Finally, the Jamaica Cricket Association has gotten around to publicly stating the obvious.

It said: “Having been debarred from playing for the West Indies for over a year, (Christopher Gayle) has been more than sufficiently punished for any infractions committed”.

In fact, it never should have gotten to “over a year”. The JCA as a “shareholder” in the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) should have made the point with all the muscle at its disposal many months ago.

Indeed from the very beginning, the JCA should have insisted at the WICB level that Gayle go before a disciplinary committee to answer to his alleged breaches of team rules.

It seems to me that had that been done, whatever disciplinary imposition deemed appropriate by that body, would have long been over and done with. Those who have followed West Indies cricket know that whatever Gayle may or may not have said about coach Otis Gibson and other WICB officials, pales in comparison to unpunished offences committed by some past players.

We should not now at this stage have the continuing untidy situation in which the CEO and the coach are still arbitrarily demanding “apology” and “withdrawal” of remarks. We certainly should not have arrived at a stage where the JCA feels compelled to condemn its own parent association, the WICB, because of a flawed response to perfectly reasonable comments from Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller. And we should not have come to the stage where Simpson Miller feels so insulted that she describes the administration of the WICB as “rude”.

Just as an aside, the thoughtlessness of the WICB secretariat in seeking to draw a parallel between a Cabinet minister “lambasting” a prime minister and Gayle’s quarrel with the WICB boggles the mind.

Seriously, what we should now be discussing is the eligibility/availability or otherwise of Gayle and fellow professionals to play for the West Indies in the context of invasive and burgeoning cash-rich Twenty-20 leagues around the world.

That, I submit should now be the big discussion — not whether Gayle had at some point ‘dissed’ the coach or anyone else.

This issue of our professionals — of whom Gayle is currently the most prominent — playing in the big money Twenty-20 leagues at the same time as they are needed to represent the region is not going to disappear. A way will have to be found to satisfactorily accommodate all parties or the situation will simply worsen.

The problem of course is that these big money leagues clash directly with the international cricket season in the Caribbean. And as Ernest Hilaire pointed out in his latest email to Gayle, West Indies cricket doesn’t have the money to compete.

As for Jamaica being excluded as a venue for the Australia tour, such a once unthinkable thing was always on the cards once you had that massive build of cricket grounds around the region for the 2007 World Cup. Islands such as St Lucia, Dominica, St Kitts and Grenada have now entered the mix and are demanding their share of international cricket.

The JCA will have to aggressively deal with that by seeking to strengthen the marketability of historic Sabina Park and perhaps even Trelawny Stadium in the exotic tourist belt of north western Jamaica. They have to do this in a context of an open secret that it is cheaper to host international cricket in the eastern Caribbean cluster of islands plus Guyana, than to include distant Jamaica to the north. Moaning and groaning won’t help.