WICB to receive recommendations

A wide cross-section of stakeholders in West Indies cricket have presented the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) with a number of recommendations to enhance the future of regional cricket.

The suggestions, coming out of a two-day conference on Cricket Development Strategy last Thursday and Friday in Antigua, will be officially presented to the Board in a report compiled by conference facilitator/chairman, Edward "Teddy" Griffith; a former WICB executive member.

"We have engaged in a most useful exercise and I am very impressed with the quality of work and the presentations made. I think the four areas which we have explored - cricket development, competitions, stakeholder relations and facilities, equipment and technology - encapsulate the crux of West Indies and there have been a lot of stimulating discussions on them.

"I think that in these two days we have been as close to getting all the constituents of West Indies cricket together as we will ever be," said Griffith, in a closing statement at the Royal Antiguan Resort where the conference was held.

More than 30 persons - ranging from Board officials, to past and present cricketers and media personnel - were invited to participate in the deliberations which culminated in group presentations on the four topics.

Among the participants were former players Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Michael Holding and Andy Roberts as well as noted journalists, Tony Cozier and Tony Becca; representatives of the West Indies Players' Association (WIPA), David Holford and Roland Holder, and international umpires Steve Bucknor and Edward Nicholls.

WICB President Pat Rousseau said that the efforts of the WICB had helped to improve its financial position and the WICB could therefore fund more programmes and institute more recommendations now than it was able to in the past. He invited member boards to put forward programmes for funding, noting that the emphasis of the Board would remain development.

There was also some discussion on the requirements and plans for hosting the 2007 World Cup. The WICB's Chief Marketing Executive Chris Dehring disclosed that it was the WICB's intention to establish a special-purpose World Cup company by next March to handle matters related to this major event. The company and full-time office which would be in operation, would be a wholly-owned subsidiary of WICB Inc. He added that a developmental blueprint would be prepared during 2001 which included the likelihood of new stadia across the Caribbean, with the plan to have these mostly in place by 2005.

To this extent, he said, the WICB did not intend to waste money "patching old facilities" when the overall developmental blueprint might call for either demolishing existing stands or perhaps even erecting completely new cricket venues elsewhere in a particularly territory.