KINGSTON, Ja­maica – The Ja­maica Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tion (JCA)’s pre­mier crick­et com­pe­ti­tion has been re­brand­ed the Michael Hold­ing Se­nior Cup, in ho­n­our of the West In­dies fast bowl­ing leg­end.

The com­pe­ti­tion will be of­fi­cial­ly named the JCA Michael Hold­ing Se­nior Cup, and will be spon­sored by mo­tor ve­hi­cle gi­ants Stew­art’s Au­to­mo­tive.

The change was dis­closed dur­ing a press launch at the Kingston Crick­et Club on Tues­day.

In a video mes­sage broad­cast at the launch, the 71-year-old Hold­ing said he whole­heart­ed­ly en­dorsed the com­pe­ti­tion be­cause of the im­por­tance red-ball crick­et played in his own per­son­al de­vel­op­ment when he played in the Se­nior Cup com­pe­ti­tion for Mel­bourne Crick­et Club.

Hold­ing, who took 249 wick­ets in 60 Test match­es for the West In­dies, al­so en­cour­aged the play­ers to take full ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ties which the com­pe­ti­tion of­fered.

Crick­et op­er­a­tions man­ag­er at the JCA, O’neil Cruick­shank re­vealed that the Michael Hold­ing Se­nior Cup will bowl off on March 15, with 24 teams com­pris­ing clubs and parish­es par­tic­i­pat­ing.

The first-place team in each group, along with the two best run­ners-up will move on to the knock­out stages.

The com­pe­ti­tion will al­so fea­ture a Play­er-of-the-Round award for each of the pre­lim­i­nary rounds and a Play­er-of-the-Match award dur­ing the knock­out stages.

CMC