Dehring suggests professional league in West Indies

Chris Dehring, the managing director of Cricket World Cup 2007, has suggested a professional league in the Caribbean, working outside the authority of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), to revitalise the game. The privately owned league, Dehring said, would serve the purpose of providing the WICB with young cricketers to pick for international series.

The amateurish cricket setup in the region, Dehring said, meant that young West Indian cricketers were losing out on opportunities that were being enjoyed by their counterparts in other countries.

Dehring, who was speaking at a ceremony to mark the end of the schoolboys' season, compared Xavier Marshall, a Jamaican batsman with two Tests under his belt, who played in the Under-19 World Cup in Bangladesh in 2004 along with Alastair Cook, England's Test opener with 18 Tests and six centuries to his credit. "Xavier comes back to a non-professional structure while Alastair goes back to his club where he was signed up from maybe 14, 15 years old - a professional structure - and he is trained and he is developed physically, mentally. A few years later, where is Xavier? Where is Alastair Cook?"

"We need to have it [cricket league] professionally owned, separate from the West Indies Cricket Board, who can then focus purely on the international sport and the West Indies team," Dehring was quoted as saying by the Jamaica Observer. The league should be placed in the hands of a private board of owners who will invest money for professional gain.

"They [professional franchises] would make sure [the players] are developed physically, mentally and professionally," Dehring said. "That is what we [West Indies cricket] need." He said England's Football Association had a system that West Indies cricket could emulate. "The English FA doesn't have to spend a cent developing players. They simply pick who they want from the clubs."

Dehring also pointed out that in terms of televised cricket West Indies was next door to the huge US market - "the largest pay-per-view market in the world". After India, Dehring said, the USA was the biggest source of television revenue from the World Cup. He also criticised the WICB and the regional media for not exploring the option of getting revenue from sale of domestic rights.