An­dre E Bap­tiste

There can be lit­tle doubt that the Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) failed Trinidad and To­ba­go, de­spite the pub­lic re­la­tions ex­er­cise.The end re­sult was that T&T's Red Steel strug­gled, al­though scrap­ing in­to the semi­fi­nals. That the T&T pub­lic booed, not once but twice, T&T cap­tain Dwayne Bra­vo on Sat­ur­day, when he ap­peared on the big screen, was in­ap­pro­pri­ate and wrong, but it was a mes­sage of dis­sat­is­fac­tion, giv­en the high stan­dards of the past.What this proves is that there must be a change of name go­ing for­ward and the name of the coun­tries must not be used. Some of the play­ers, with whom I have spo­ken, sug­gest nam­ing the teams af­ter the cap­i­tal towns in each is­land, which on the sur­face seems log­i­cal, but giv­en the way West In­dies crick­et is ad­min­is­tered, may not ac­tu­al­ly work.

T20 has long been good the­atre and al­ways had an ap­peal even go­ing back to the Stan­ford days. How­ev­er, it lost its val­ue when T&T be­gan to dom­i­nate and the oth­er teams fell short. There­fore, peo­ple around the Caribbean lost in­ter­est, not want­i­ng to watch one-sided match­es.It is clear in the cur­rent set up that T&T was at a se­ri­ous dis­ad­van­tage.Let us ex­am­ine the base; the West In­dies won the World T20 Cham­pi­onships in Sri Lan­ka in 2012. The West In­dies squad was DJG Sam­my, DJ Bra­vo, S Badree, DM Bra­vo, J Charles, FH Ed­wards, CH Gayle, SP Nar­ine, KA Pol­lard, D Ramdin, R Ram­paul, AD Rus­sell, MN Samuels, LMP Sim­mons, DR Smith.Of the play­ers above, the fol­low­ing are from T&T: DJ Bra­vo, Badree, D M Bra­vo, Nar­ine, Pol­lard, Ramdin, Ram­paul and Sim­mons–EIGHT.Three from Ja­maica: Gayle, Rus­sell and Samuels.Two from Bar­ba­dos: Ed­wards and Smith.Two from St Lu­cia: Sam­my and Charles.

The teams were di­vid­ed based on these play­ers with T&T re­ceiv­ing three of the eight play­ers above and the oth­er five placed else­where. Strange­ly, Guyana got three play­ers, Bar­ba­dos, one play­er and Ja­maica al­lo­cat­ed one play­er as well.Ja­maica had three play­ers and got two se­lect­ed. Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, that is 66 per cent, Bar­ba­dos had two play­ers and got one se­lect­ed and that is 50 per cent, sim­i­lar­ly St Lu­cia had two play­ers and on­ly one was se­lect­ed, so that al­so is 50 per cent.Now let us re-ex­am­ine the Red Steel. Of the eight play­ers, T&T got three play­ers which is 37.5 per cent, and if we are to use the start­ing 11, where T&T had six play­ers in the fi­nals, they got on­ly two of the six–33 per cent.Even if you do not like math­e­mat­ics, there is in­equal­i­ty in all of this. While, it is easy to say that this tour­na­ment was a suc­cess in terms of crowd par­tic­i­pa­tion and be­cause peo­ple en­joyed the fun and par­ty at­mos­phere, those who ar­gue that it would de­vel­op young play­ers may need to re-think that idea, as both Guyana and Ja­maica strug­gled to give ex­po­sure to many "young and in­ex­pe­ri­enced" play­ers.

Clear­ly there is some­thing wrong with this mod­el and it may lead to ask­ing why don't we do some­thing sim­i­lar in ath­let­ics? How would Ja­maica feel about this if we de­cid­ed to have a spe­cial ath­let­ics games in the Caribbean and dis­pose of the lead­ing Ja­maican ath­letes to run for var­i­ous teams in the re­gion such as Shelly-Ann Fras­er-Pryce, Yohan Blake, Nes­ta Carter, War­ren Weir, etc. Of course Us­ain Bolt will run for Ja­maica. And how would Ja­maica feel to read on­line or lis­ten in the BBC news and be told that the Guyana or Bar­ba­dos track team de­feat­ed Ja­maica? I am cer­tain they would not be very hap­py.Most of the in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia stat­ed that T&T lost and that is how it was per­ceived.As it stands, the Ja­maican Tallawahs will not be able to rep­re­sent the re­gion in the Cham­pi­ons League crick­et in Sep­tem­ber, as T&T al­ready qual­i­fied. Does this mean, that they will rep­re­sent the West In­dies next year in 2014 and how many of the team will be el­i­gi­ble, giv­en the amount of play­ers on this team with out­side com­mit­ments to oth­er clubs?This CPL is very mud­dled in terms of process but it seems the on­ly in­ter­est is fi­nan­cial and if so, that is sad.