WICB removes blinkers at last

	The current proposals could help revive the game in the West Indies, and help the team rediscover its winning ways © Eddie Norfolk Enlarge

After the unedifying distractions of who stumped up the cash to spruce up the president's office and the latest - inevitably costly - row over sponsorship, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) shocked us all last week with a lengthy statement that, for a welcome change, dealt with cricket and nothing but cricket

It came from the chief executive, Donald Peters, and carried a preamble that effectively acknowledged the organisation had lost sight of its primary purpose. In outlining the "major plans for the coming seasons", Peters noted that "there would be a full focus on players and their development".

In other words, and this has been obvious for some time, the "full focus" had been on other areas. Most have had little regard for the game that is the very reason for the WICB's existence. All that, Peters assured us, will change for "the coming seasons". The programmes he revealed were all taken for granted by those who have so rapidly overtaken the West Indies and relegated them from top to near bottom in the space of a decade.

Consistently consumed by pomposity, egotism and insularity, the WICB has allowed West Indies cricket to fall way behind the rest of the world. How far is clear from the measures Peters' statement promised. From next season, the first-class tournament, appreciably shorter than anywhere else, is to be expanded to a home-and-away format spread over 14 weeks.

Six territorial teams, along with the Combined Colleges and Campuses (in for a second experimental season), would each play 12 matches, rather than the inadequate six as previously. When I asked, Peters confirmed that, for the first time, there would be matches even when Tests were in progress.

That it has never been so is an obvious encumbrance to West Indies' strength. Repeatedly players have come into the Test or ODI teams several weeks after the end of the domestic season, their form unknown and their fitness questionable. Yet there were lessons to be learnt from the experience when the home-and-away schedule was tried for the one and only time, in 1997.

There was a break of three weeks to accommodate the Tests against India so that the Red Stripe Cup, as it was, lasted from January 24 to May 25. It prompted David Holford, the Barbados manager, to comment that "the season went on for too long and players tended to get stale and lack motivation". Rohan Kanhai, the Jamaica coach, observed that "most of the players didn't know what hit them . . . as they never had to play so many matches in their lives".

Tony Howard, the WICB's chief cricket operations manager, needs to take such comments into consideration when planning the coming season. Perhaps the most significant statement in the "overall plan" is that 80 players are to be retained on contract by the WICB as out-and-out professionals. It is a system in place in every other major cricket country but professional is a description that does not properly fit any West Indian at present.

This arrangement would dovetail with another of WICB's long-stated goals, the establishment of a professional league by 2010. A High Performance Centre, with feeder academies in each of the WICB's member territories, is to be established; and the A team, once an essential feature in players' preparation for the advance to the highest level, revived.

While right now Sri Lanka are in South Africa, Australia in India and New Zealand in Australia for A team series, the West Indies' second stringers have not toured in more than two years. Peters said the WICB's cricket committee, which met in on Saturday, is especially keen for more exposure for such players on the edge of the Test team.

This is all exciting stuff but several questions need to be positively answered before it can be properly executed. One concerns the attitude of the West Indies Players' Association (WIPA); the other, as always, money.

"We realise that the players are at the heart of the enterprise and our first priority in the next 30 days is to develop a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the WIPA that will address salaries, match fees, performance related incentives, international ranking, statistical averages of players and fitness," Peters said. A succession of his predecessors have found that WIPA president Dinanath Ramnarine drives a hard bargain. Whether he will be any softer now that he has been included as a WICB director is open to question, but he and his members must recognise, as everyone else does, that without change, West Indies cricket will further wither and eventually fulfil the prophesy of football's czar, Jack Warner, that it is in its death throes.

Players have repeatedly had to enter series with the WICB and the WIPA still wrangling over their contracts. There have been strikes and threats of strikes, the effects of which are to be seen in the performances. Peters says that he has "no intention of going to the WIPA to negotiate salaries every time we know a tour is coming up". Ramnarine has said as much in the past. Yet such last-minute brinkmanship remains a reality. Agreement on the MoU is now critical for West Indies cricket to go forward.

Nothing, however, is more critical than money. What Peters has laid out requires sums that would not faze a certain Texan billionaire who is preparing for his own extravaganza down the road from the WICB headquarters in Antigua, but which will require the utmost goodwill of governments, sponsors, banks and even Sir Allen Stanford himself to obtain.

The contracting of 80 professionals alone, taken at a conservative annual figure of US$60 000 each, would require US$4.8 million. The High Performance Centre, at the University of West Indies Cave Hill Campus in Barbados, has attracted sponsorship but it is short of what was sought. And then there are the academies, the expanded, and expensive, season; the establishment of the A team.

It's a daunting prospect but, at least, the WICB has set its mind back onto cricketing matters.