Marshall: BCL can only get better

Trevor Marshall has a dream for the Barbados Cricket League (BCL), a vision which sees the 64-year-old cricketing institution playing a major role on a new level of cricket development in Barbados and the Caribbean.

As he delivered the feature address at the awards ceremony for the Banks BCL knockout tournament, Marshall shared his belief that theree is a meaningful and dynamic future for the BCL if those involved are prepared to work hard.

"I have a dream of the BCL having its own stadium. You may laugh but mighty ideas have started with such visionary fantasies," Marshall told the attentive audience.

"I see a large stadium capable of holding 20 000 persons, built on behalf of the BCL, somewhere let's say on the borders of St. George and St. Michael to make it accessible to persons from all over.

"The `Mitchie Hewitt Stadium' would answer your problem of how to attract large scale funding. I see the BCL stadium as an alternate venue to Kensington Oval," Marshall told the group, made up mainly of BCL players and administrators.

With such a facility in place the BCL can then be prepared for what Marshall called the cricketing bonanza he anticipates lies ahead.

Marshall predicted greater involvement in cricket from Canadian, American and South American teams and noted that the proposed stadium could earn revenue from such a development.

Tracing the history of the BCL as he spoke on the topic, the BCL Past, Present And Future, Marshall stressed the point that the contribution of the BCL went far beyond the concept of being a nursery for Barbados cricket.

"It (BCL cricket) has taken young men from the highways and byways of Barbados from the earliest days to the present and has introduced them not only to the game perse but other aspects of the game, leadership aspects, scoring and record keeping, presidency of clubs, treasurers etc," Marshall said.

The historian and lecturer at the Barbados Community College said that such training was not easily available to the average man at that time.

According to Marshall the BCL was born in October of 1936 out of the efforts of Mitchinson Hewitt, a former Combermerian and member of Empire Club.

"He saw at that time what others did not see and if they saw they did not care to see, that the average Barbadian living in the tenantries and living in the villages away from Bridgetown and away from the reaches of the Barbados Cricket Association, needed an outlet, needed their own forum, their own medium within which to develop their talent."

"The BCA which started in 1892 was for the elite," said Marshall.

Marshall argued that cricket, like everything else in Barbados during that period, suffered from racial, class and social segregation.

It was against this backdrop that Hewitt along with others such as Sir Grantley Adams, JTC Ramsay and Tony Hinds went to the outer reaches of Barbados recruiting persons to help in the revolutionary activity of creating the BCL.

Marshall stressed the involvement of what he called some philanthropic white planters who took land out of sugar production to donate as cricket grounds for the BCL.

While admitting a fall off in the popularity of the BCL today to the extent that from a high of 132 clubs there are now just 66, Marshall is firmly against the idea of the BCL amalgamating or being taken over by the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA).

He fears this could escalate the lost of the sense of community which the BCL promotes.

Marshall noted that the movement of players from the BCL to the BCA has already contributed to this.

"The BCL must go forward," Marshall stressed.

Marshall suggested the sale of BCL paraphernalia as one means of raising funds towards the estimated $10 million needed to start the project.

"Studies of the BCL, studies of its outstanding personnel, its outstanding cricketers, should be put together and sold," Marshall suggested.

Marshall challenged the BCL members to create a more lofty image of the institution, and seek equal status with the BCA.

"The BCL is no less an enchanting entity than the BCA. As long as you get your act together and you move out of that perception of opponents seeing you as Combined Schools Central and therefore a weak team that you can beat anytime, the BCL will go on to greater strengths," Marshall said.

Marshall also promoted the idea of the BCL's involvement in night cricket,women's cricket and the broadening of tape ball cricket.

He suggested marble cricket could be re-introduced along with the areas mentioned previously and could be used to generate income.

"You have to think big nowadays. We of the working class origin need not think that we belong to the gully grounds and playing fields which are only playing fields by a stretch of the imagination. You have to move into the broad sunlit uplands which represent cricket grounds and playing fields today," Marshall said.