Dear Editor,
Following the announcement by Anand Sanasie that he will run for the presidency of Cricket West Indies Inc. with Calvin Hope as his vice president, I decided to do some background checks on the four candidates, namely Rickey Skerritt, Kishore Shallow, Anand Sanasie and Calvin Hope and it was revealing what I discovered.
Since Skerritt and Shallow took over the leadership of West Indies cricket, Guyana has been sidelined with regards to international cricket along with Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica to a lesser extent. Most of the international and even regional cricket was played in the Leewards and Windward Islands. We here in Guyana were starved of international cricket, a clear case of insularity and payback time for those who did not vote for them. Guyanese cricketers also suffered tremendously during the two year reign of Skerritt and Shallow. Although we are the best team in regional four day cricket the most we got at any one time is one cricketer in the test team and now we don’t have any, and the treatment meted out to Hetmyer is scandalous when his fitness is compared to Gayle, Cornwall and Edwards.
What more must Permaul do to make the playing eleven in test cricket? Why Hemraj, Johnson, Barnwell, Paul, Motie and others not given the same opportunities as lesser talented players from the other islands, many of whom continue to fail and are selected over and over again. Once again it is a clear case of insularity and Skerritt and Shallow does nothing about it. And finally, the financial position of CWI is in red throughout their term and so there is no money to fund grassroots cricket in the various territories to help develop and nurture promising young cricketers.
Anand Sanasie has done a tremendous job to lift Guyana cricket to the state it is in today with one of the best academy programmes in the West Indies that is churning out quality cricketers year after year resulting in Guyana being the top team in all formats of West Indies cricket. And in terms of financial position, the Guyana Cricket Board is never in the red and I therefore would like to take this opportunity to endorse Anand Sanasie and Calvin Hope to be the President and Vice President of CWI and I call on the other territories to support them to lift West Indies cricket from the doldrums that it has been in for a very long time now and to take its rightful place at the top of world cricket.
Sincerely,
Imtiaz Baccus.
