Time To Reform Cricket West Indies

Fri, Aug 28, '20

After more than a dozen years of reports and debate on restructuring the governance arrangements of West Indies cricket, proponents of the idea may have their best shot of securing reform with the latest report on the matter by a task force led by Jamaican businessman Don Wehby.

Several factors are now in better alignment for an acceptance of the Wehby recommendations, or a great portion of them, beyond any agreement on the long-standing argument that Cricket West Indies (CWI), the body that oversees the sport in the Caribbean, is not fit for purpose for today’s circumstances.

First, Mr Wehby and his team avoided the ‘let’s throw the bums out’ tone of Professor Eudine Barriteau’s document of five years ago, which called for “the immediate dissolution” of what was then the West Indies Cricket Board, to be replaced by an interim body while an “obsolete governance framework” was revamped. It is the CWI that would have had to disband itself.

And while Mr Wehby’s report, like former Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson’s in 2007, embraced the concept of West Indies cricket as a public good, and, therefore, insisted on stakeholder public involvement in its management, Mr Wehby’s formula is less intrusive than Mr Patterson’s, which had a whiff of public sector-type bureaucracy and, from our vantage point, the potential for mission creep and power grab by regional governments.

Read more at The Jamaica Gleaner