Let’s fix WI cricket and Jamaica football for 2017
It is again that time when we are getting ready to say farewell to one year and welcome in another, and I would like to wish all the readers of this column a successful 2017.
While there were not many things to celebrate in 2016, enough good things happened for me not to forget the year in a hurry.
After all, it was the year in which Usain Bolt completed that amazing ‘triple-triple’ at the Olympic Games in Rio Janeiro, Brazil.
On that note, I believe we must extend our appreciation to our top athletes to include the likes of Bolt, new sprint queen Elaine Thompson, Alia Atkinson, Stafani Taylor and Chris Gayle, who brought us joy amid the tough economic realities, political failure and devastating crime.
SPECIAL NATION
When I travel outside Jamaica and see the type of respect we generate globally through the accomplishments of Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the incomparable Bolt, I have no doubt that we are a special nation and I just wished more of us would realise the muchvaunted light in which we are seen globally.
I don’t wish to dwell on the things that did not go well in 2016, and there are some things I am hoping will happen in 2017 which will put us on a path to fixing some of what went wrong over the past 12 months for a variety of reasons.
As a devoted fan of national football, my greatest wish is to see a change of leadership in the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF), which has become such a badly tarnished entity that nothing short of a complete overhaul will be able to put the organisation back on track and again put us on a path to attain more global glory.
Speaking of national football, if we get new leaders in the JFF, one of the first things I would like to see is the scrapping of the Red Stripe Premier League, which is now more than a sick joke. We have to go the franchise route, where we could use incentives to create a professional structure and drive interest in the product.
While I am always ready to embrace persons with Jamaican roots, I believe our over- dependence on England-born players for our national senior team must come to an end. However, changing course without a structure in place to produce quality players locally would be a recipe for more disaster.
I would also like to see a complete overhaul of West Indies cricket to include the complete removal of the current Dave Cameron-led administration. When I look around the Caribbean region, I believe we have good talent. What we lack is the leadership to get the unit to function properly.
West Indies cricket demands a president who can command, not demand, the respect of the players, the fans, regional leaders and persons looking in from the outside. We can no longer afford to have a board that is jumping from one controversy to another without realising how painful it is for us who love West Indies cricket and want to see a return to the glory days.
While I seriously doubt that we are likely to see any substantial changes in either Jamaica’s football or West Indies cricket, we just cannot afford to give up hope. Maybe, if our beloved foreparents had not remained hopeful, we probably would still be staring up at the Union Jack instead of our beloved black, green, and gold.