The talk of the break up of West Indies cricket into its constituent parts or, conversely, its demotion to the second division of a proposed new Test match league, grows louder by the day.
The dire repercussions of such eventualities should be obvious but those promoting the concepts, for various reasons, appear either unmindful of them or convinced of their inevitability after a decade and more of decay.
One way or another, they would surely destroy “one, if not the only one, West Indian exercise in cooperation which has successfully stood the test of time”, as the late Barbados prime minister Tom Adams once put it.
No less than the chief executive of the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB), Forbes Persaud, last week articulated his support for going it alone, even if only for one-day cricket, a position apparently shared by several of his colleagues.
It is now reported that the TTCB has voted not to send representatives to the annual general meeting of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) in Antigua over the next few days, apparently in protest over the WICB’s failure to restructure itself as recommended by the P. J. Patterson report.
It is the first nail hammered deep into a coffin long since under construction through the endless confrontations between the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) and the WICB and the deplorable record of performance and indiscipline by teams over the past 15 years.
It is significant that, at this particular time, the WIPA has organised a 20/20 match at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain on Saturday night, under the title “Balls of Fire”.
It features players it instructed to make themselves unavailable for West Indies selection for the recent series against Bangladesh as a result of yet another contracts dispute with the board and is between teams dubbed Trinidad and Tobago Players, under the captaincy of the republic’s greatest player, Brian Lara, and West Indies Players, led by the erstwhile West Indies captain, Chris Gayle.
Proceeds are to go to the Pearl and Bunty Lara Foundation, formed by Lara in memory of his parents, the WIPA development fund and various players’ charities.
The extravaganza, to be supplemented by a football game between a WIPA team, also led by Gayle, and the veterans of the Trinidad and Tobago Strike Squad that narrowly missed qualification for the 1998 World Cup, is billed as “a celebration of our national cricket and football teams.”
The message is clear. After years of confrontation with the WICB, the WIPA is concentrating much of its attention on Trinidad and Tobago, its home base.
It is a position commented on earlier this year by Jack Warner, one of international football’s most prominent administrators, himself Trinidadian and deputy leader of the political opposition.
Warner chose the WIPA’s own annual awards ceremony at the Hyatt Regency Hotel to note its Trini bent.
He told his “good friend”, WIPA president Dinanath Ramnarine, that he had been “hearing on the ground that WIPA is a Trinidad organization and that the staff is all from Trinidad and even the functions are only held in Trinidad.
“I would advise you to take note and, if this is the case, you need to bring more of a Caribbean content to it,” Warner said. “Let WIPA be reflective of the wider region.” On the present evidence of its match in celebration of Trinidad and Tobago teams, such advice has not been heeded.
Earlier, when the WICB assigned the WIPA a one-day warm-up match for England in March, 10 of the 11 WIPA players were Trinidadian.
It has not taken long for the international media to note such disruptive developments and draw its own predictable conclusions.
Scyld Berry is editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, for 146 years the game’s bible. In an article in last Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, his view was that the fragmentation of the West Indies cricket “might prove better for all concerned, in the long run.”
From Berry’s perspective, the “all concerned” would be the other full members of the International Cricket Council (ICC) – Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa – who, with West Indies out of the way, would form a top division more readily adaptable to the proposed world Test championship.
The separated territories of the Caribbean – Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and “perhaps” Combined Islands – would then contest a second division along with Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and heaven knows who else.
Such an outcome would have a devastating effect not only on West Indies cricket and cricketers but on a few national economies as well, some more so than others.
It would mean the end of tours by West Indies’ long established opponents and the subsequent loss of lucrative television contracts on which regional cricket so heavily depends. A series between Trinidad and Tobago or a decimated West Indies and, say, Zimbabwe would be of no interest to international broadcasters with far more enticing alternatives at their disposal.
As it was, Sky television, which pays a sizeable sum to the WICB for British rights to West Indies cricket, disconnected coverage on the recent Bangladesh Tests once Ramnarine pulled his men out. The value of sponsorship is almost entirely dependent on television coverage. It has already been undermined by the repeated bungling by the WICB, its interminable fights with the confrontational WIPA and the appalling results on the field.
Both the regional four-day and one-day tournaments now operate without a commercial backer. In all likelihood, revenue from international sponsors, such as Digicel and Bank of Nova Scotia at present, would disappear altogether if the West Indies, or the fragmented components, are no longer on international screens.
Money required for such developmental projects as academies, ‘A’ team tours and age-group competitions, in short supply as it is, would dry up and the game wither and die.
The loss of cricket tourism is an additional factor to concern governments which invested vast sums in new stadiums for the 2007 World Cup.
When England tour, their supporters – as many as 10,000 in Barbados and Antigua, smaller but still significant numbers elsewhere – ensure a sharp upward incline in Central Bank graphs. Australians and Indians, mainly from their north American diaspora, are increasingly profitable cricket visitors.
They won’t be coming under the threatened new arrangement, whether West Indies are in Division 2 or the territories go their separate ways.
And what platform would there be for talented, up and coming players like Darren Bravo, Adrian Barath, Andre Creary, Andre Fletcher and Kemar Roach to follow in the path of their great predecessors, globally identified as West Indian rather than by the individual lands of their birth.
Can Bravo become another Lara and Roach another Wes Hall or can they share in the wealth of the modern game in the confines of contests against Bangladesh, Ireland and Zimbabwe?
What national pride can be derived from performances for franchise Twenty20 teams on the other side of the world?
That is where we have been heading for some time now. We are almost there.
