TWO THINGS have come to mind following the recent Caribbean Twenty20 Championship.
It is clear from the performance from the Barbados team that cricket selectors across the region have got to be more imaginative about the composition of their sides when choosing for the different formats of the game.
And the negative response from some quarters about the expense to pay Hampshire and Somerset to participate in the competition has again raised the question about the need for a professional league in the region.
First, it was very evident from the competition that some of our players are clearly not quite suited for the vagaries of the Twenty20 competition.
It was painful to watch our captain Ryan Hinds, easily the best batsman in the island right now, struggle to get ball off the square, and his subsequent failings with the bat.
Hinds should not be fully blamed, but rather the lack of imagination from the selection panel, and cricket administrators in general has placed in this highly undesirable position.
Cricket is one of the few sports in the World that has attracted more than one code of play. Of the others, football is the one that comes to mind to provide the proof that the selectors need to understand that they cannot just include a player every version of the sport.
In football, there is the traditional game, which is played on open fields, the indoor version called Futsal, and beach football.
Here’s the question: Other than maybe a charity match of some sort, has Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Torres, or any of the World’s leading players currently members of all three of their nation’s national sides in the three different formats? The answer is a resounding, “No!!!”
So why pray tell, do cricket selectors not only in the Caribbean, but around the World believe that they should pick the same people to service Tests, One-day Internationals, and Twenty20.
This is not to say that there are not batsmen that can easily adjust. One that comes to mind readily is the former Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene, but Ricky Ponting has sworn off T20s for not only Australia, but also the lucrative Indian Premier League.
So we should beseech our selectors – both national and West Indies – to be far more creative and not believe that established Test players or first-class players like Hinds should be able to easily make the transition. It is a very, very difficult thing.
Secondly, the idea of a professional league in the region has been on the table for a long time, and the West Indies Cricket Board had even commissioned a feasibility study on the issue.
They were however, advised that a pro league at this time may not be a viable enterprise because of the global economic recession. Really?
Is it not a long held view that one of the best times to invest in an enterprise is during a recession?
Financial experts reason that the investor can buy-in when the market is low, and when the market recovers and stiffens, the investor can sell their interest, if they so choose, at a decent profit.
The WICB may have accepted the advice of the study’s author because they too, have discovered that the regional market is very weak, and business executives are not keen to part with the precious little they have.
But the WICB should be, and should have been advised to look outside of the Caribbean for investors in a pro league, considering that there are people in Britain, India, and Australia all looking to cash-in on this new wave of money in the game, particularly the T20 version.
The WICB has two directions in which they can move. They can either go the route, which they did with Allen Stanford, by franchising particular tournaments out to an investor for an annual fee, or they can establish a league with say six to eight franchises and invite bidders to buy them.
Either way, the WICB cannot lose, and one of the benefits is that the regional governing body would be off-the-hook for financing and managing the three major competitions, while collecting a tidy sum every year in franchise fees to finance other development projects.
They can now also fully focus of the West Indies team, and making it stronger and more competitive.
Less the territorial boards feel left out, their role would be to produce teams that play in development tournaments, like regional age-group tournaments from Under-13 through to Under-19.
These are exciting times in the game, and our administrators have got to start thinking creatively to change the downward spiral in which cricket has found itself in the island and the region.
