Dear Editor,
One of unintended benefits of the election of Jamaica's Dave Cameron to the presidency of the West Indies Cricket Board — which you can be sure his electors never envisaged — is that this is a rare occasion where the new leader needs no "vision" to substantially improve its performance.
Cameron will need no "long term view", no bevy of advisors. Nor will he even need to dust off any of the many commissioned reports on the WICB's shelves. Indeed, a sudden affliction of myopia will be his surest guide to success.
For Cameron, as long time president of one of our venerable institutions, Kensington Cricket Cub, (and its next door neighbour Lucas), will have had a daily 'up-close-and-personal' view of the origins and solutions surrounding West Indies' precipitous fall from grace: the shocking decline of the region's club cricket.
This decline has been assisted by the misallocation of WICB resources, the bulk of which has gone to head office bureaucracy and the top players with hardly a crumb for the sustenance and development of the region's clubs. Yet from the earliest days of West Indies cricket, clubs have been the nursery of our Test players. They form the "university" to which the best of our highs schools graduate. While the Sagicor High Performance Centre, started under the watch of Dr Julian Hunte, is a plus, it should be the finishing school for our young upcoming stars. It can never be a substitute for high quality club-level coaching and competition.
Nor need Cameron look any further than his own Jamaica's highly successful athletics programme to discern the tested formula for sustainable sporting success: high quality coaching and competition from the base up.
If, at the end of his term, Cameron can point to some of the following improvements he will have served West Indies cricket well: reallocated resources to (a) provide stipends for qualified coaches for the region's premier clubs; (b) trained curators to prepare better match-day and practice pitches and outfields; (c) basic coaching aids (such as bowling machines) which clubs in even non-Test playing nations now have; (d) improved club houses and facilities to attract and retain members; (e) enhanced prize money for premier club competitions.
Clubs, even before formal coaching became the norm, enabled West Indies to make the swift ascendancy to parity with a top nation such as England right after our acceptance to Test cricket in 1928, producing the likes of George Headley and Learie Constantine; later they provided the three W's, Garfield Sobers, Conrad Hutne et al; still later the world champion teams of the Clive Lloyd era. For Cameron and his fellow WICB directors to continue believing that focusing on our top 30 players alone will take us back to the top, is an approach doomed to failure.
Errol WA Townshend
16 Turtledove Grove
Scarborough, Ontario
Canada M1X 2B2
Cameron doesn't need vision but myopia
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One of unintended benefits of the election of Jamaica's Dave Cameron to the presidency of the West Indies Cricket Board — which you can be sure his electors never envisaged — is that this is a rare occasion where the new leader needs no "vision" to substantially improve its performance.
Cameron will need no "long term view", no bevy of advisors. Nor will he even need to dust off any of the many commissioned reports on the WICB's shelves. Indeed, a sudden affliction of myopia will be his surest guide to success.
For Cameron, as long time president of one of our venerable institutions, Kensington Cricket Cub, (and its next door neighbour Lucas), will have had a daily 'up-close-and-personal' view of the origins and solutions surrounding West Indies' precipitous fall from grace: the shocking decline of the region's club cricket.
This decline has been assisted by the misallocation of WICB resources, the bulk of which has gone to head office bureaucracy and the top players with hardly a crumb for the sustenance and development of the region's clubs. Yet from the earliest days of West Indies cricket, clubs have been the nursery of our Test players. They form the "university" to which the best of our highs schools graduate. While the Sagicor High Performance Centre, started under the watch of Dr Julian Hunte, is a plus, it should be the finishing school for our young upcoming stars. It can never be a substitute for high quality club-level coaching and competition.
Nor need Cameron look any further than his own Jamaica's highly successful athletics programme to discern the tested formula for sustainable sporting success: high quality coaching and competition from the base up.
If, at the end of his term, Cameron can point to some of the following improvements he will have served West Indies cricket well: reallocated resources to (a) provide stipends for qualified coaches for the region's premier clubs; (b) trained curators to prepare better match-day and practice pitches and outfields; (c) basic coaching aids (such as bowling machines) which clubs in even non-Test playing nations now have; (d) improved club houses and facilities to attract and retain members; (e) enhanced prize money for premier club competitions.
Clubs, even before formal coaching became the norm, enabled West Indies to make the swift ascendancy to parity with a top nation such as England right after our acceptance to Test cricket in 1928, producing the likes of George Headley and Learie Constantine; later they provided the three W's, Garfield Sobers, Conrad Hutne et al; still later the world champion teams of the Clive Lloyd era. For Cameron and his fellow WICB directors to continue believing that focusing on our top 30 players alone will take us back to the top, is an approach doomed to failure.
Errol WA Townshend
16 Turtledove Grove
Scarborough, Ontario
Canada M1X 2B2
Cameron doesn't need vision but myopia
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