Mitchell wants new focus on cricket crisis
Grenada’s Prime Minister, Dr Keith Mitchell, has urged CARICOM to revisit the recommendations of the dormant Governance Report, and has also called on leaders to abandon “entrenched polarised positions”, in order to rescue West Indies cricket from its current crisis.
Addressing the two-day intersessional summit, which started here yesterday, the outspoken leader said West Indies cricket required an effective governance framework in order to flourish and warned unless this was done, the game would continue to “wallow in the land of under performance and mismanagement.”
REGIONAL PUBLIC GOOD
“[Cricket] is a regional public good and must therefore be the subject of a regulatory framework recognising its public good character,” Mitchell said, referencing the 2015 report which assessed West Indies cricket as a public good managed by a private company.
The CARICOM-commissioned Governance Review Panel, headed by UWI Cave Hill principal Professor Eudine Barriteau, authored the controversial report whose main recommendation called for the “immediate dissolution of the West Indies Cricket Board and the appointment of an Interim Board whose structure and composition will be radically different from the now proven, obsolete governance framework.”
The recommendations were rejected by the WICB (now Cricket West Indies), headed by president Dave Cameron, and slammed as an “impractical” and an “unnecessary and intrusive demand”.
CWI, which is based in Antigua, received backing from the country’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne who said he “categorically rejected” the call for dissolution, contending it would plunge West Indies cricket into “further chaos and confusion.”
A former head of CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial subcommittee on cricket, Mitchell yesterday called for unity among the regional heads, while urging his successor, Vincentian Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, to ensure the overhaul of West Indies cricket remained on the front burner.