DR Donovan Bennett, newly elected president of the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA), says poor implementation plagued the previous Administration which was in place for a decade with him as first vice-president.

“… The cricket didn’t develop, as board [of directors] decisions were not followed,” Dr Bennett told journalists on Thursday after his victory over the outgoing president, Mr Wilford “Billy” Heaven, at the JCA’s election.

“The problem with the past board was that a lot of good plans were made but the implementation was poor,” Dr Bennett added.

As is well-established, proper execution of any project (involving more than one person) requires a unified effort by those with the will and expertise.

Hence, Dr Bennett’s pronouncement that, “The problems [in Jamaica’s cricket] are enormous, and I know that I can’t solve them alone, so the thing now is to get together a group of people from all over the island to join… No one person can do it — it has to be a team effort.”

A shortage of money — always a reality for Jamaica’s cricket — was much to the fore for the new president.

“One of the things that as an Administration we [previous Administration] didn’t do well was to go out and ask for funding, and we intend to do that because without funding you can’t do much,” Dr Bennett emphasised.

Even as change in the leadership of Jamaican cricket was ongoing in Kingston, a high-level, two-day Caricom conference on West Indies cricket was well into its opening day in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.

The need for collaborative effort, proper implementation with the help of available expertise, good governance, and the harnessing of resources to grow and strengthen regional cricket were also central themes at that regional conference.

We note extreme dissatisfaction, among those in Port-of-Spain, with a contract — said to be 50 years in duration — between Cricket West Indies (CWI) and the private owners of the 11-year-old Twenty20 Caribbean Premier League (CPL).

There were calls for it to be renegotiated to ensure more favourable terms for Caribbean cricket.

“Who signs a 50-year contract?” former West Indies Captain Sir Clive Lloyd is reported by the Caribbean Media Corporation as saying during a panel discussion.

“…how can a board sit down and negotiate that? It is still a mystery to me,” Sir Clive said.

We believe Barbadian business executive Mr Peter Griffith hit the nail on the head as he contemplated news of the CPL contract and challenges facing the historic Caribbean cricket project.

Said he: “We need to hire the professionals that can manage our business… We need to have a commercial section who can deal with high-powered people, who can negotiate properly because… we are accustomed to small money, we accept small money and, as a result, the big people make the big money out of us.”

In Jamaica and the wider Caribbean the challenges facing cricket are much the same. So too, we believe, is an overarching proposed solution. It’s been outlined time and again in respect to West Indies cricket — most latterly in the Wehby Report, led by business executive Mr Don Wehby. That’s for cricket to be governed not as a ‘closed shop’, but in true professional, efficient, business-like, transparent fashion, as a public good.

We need to get to it.