The broad­cast voic­es, words and opin­ions of West In­di­an crick­et writ­ers should re­sound across the re­gion and must be tak­en no­tice of by the crick­et au­thor­i­ties and the fans in the at­tempt to re­for­mu­late our crick­et.

Vet­er­an broad­cast­er, the last of the likes of Tony Bec­ca and Tony Co­zi­er, Joseph “Reds” Per­reira (Hon. PhD – UG) says those who are close-up watch­ing, re­port­ing and com­ment­ing on crick­et have much to con­tribute.

“The mas­ter of them all, Michael Hold­ing, if he puts his pen to pa­per and writes on red ball crick­et on the field in the West In­dies, write to on world crick­et, on the in­ad­e­qua­cies of the fi­nan­cial take of the West In­dies board and more, it will be a great thing,” Reds told the Guardian as this news­pa­per seeks to con­tribute to the re­vival of WI crick­et in this se­ries of ar­ti­cles on so­lu­tions.

In his time and in recog­ni­tion of the val­ue of hav­ing a West In­di­an voice and pen present when our teams went abroad to re­port our sto­ry against the might of the likes of Eng­land and Aus­tralia, econ­o­mist and po­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor, Lloyd Best picked his tour­ing team of play­ers and then added Tony Co­zi­er as the scribe to send home dis­patch­es on the crick­et. Like in the in­stance of the his­to­ry of the West In­dies/Caribbean, Best want­ed our sto­ries to be told by our peo­ple.

“We are miss­ing peo­ple writ­ing con­sis­tent­ly,” says Reds.

In ad­di­tion to Hold­ing, he iden­ti­fies the likes of Tony McWatt, Bryan Davis, Fazeer Mo­hammed and Col­in Mur­ray as writ­ers who need to be al­lowed space “to con­sis­tent­ly write about our crick­et and so too our sports ed­i­tors should be writ­ing their views."

Reds has cov­ered 152 Test match­es and up­wards of 200 ODIs be­tween 1971 and 2019.

Re­gard­ing what Reds sees as the de­fi­cien­cy in the ad­min­is­tra­tion of our crick­et boards, he sin­gles out what he con­sid­ers “the er­ror of the Ricky Sker­ritt board when in May-Ju­ly 2020, when we went to Eng­land in that Covid-19 pe­ri­od when there was no crick­et on tele­vi­sion and our go­ing there saved the Eng­lish board from hav­ing to pay mil­lions of pounds for not hav­ing crick­et.”

The West In­di­an tour was fol­lowed by two se­ries, one against Pak­istan, the oth­er by Aus­tralia and the West In­dies board did not get much for our ef­forts, says Reds.

“What we got was a Test match in Grena­da for our dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion to send our team to Eng­land in the Covid-19 pe­ri­od,” said the ex­pe­ri­enced crick­et broad­cast­er. “When I said to Sker­ritt (Pres­i­dent of Crick­et West In­dies) that our CEO John­ny Grave, should have bar­gained for an Eng­land A Tour to the WI and a re­turn tour to Eng­land at their cost, that was the end of me re­ceiv­ing an an­swer.”

Per­reira al­so finds Crick­et West In­dies want­i­ng in terms of com­mu­ni­cat­ing proac­tive­ly with the West In­di­an na­tion about crick­et is­sues. “What are the pro­grammes be­ing adopt­ed to find play­ers, about coach­ing camps and clin­ics, camps to work on the present crop of play­ers with se­nior play­ers in charge.”

And in this re­spect “we have not used the past great play­ers ef­fec­tive­ly as mon­i­tors to help the present gen­er­a­tion; Haynes should be our bat­ting coach; great fast bowlers such as Roberts, Walsh and oth­ers should be used from time to time to ad­vise, lec­ture to help our fast bowl­ing stock, a few have pace but lack con­trol.”

Reds has big ques­tions about the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my here in the south of Trinidad: “What is the Acad­e­my all about, it’s seen all over the world as a love­ly venue for play­ing crick­et, but what’s the pro­gramme of train­ing that is tak­ing place, is there re­al­ly an acad­e­my at the Bri­an Lara sta­di­um, who are the coach­es, what’s the coach­ing pro­gramme like, how many boys and girls are there at the Acad­e­my?”

