George's, it seemed a different alliance had been formed between the West Indies Cricket Board and the University of the West Indies (UWI) regarding the use of its facilities and expertise in the development of regional cricket. The Cave Hill Campus in Barbados particularly, has invested heavily in preparing an appropriate learning environment and has obviously positioned itself to be central to a cricket renaissance.
It has partnered with the WICB on several projects, and it seemed natural that this would be the hub of cricket development. In another time and place, a few assumptions would be natural: (1) that the UWI, with its existing resources, would be the site for a WICB academy, and (2) that something like the BCL Academy would be a complementary facility. But, as the late Tim Hector wrote we live in a social time "in which everything and anything goes," and it is evident that there is a move afoot to locate the Academy in Trinidad as part of the Manning legacy. Manning is as eager as his Caribbean counterparts to big up his tenure; he is certainly not alone there; he just has more money at his disposal.
How this pans out will show how partnerships are valued, and you can measure it by seeing how Ken Gordon and his WICB will respond to this silver platter, especially as Owen Arthur has told them no to gate receipts.
I welcome investment in sport, but when its rationale is so amorphous that even the Minister couldn't articulate it convincingly, it becomes a disappointing safari to white elephants. He spent a great deal of time boasting about what this would do for elite athletes, yet at my daughter's secondary school, the Ministry of Education still cannot allocate a Physical Education teacher.
They don't yet understand that training has to come from early if anyone is to be called an elite athlete. It's no more than building without foundations, and it just goes to show that money can't buy brains.