Vin­ode Mam­chan

The West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) has de­cid­ed to axe cur­rent man­ag­er Sir Richie Richard­son and re­place him with his for­mer team­mate and for­mer man­ag­er of the team Joel Gar­ner.

The de­ci­sion was tak­en at the board's tele­con­fer­ence on Tues­day and Gar­ner, who is al­so a di­rec­tor on the WICB, agreed to pick up the chal­lenge at this crit­i­cal time in West In­dies crick­et.

A WICB di­rec­tor con­firmed to T&T Guardian that the of­fer was made to Gar­ner and he ac­cept­ed it. It is an­tic­i­pat­ed that the WICB will make an of­fi­cial state­ment on this move soon.

Richard­son was the man­ag­er of the team that abort­ed the tour to In­dia re­cent­ly and ac­cord­ing to the WICB di­rec­tor: "At this point in time we thought that Joel would be the bet­ter man for the job be­cause he has a no-non­sense at­ti­tude. We are not say­ing that Richie en­cour­aged any­thing, what we are say­ing is that we need a more force­ful man­ag­er at this point in time."

Con­tact­ed for his com­ment on this mat­ter, pres­i­dent of the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB), Az­im Bas­sarath de­nied any knowl­edge of it and said that he did not par­tic­i­pate in the meet­ing.

"I had some oth­er com­mit­ments in terms of meet­ings at the Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion in San Juan where I work, so un­for­tu­nate­ly I was un­able to take part in the tele­con­fer­ence."

Asked whether there was a move to have all three cap­tains re­moved, Bas­sarath again plead­ed ig­no­rance say­ing: "That to me is un­be­liev­able. No one has con­tact­ed me with that news and for that to take place all the di­rec­tors would have to be aware."

It was ru­moured that Test cap­tain De­nesh Ramdin would have been re­placed by Kraigg Brath­waite, one day cap­tain Dwayne Bra­vo by Ja­son Hold­er and T20 cap­tain Dar­ren Sam­my, al­so by Hold­er.

This would have breached the Hy­att Ac­cord where it was agreed that no dis­crim­i­na­tion or vic­tim­i­sa­tion would take place in deal­ing with all mem­bers of the team that abort­ed the tour.

The WICB will have an­oth­er meet­ing on Thurs­day, as they build up to their or­di­nary meet­ing on De­cem­ber 13, in Ja­maica.