As to the val­ue of hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant in­di­vid­ual/coach­es go­ing to parts of the West In­di­an crick­et­ing na­tion to dis­cov­er and coach tal­ent, Per­reira re­calls the ef­fort of “the Book­er Group of com­pa­nies which hired the great Clyde Wal­cott to go in­to the then British Guiana first as wel­fare of­fi­cer and crick­et coach. Out of that ven­ture, came (Ro­han) Kan­hai, (Joe) Solomon and (Basil) Butch­er,” re­mem­bers Per­reira. It was not the on­ly oc­ca­sion when such a pro­gramme was suc­cess­ful in pro­duc­ing WI Test play­ers, Wes Hall did it back in the 1970s in T&T un­der the spon­sor­ship of WIT­CO. Lar­ry Gomes, In­shan Ali and Bernard Julien were three of those who emerged and played Test crick­et, a num­ber of oth­ers rep­re­sent­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go.

In re­sponse to the fact that sev­er­al great for­mer West In­di­an play­ers have been hired as coach­es and not made a great im­pres­sion on pro­duc­ing stars, Reds of­fered the cyn­i­cal com­ment: “It is al­so rel­e­vant to look at ma­te­r­i­al they had to work with; you can­not make bread out of stone.” He be­lieves, “our play­ers are not spend­ing enough time hit­ting balls in the nets, prac­tic­ing and run­ning".

The not­ed in­ter­na­tion­al broad­cast­er re­grets the loss of Eng­lish Coun­ty Crick­et as the “fin­ish­ing school ex­pe­ri­ence for the gen­er­a­tion of to­day".

As to white ball crick­et in the Fran­chise Leagues pay­ing big salaries to crick­eters and of­ten­times draw­ing them away from rep­re­sent­ing the West In­dies, “there can be no en­vy of mod­ern play­ers mak­ing mon­ey in the fran­chise leagues,” he says. “We have to go with the flow and if our team keeps win­ning, you may get a kind of pride re­turn­ing and greater com­mu­ni­ca­tion tak­ing place be­tween the board and the play­ers.”

But Reds says, “There is no loy­al­ty, no across-the-board com­mit­ment to the West In­dies, I think it is fair to say. Play­ers are go­ing to make mon­ey in white-ball crick­et as they recog­nise that af­ter 34, their ca­reers are at an end.”

He al­so sees the dra­mat­ic fall-away of home crowds at match­es and its ef­fects: “It’s dif­fi­cult for a young play­er to play in front of an au­di­ence of ten peo­ple view­ing from the stands.”

Per­reira sug­gests that Crick­et West In­dies seek out new spon­sor­ship deals for four-day crick­et. He iden­ti­fies as a po­ten­tial spon­sor Exxon­mo­bil, the multi­na­tion­al en­er­gy com­pa­ny now in Guyana. Re­flect­ing on the four-day game, the vet­er­an com­men­ta­tor notes that scores in such games on oc­ca­sion amount to no more than the 90s and 110.

Reds con­sid­ers a "ma­jor blun­der on the part of the Sker­ritt board came when it re­moved a win­ning coach South African Richard Py­bas and his team of Es­uan Cran­don and Vas­bert Drakes soon af­ter com­ing in­to of­fice: In my mind, it was the re­al start of the col­lapse and every­one begged him, (Sker­ritt) to keep the coach­ing staff".

Reds is heav­i­ly crit­i­cal of the move to have the coach and the cap­tain se­lect the team say­ing there is need for a wider base of se­lec­tors to ex­press a bal­anced view of the play­ers to com­prise the team. Work al­so has to be done to en­sure that the up­com­ing match­es against Bangladesh are played in Ja­maica and St Lu­cia which are the wick­ets which are ben­e­fi­cial to our fast bowl­ing at­tack and use­ful to our spin­ners (Gu­dakesh) Motie and (Akeal) Ho­sein.

We shall con­tin­ue al­low­ing West In­di­ans, crick­eters, ad­min­is­tra­tors and all to say what they think is need­ed to spawn a re­vival.