The word is out that after just one season, the cash-strapped West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) is planning to drop the home-and-away format and revert to a shortened version for its 2010 regional first-class tournament.

Jamaica’s cricket coach Junior Bennett – whose 24-man training squad began preparations on Monday for the new season which is expected to begin in January – is among those most displeased.

“I’ve heard the news too and if it’s true then it would be most disappointing. This would be a very backward step for West Indies cricket,” Bennett, who guided Jamaica to the title last year, told the Observer yesterday.

The Observer has learnt from usually reliable sources that a lack of money and the inability to find a sponsor has influenced the WICB to abandon its arrangement of last year when all seven regional teams, including the Combined Campuses and Colleges, played each other twice on a home-and-away basis over a three-month period.

The regional board now plans to return to the system of previous years when each team played each other just once – with a semi-final and final to cap the season.

While the decision has not been finally “signed off”, sources say a schedule reflecting the shortened tournament has been circulated to territories over recent days.

The Observer understands that an alternate format proposed in recent months for the longer format to be retained, but with three matches being played in a single territory at the same time, was discarded after much discussion.

Under that format, the proposal was for Jamaica to host the first two rounds involving six teams and six matches. The defending champions would then be asked to travel to the eastern Caribbean and Guyana for the remaining two-and-a-half months, or ten rounds, in order to complete their schedule.

Bennett argued yesterday that given the extremely inadequate state of West Indies cricket, “we should be looking to play more cricket, not less”.

Said he: “If what we are hearing is true, then this is a most retrograde step. If we’re talking about the development of West Indies cricket, then this is definitely not the way to go.”

Bennett also criticised the format of last month’s rain-hit One-Day tournament in Guyana. Jamaica – weakened by the absence of captain Chris Gayle and lead fast bowler Jerome Taylor because of illness and injury – lost to eventual champions Trinidad and Tobago in a rain-affected encounter. They could only watch as rain washed out their two remaining games.

Bennett argued that rather than splitting the teams, including the West Indies Under-19s, in two zones, the organisers should have had all the teams playing each other.

“We ended up in a situation where some players, including Gayle, never faced a ball,” he said. “The rain was a problem, but there were too few games to begin with,” he said.

Bennett was also critical of the decision to hold the tournament in Guyana ahead of the current West Indies Test tour of Australia, claiming that it did not take into account the need to prepare the leading players for Australian conditions.

“We all know that in Guyana the pitches tend to be very low and that the West Indies team would be going to Australia where the pitches provide plenty of bounce.

“It would’ve made more sense to have scheduled the tournament in Barbados or Jamaica where you know you have a better chance of finding pitches with some bounce,” he said.