Jagdeo slams WICB

The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has come in for severe criticism from Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo, who argued that cricket belongs to the national boards, countries, and players rather than an “amalgamation” of the territories under one board.

Jagdeo’s swipe at the regional board comes days after the Prime Ministerial Sub- Committee on Cricket was revived with the aim of addressing issues affecting West Indies cricket and the strained relationship between the WICB and the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA).

The WICB has attracted much negative publicity of recent with its latest move to chastise senior players Chris Gayle, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, and Ramnaresh Sarwan for ‘poor’ performances at the Cricket World Cup (CWC) earlier this year, and the appointment of the inexperienced Darren Sammy as the skipper of the team.

Speaking at a press conference at the Office of the President in Georgetown on July 8, the Guyanese head-of-state posited that the “poor performance (of the West Indies team) is symptomatic of a lot of things that are wrong, and the fundamental question is: to whom does cricket belong?”

“In my little interaction with the board, I get the feeling that it is the WICB. I get the feeling that they had this distinct impression that it belongs to them. And I don’t think so. I think it belongs to the territories; it belongs to the country boards, to the people of this region, and to the players, and not to some bureaucracy that is an amalgamation of the boards of the region,” Jagdeo declared.

Jagdeo, a member of the sub-committee, said that Caricom could use the countries’ ownership of the various stadia across the Caribbean to put pressure on the WICB to address critical issues regarding the game’s progress.

“A lot of cricket cannot be played without the stadia, and the stadia around the region are owned by governments mainly. So if they feel they own the cricket, you have to find some place to play the cricket.”

Critical issues

Caricom leaders, he said, are eager to resolve two major issues which are critical to the revival of the game in the region.

“One has to do with the commercial rights of players, and the second has to do with compensation.

“…before every tour, they have this whole issue, they have long outstanding matters and the negotiations become so acrimonious and it haunts the entire tour and the performance,” he added. “The management and the players are seen on opposite sides. You don’t need that, you need a team. And if you settle those issues — and they can be settled by determining a gross percentage, a percentage of gross earnings that the board makes, or they could go to the players and they then decide among themselves how it goes to compensation — you can settle the commercial issues and put a percentage of gross income also as settlement for commercial works. It could be done, [but] unless they do it, they would have this constant clash before every tour, and then what will happen is that they are not a single team. So they need to fix that.”