'The relevant points are the "professionalisation" of the regional first-class game and the expansion of the season. There will be 90 players under contract, 75 with their individual boards, 15 with the High Performance and A squads. The objective is to ensure that all the players are available for a new tournament of double-round cricket over six months (as opposed to one round concentrated into six weeks at present). It won't come cheap. Pybus estimates the cost of the new plan to be US$2.8 million for staff and players, $750,000 for the expansion of the first-class and one-day competitions, $300,000 for retainers for the A squad. To raise such sums, he believes sponsorship through naming rights of teams could raise $200,000 and naming rights to their stadiums a further $500,000. "Territorial boards to source sponsorship for first-class teams as they do in Australia, England, South Africa, the IPL," he wrote, hopefully. Given that the first-class series hasn't been sponsored since Carib, the Trinidadian brewery, ended theirs in 2009, that cricket no longer holds the sporting pride of place it once did in the region and that most of the territories are going through difficult economic times, the marketing departments face a difficult task. What is more, the WICB is ironically competing for the same financial support from private enterprise and governments as the Caribbean Premier League, to which it sold its T20 rights last year.'
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Let's be frank here....
Back in the old days, Shell and Red Stripe sponsored the FC season, because fans turned out in large numbers to watch matches. Now, only three men and a dog have turned out to watch the final - on a Saturday! If you can no longer pull fans to the four-day game, you won't pull sponsors. These are the main reasons why the CPL has sponsors, and the four-day competition does not.
'The directors even agreed to Pybus' plan for each of the six territories to select their ten contracted players after which all the others would "go into a draft to equalise the regional distribution of players to the betterment of West Indies cricket". The idea is that within a year all players will be open to a "free market… as per best practice in overseas first-class cricket". While the CPL followed the IPL lead and introduced the draft concept in its first year in 2013, it might be a revolutionary concept too far for traditional West Indies cricket that, after all, comprises a dozen independent nations each protective of its sovereignty. It was all very well for Narine to turn out for the Guyana Amazon Warriors and Pollard to captain the Barbados Tridents rather than their native Trinidad Red Steel in the inaugural CPL T20 fiesta; another for such a switch to extend to intense, long-standing inter-territorial rivalries.'
This is another nonsense that Afro seems to like...T20 is lickit cricket. You can mix and match players, but you don't do it for four-day cricket. Not even three men and a dog would turn up to see that.
'Pybus' is not the first such report commissioned by the WICB. That, prepared by a group, headed by the former Jamaica prime minister PJ Patterson, presented an equally significant tome in 2007. Its main points were not acted on, prompting Patterson to complain that he had spent a couple of years wasting his time. It has now reached the stage where the WICB cannot afford to treat Pybus' report the same way.'
That is the problem...a missed opportunity to implement the Patterson report. It's not too late for Cameron to do so. But will he?
That's the main problem with the WICB....
NOWHERE!!..this new structure is in line with what the majority of our cricket rivals are doing...allowing players to move freely will eventually lead to our cricket weeding out poor performers...so how can we lose with that? MORE games will now be played and sponsors are set to get on board...
if it was in the big teams backyards then i think you would have seen a different picture..just like it was when bim played Jamaica.
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