It is clear that there is a battle that is raging between the T&T Cricket Board (TTCB) and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and this seems to have come about after the aborted tour of India last October.
So much so, that at the WICB’s last annual general meeting, the TTCB did not support Dave Cameron’s bid for a second term at the helm. They went for the former West Indies fast bowler and Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) president Joel Garner. The TTCB’s Baldath Mahabir also threw his hat in the ring and went up unsuccessfully against Emmanual Nanton for the post of vice-president.
At the time my discussions with some officials at the TTCB led me to believe that they were less than happy with Cameron’s handling of the India situation and decided that he must not retain the top post.
Initially it was the TTCB that supported Cameron in his bid to unseat the long serving Dr Julien Hunte. I
nformation received indicates that TTCB president Azim Bassarath was the one who encouraged Cameron to go for the presidency and the TTCB voted for him.
Things turned sour after the India tour, and now the public has been making calls to the TTCB to find out what is going on with players from Trinidad and Tobago. In the space of eight months, three nationals have been removed from captaincy positions on different West Indian teams. Dwayne Bravo who was captain of the ODI team on the ill-fated India tour was removed firstly. He was then followed by Denesh Ramdin from the Test team and then Merissa Aguilliera from the women’s team.
There was a meeting to discuss the removal of Ramdin from the Test captaincy and I thought that the TTCB should have pushed harder for answers from the WICB. Ramdin was called to a meeting to discuss the Sri Lankan tour and to give his input to the future of the Test side and two weeks after he was removed as captain—strange.
At the meeting to discuss his removal, the TTCB should have been strong in their condemnation. Bassarath it is understood could not take part in the discussions due to other pressing comments. I must strongly condemn this because as president he must have known that Ramdin’s issue would be discussed. The WICB would—or should have— sent out the agenda to be discussed and Ramdin’s issue would have been on it.
The other TTCB director Baldath Mahabir, knowing that the issue would be discussed, should have taken a directive from the president and the executive of the TTCB and represent well.
This is the second time that the TTCB has backed away from a critical issue at the WICB (the first being the regional T20 being sold to Verus International). The TTCB, given the prowess of the Red Force, stood the lose the most from the tournament going private.
I know that the other directors would have supported the idea of the privatization because they stood to lose the least. In the five editions of the Champions League the T&T Red Force attended four and this would have raked in about US$2M for the TTCB, which they would have ploughed into development of national cricketers and clubs. Going private would have starved the TTCB of prospective funds.
Although it was never going to be a case of winning that battle, I thought that the TTCB should have made then-president Hunte make public the arrangement he and his board were going to enter into. A signed deal of 25 years with an option to renew to 50 would have led to very strong opposition by cricket stakeholders in the Caribbean. The TTCB stayed quiet and did not make it public. The directors at the time Mahabir and Dr. Allen Sammy should have made strong objections to what was being done and threaten to go public with information, in a bid to make these guys re-think their move.
History would show that they did not, and basically what they did was set a trend which we are now seeing continued. There has been some noise coming from certain quarters saying that T&T’s cricket and cricketers are being marginalised. The TTCB has to come out strong here and make a serious statement if this is the case, in order to gain back the respect that they previously had.
T&T is a major stakeholder in regional cricket and the staging of last’s night town hall meeting was also one which led to a dispute between the TTCB and the WICB. The meeting comes to T&T last, while every other territory in the region had their’s already. It is quite odd in my view that the Leeward Islands had two town hall meetings, one in Dominica and another in Antigua before a solitary one could have taken place in T&T.