Playing cricket with politicos
by VANEISA BAKSHWhen Grenada's prime minister Keith Mitchell announced that investment by CARICOM governments for staging the Cricket World Cup (CWC) 2007 entitled them to greater say in the running of West Indies cricket, he was signalling more overt participation, rather than the more discreet interventions of the past.
Taxpayers' investments have been enormous, an estimated US$800 million, and although CWC managing director Chris Dehring points to projected ticket revenues of US$32 million as the highest ever, it is hardly a proportionate return. CARICOM heads, mindful of looming elections, are moving in and even deepening their financial investments.
They declared a Caribbean Lottery initiative that is supposed to finance the cricket academy that will be led by University of the West Indies's (UWI) Cave Hill Campus and payment for cricketers. This lottery has been in the West Indies Cricket board (WICB) works for more than seven years, as it was one of the plans revealed by then Vice-President Clarvis Joseph at the CARICOM-UWI conference of 2000.
Invoking it now as a new initiative seems like typically political opportunism, and there is very little to suggest anything will come of it. This was one of the initiatives announced by WICB president Ken Gordon as one of the goals of his first year in office and it is still in the "study" stage.
Reports say that CARICOM heads received a presentation from the P. J. Patterson-led Governance Committee appointed by the WICB and this hints that politicians have imposed themselves fairly high in the WICB hierarchy.
It must have been an odd position for Patterson, the former Jamaican Prime Minister. He would surely have remembered being on the other side of the table seven years ago when another cricket report was presented and dismissed, and now there he was repeating the exercise, this time as presenter. Did he feel any confidence that his report would meet a different fate?
The rationale that greater investment grants the right to greater say affords these CARICOM heads a broader licence; but it also raises reasonable concern over the implications of political involvement.
The WICB has already established its inability to raise funds, to administer cricket, to nurture cricket and develop the game in the region. That is so indisputable that even the CARICOM heads took no pains to hide their lack of confidence in the WICB by taking on responsibility to generate revenue via the lottery to pay players and educate them.
But to have politicians take over when an administrative board lies in a position of such weakness might present problems that even our lively imaginations have not yet created.
It is hardly necessary to dig up past instances of political interference in the selection process, despite Mr Mitchell's statements. Even the site of a regional cricket academy has been complicated by claims from Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada and Barbados. Don't think candidates for positions are not the subject of fierce lobbying by politicians.
Governments should be concerned with the way they invest citizens' money. Optimistically, one hopes that national sports plans involving the development of coaches, players, psychologists, nutritionists, therapists, trainers, scientists, and other analysts will form part of their continued investment, and they will see value in promoting sports tourism as part of their World Cup legacy. That is how they can protect our investments.
Sadly, there is no great record of vision and wisdom behind these politicians, and certainly as a group, CARICOM has moved ponderously and almost imperceptibly for the last two decades.
The same can be said of the WICB; on reflection, they might be even more skilled at political games than CARICOM leaders. So what we might actually be seeing here is the meeting of like minds, and what transformation will that bring?