As the New Year dawns with West Indies cricket fortunes continuing the same old gloomy, we are seeing yet another series of calls for major surgery on the organization in charge of our cricket. Esteemed cricket pundits in the Caribbean, including Tony Cozier and Michael Holding, are calling for the West Indies Cricket Board to be overhauled and to be made accountable. In recent months, the current President, Dave Cameron of Jamaica, has come in for severe criticism, peaking with the recent furor when our regional team cancelled an Indian tour, leading to the writer Andre Baptiste in the Trinidad Guardian stating “While not for the first time, a sitting West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president finds himself in the firing line, and Cameron seems heading to be top of the list as the “worst WICB President in history.’” We are even seeing radical suggestions as from Jamaica Gleaner guest columnist Paul Wright, who reacted strongly to our continuing wretched performances by proposing: “What is needed in the West Indies is for us to understand and realise that as a Test-playing nation, we are a joke. Let us be brave and request from the International Cricket Council (ICC) a five-year leave of absence from Test cricket. Say thanks to this present crop of ‘senior’ cricketers and concentrate on under-15 youngsters. With proper guidance re technique, nutrition, and education, we will produce technically gifted young men with the ability to think. Then, and only then, should we re-enter the Test cricket arena.”
Most of the commentary, however, is focusing on the removal or restructuring of the present WICB with, tellingly, many of them emanating from respected cricket voices in Jamaica, such as Michael Holding and Tony Becca, calling for Jamaican President Cameron to step down. Indeed, the anti-President tirade has a long history going back to the days of former Board boss Pat Rousseau, himself a Jamaican, and continuing through the years. It was there in Ken Gordon’s time as President, as with his successor Julian Hunte, and, subsequently, Dave Cameron, and it suggests that perhaps the problem with the WICB is not so much the organization’s head – we have found fault with every one of them, even the revered Wes Hall of Barbados – but in the organization itself. Changing the head of a dysfunctional organization does not remedy the dysfunction; a radical overhaul is needed, such as
