Vin­ode Mam­chan

Pres­i­dent of the West In­dies Play­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (WIPA) Di­nanath Ram­nar­ine has come out in de­fence of T&T and West In­dies bats­man Lendl Sim­mons, say­ing that he nev­er re­fused to meet with chair­man of the se­lec­tion com­mit­tee Clyde Butts. Ram­nar­ine pro­duced ev­i­dence yes­ter­day at his of­fices on Ed­ward Street, which in­di­cat­ed that Sim­mons was in con­tact with Butts but the meet­ing nev­er ma­te­ri­alised. The West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) in­di­cat­ed on Wednes­day that Sim­mons had promised to meet with Butts but failed to do so and of­fered no ex­pla­na­tion. Ram­nar­ine re­fut­ed this say­ing: "Butts called Sim­mons around 3pm on May 31 and said he would like to meet with him at 5pm, to dis­cuss his is­sues. Sim­mons told him he had a fam­i­ly mat­ter to deal with and could meet at 7pm. Even if Sim­mons did not have a fam­i­ly mat­ter, he would have been hard pressed to come in­to town for 5pm, since he lives in Ari­ma.

"Butts then told him he can­not meet at 7pm, as he had to leave at 6pm for the air­port and promised coach Ot­tis Gib­son would call him. Sim­mons is still await­ing that call." Ram­nar­ine pro­duced an au­dio clip with for­mer West In­dies se­lec­tor Raph­ick Ju­madeen con­firm­ing Sim­mons' ver­sion of the in­ci­dence. Ju­madeen's ex­tract was tak­en from an in­ter­view he did on i95.5fm.

Ram­nar­ine point­ed out if the WICB re­al­ly want­ed to meet with Sim­mons, they had suf­fi­cient time since then. He charged that the WICB want­ed to op­er­ate in an ad­hoc man­ner and is now blam­ing WIPA wrong­ful­ly. "The WICB is say­ing WIPA doesn't want to meet with them but this ia far from the truth. Any right think­ing per­son would see that it was WIPA who asked for a meet­ing.

"They are say­ing that we want to take the mat­ter to me­di­a­tion but they must re­alise that the time for 'good faith' ne­go­ti­a­tions has passed. We try to op­er­ate with­in a frame­work and they know noth­ing about that type of op­er­a­tion. "Af­ter we sent the let­ter to the CEO try­ing to get in­for­ma­tion as to the sta­tus with Sim­mons, they had sev­en days to meet and they missed that. The next step ac­cord­ing to the Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) is me­di­a­tion and if they fail to abide by this, then we would have no choice but to go to ar­bi­tra­tion."