West Indies board can't wait any longer

Introduced with a budget exceeding that of several West Indian governments and pay packets for principal players unimaginable even in an age when millionaires in professional sports proliferate, cricket's universal attention has been riveted these past few months on the Indian Premier League (IPL).

The effect on the game as a whole of the most hyped tournament in the brief life of the Twenty20 format has created as much comment, and concern, as Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket, another revolutionary creation, did 30 years ago.

The IPL's rival that preceded it, the Indian Cricket League, has more in common with Packer in that it is a private tournament, set up specifically in opposition to the establishment after it lost its bid for television rights to Indian cricket. The IPL is simply a counter by the Indian board.

But, with the white ball, the floodlights, the coloured gear, the field restrictions, the promotional hype and the enhanced players contracts, both are direct derivatives of the late Australian media magnate's innovation, as indeed, is every form of the shorter game since. So are the issues that surround them, the survival of Test cricket not surprisingly being the most prominent.

Spread over five days with a minimum of 450 overs allocated for four innings, it is the antithesis of its most recent by-product.

Everyone who is anyone in the game has had his say on the effects, short and long term, of the IPL. But, in spite of Twenty20's immediate popularity and the ready investment of millions of dollars into the IPL by India's intrepid entrepreneurs and wealthy film stars, few have ventured further than former England captain Mike Atherton's cautious "the game is set onto a radically different course."

Thirty years ago, emboldened by the excitement over WSC's flood-lit, 50-overs-an-innings matches, Lynton Taylor, Packer's right-hand man, predicted the death of Test cricket within ten years.

After 131 years, it is still going although everywhere except its ancestral home, England, and Australia, far less robust than before the abbreviated format came along. There is an understandable fear that, with demands for more and more series like the IPL, Tests involving weaker, less attractive teams would necessarily diminish and possibly disappear altogether.

That, at present, would certainly include the West Indies. Whereas Packer contracted 20 West Indians and had the West Indies as one of the three teams (along with Australia and World) during WSC's two seasons, IPL only has three West Indians in its fold, actually four with the late addition of Dwayne Bravo.

No longer do the West Indies command more than three Tests a series (there were six in England as recently as 1995) or are placed at the traditional grounds overseas. For the first time, Melbourne and Sydney did not figure among the three Tests in Australia three years ago. In England last year, the West Indies joined Zimbabwe and Bangladesh as the only teams to have had a Test at Chester-le-Street.

It is a situation that renders especially pertinent the recent release by the West Indies Cricket Board of its draft strategic plan for 2008-12 and the almost simultaneous comments by Jimmy Adams, the former Test captain, at the annual West Indies Players Association (WIPA) awards.

The ultimate aim of the WICB plan is to see the senior team in the top three in the world rankings in Tests, ODIs and Twenty 20 and the Under-19s and Under-15s, and the Women's team among the top four by 2012 and to win the Champions Trophy in the Caribbean in 2010. Given the senior team's present status, above only Bangladesh at No. 8 in Tests and ODIs, the U-19s' failure to go past the first round of their World Cup in January and the inexperience of women's cricket, these are heady goals-and expensive.

The strategic plan estimates that it will require just over US$138 million to achieve its aim. It makes the observation that "the prospects for major sponsors are limited", noting that it has been able to attract only one major sponsor in the past six years, Digicel, whose contract ends in 2012.

Adams was not so pessimistic in his address to the WIPA awards ceremony. "We have more than enough resources here inside the Caribbean to fund the planning, implementation and the ultimate control of our own development processes," he said. He cited the "massive sums" that went into the drive that carried Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica to the football World Cup finals over the past ten years and challenged the WICB to "design a process" to present to potential investors within the overall Caribbean business community to fund the "structural requirements of any good development programme". Adams did not have to look very far to strengthen his point.

In the past week, the WIPA, of which he is an executive member, announced that it is organising a West Indies club championship next month with sponsorship from First Citizens, Trinidad Cement Limited and Toyota that guarantees prize money of US$150,000 for the winners, $50,000 for the runners-up. Nothing under the WICB's auspices comes close to that payout.

At the same time, a Trinidad outfit, All Sports Promotions, has arranged a major international under-15 tournament that started in Barbados this weekend. The sponsor, one of the Caribbean's biggest insurance companies, has put up US$1 million to finance the organisation. While the made over Kensington Oval is still short-changed by the absence of floodlights, Prof Hilary Beckles, the principal, persuaded Sagicor, another major Caribbean insurance company, to invest US$1 million to have them installed at the Three Ws Oval in the University of West Indies' Cape Hill campus.

In several smaller ways, private groups throughout the West Indies are demonstrating the worth of their cricket to willing sponsors.

So there are "enough resources" within the Caribbean available that, as the WICB admits, have not been tapped. It cannot wait any longer in seeking them out and putting them into the ambitious development schemes needed to stimulate a revival in West Indies cricket. It might even be already too late.