As we sit right now in the middle of a firestorm in the media and elsewhere enveloping the West Indies Cricket Board following the abrupt cancellation of the India series by our team, one is left to wonder how long it is going to take to convince us that our regional cricket arrangement needs urgent revision. This anachronistic cobbling together of a team made up of selected players from several national teams may have worked for a while in the days of the British, but since the flowering of independence across the region the WICB has been a disaster. Going back to the days of the former Jamaican President Pat Rousseau, and coming forward to his present compatriot David Cameron, the WICB has been calamity on top of calamity. The examples abound: the American stock market fiasco; the firing and re-hiring of Brian Lara; the inability to book airline seats for players summoned to England; the rifts with the association representing the players; and the most recent turmoil over the cancelled India tour. The shouts and complaints from respected cricket experts (Tony Cozier, Rudi Webster, Reds Perreira, Clive Lloyd, Mike Atherton, etc) have been running for some time and their dissatisfaction with the WICB is clear.
But one does not have to be a cricket expert to see that the present arrangement must change to tackle the two fundamental dilemmas facing the WICB. The first of these is the fact that the organization is not accountable or responsible to anyone other than itself. This flaw has been repeatedly emphasized by cricket and management experts – very recently again by Rudi Webster – but the condition remains unchanged. Currently we are seeing Vincentian Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves attempting to
