LATEST NEWS:
Editorials
Time to walk away
Saturday, September 12, 2009
As a former St Lucian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations, Dr Julian Hunte commands considerable respect throughout the Caribbean.
We think it is important to make the point because Dr Hunte, in his current capacity as president of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), has been at the butt end of much bitter criticism over recent months.
This newspaper stands among those to have repeatedly called for Dr Hunte and his administration to step aside to make room for a complete transformation of the way cricket is run in the region.
Yet, we feel it is relevant to emphasise that our call is in no way personal and should not be read as an aspersion aimed at his individual competence or, for that matter, at any others in his executive.
Rather, we feel that Dr Hunte finds himself at the helm of an organisation that is dysfunctional to its very core and has been so for a long time - long before he became president. That structural dysfunction, dealt with at length in the report of the Governance Committee led by former Jamaican Prime Minister Mr PJ Patterson, militates against the professional, efficient and accountable management of West Indies cricket.
At bottom line, we believe, the WICB and its territorial affiliates, surrounded though they are by an increasingly professional world, have remained trapped in a culture of amateurism and insular parochialism. Hence that still officially unexplained disaster in Antigua earlier in the year when a Test match had to be abandoned in the first few minutes because the field was unfit for any kind of cricket - except the beach variety - and the countless gut-wrenching embarrassments such as the latest 'no contract' allegation reportedly made by the dismissed coach Mr John Dyson.
As yet we have heard no denial of Mr Dyson's reported charge that no proper contract document was ever handed to him. Even the growth of the West Indies Players' Association into a strident, often juvenile organisation - silly enough to have taken industrial action and exposed West Indies cricket to an embarrassing double sweep by Bangladesh - underlines the extent to which the WICB has failed the Caribbean people.
All of which is not to say that Dr Hunte and his executive lack good intentions or have failed to achieve anything positive.
We would suggest, for example, that the board's initiative to push ahead with an extended first-class season earlier this year with home and away games, despite the absence of sponsorship, is deserving of respect. We note the announcement that another attempt at a much-needed academy programme is now just around the corner with the corporate help of Sagicor.
The trouble is that in the eyes of the cricketing public and the wider world, those achievements are nothing compared to the failures. The WICB has lost all credibility; its very legitimacy is now in doubt. Dr Hunte and his executive now find themselves in the untenable situation of 'even when dem right, dem wrong'.
It is against all that backdrop that West Indies cricket must now look to the region's political leadership - themselves with no great record of achievement - for salvation. Surely, it's time for Dr Hunte and his administration to graciously walk away.
Other Stories
We couldn't have said it better, Dr Stafford
Get ready for a Sino-American bi-polar world
Can just anyone slip into the national team?
In the milk of human kindness.
Selecting Reneto Adams as police commissioner
BOJ governor's emoluments: Who is responsible?
Redeveloping downtown Kingston
Lessons from the Gaza-Gully debacle
RSS Feeds