Re­fresh­ing and en­cour­ag­ing news has come out of the 21st meet­ing of the Cari­com Prime Min­is­te­r­i­al Sub-Com­mit­tee on Crick­et held re­cent­ly in George­town, Guyana.

“To­geth­er let us reimag­ine crick­et as a dri­ver of uni­ty and pros­per­i­ty, lever­ag­ing its sto­ried lega­cy to en­gage youth and fos­ter re­gion­al pride,” said T&T’s Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, chair­man of the sub­com­mit­tee meet­ing in Guyana.

Of in­ter­est is the recog­ni­tion of crick­et as one of the undy­ing her­itages of the peo­ple of the re­gion and al­so “crick­et as a mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar com­mer­cial en­ter­prise, in which we are to be en­gaged if we are not yet al­ready en­gaged,” ob­served Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley.

There is no ques­tion about the en­gage­ment of the West In­dies in this mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar in­dus­try at the Test lev­el and in all oth­er forms of the game. More­over, through­out the al­most 100 years of WI teams play­ing suc­cess­ful­ly at the high­est lev­els of the game, it has been a par­tic­i­pa­tion in crick­et’s emer­gence as an in­ter­na­tion­al game of great con­se­quence, a sport­ing spec­ta­cle of dis­ci­pline, and an ex­pres­sion of na­tion­al tal­ent and pride.

Unar­guably, these are the ma­jor fac­tors that have made the game the mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar suc­cess to which the T&T Prime Min­is­ter refers. It is the West In­di­an team, un­der the in­ci­sive and cul­tured lead­er­ship of Frank Wor­rell, which went to Aus­tralia in 1960 and, with the hosts, re­vived the game which had sunk in­to sta­sis.

So great was the im­pres­sion made by Wor­rell and his men that 100,000 Aus­tralians lined the streets of Mel­bourne at the end of the se­ries to say thank you and good­bye to Wor­rell, Sobers, Kan­hai, Hall, Gibbs, Solomon and the rest of the team.

So too, the great WI team un­der Clive Lloyd was cen­tral to the mod­erni­sa­tion of crick­et dri­ven by the Aus­tralian fi­nan­cial ty­coon Ker­ry Pack­er. Lloyd and his West In­di­ans com­plete­ly trans­formed Test crick­et with the mighty fast bowl­ing team and as­sault-mind­ed bats­men for 15 years.

The com­bi­na­tion al­so won the two first ODI World Cup tour­na­ments, to be fol­lowed by Dar­ren Sam­my’s team, which won two T20 tour­na­ments that set the stage for the emer­gence of the mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar en­ter­prise re­ferred to by PM Row­ley.

It was that band of West In­di­an play­ers, in­clu­sive of Gayle, Bra­vo, Pol­lard, Rus­sell, and Nar­ine, who all but in­vent­ed the mod­ern T20 game, the en­gine room of the mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar fran­chise game of the present.

For­ev­er it will live in the mem­o­ry—the West In­di­an ge­nius and dar­ing dis­played by Car­los Braith­waite when he sealed the T20 vic­to­ry for the WI with the then im­prob­a­ble four six­es to de­mol­ish Eng­land and send the con­test up to a new glad­i­a­to­r­i­al lev­el.

What, there­fore, has to now hap­pen, un­der the lead­er­ship of PM Row­ley and his col­leagues, is to frontal­ly, hon­est­ly, and with­out small-is­land po­lit­i­cal bias, timid­i­ty and de­fer­ral, find so­lu­tions to the prob­lems that have, in the present, rel­e­gat­ed the West In­dies to a mi­nor role in world crick­et.

If Cari­com has failed to bring about po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic uni­ty, the lead­ers can­not af­ford the same kind of non-achieve­ment in crick­et. Prime min­is­ters, you must be con­scious of the fact that four years from the present, we shall have to ho­n­our the mem­o­ry and per­son­ages of George Chal­lenor, George Headley, Learie Con­stan­tine, and oth­ers who made that first of­fi­cial trip to Eng­land and laid down the ba­sis for all that has been there­after achieved. We can­not fail these great West In­di­ans.