Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley bold­ly pre­dict­ed that if West In­dies fails to “get its act to­geth­er”, teams such as the Unit­ed States will eas­i­ly beat them on the in­ter­na­tion­al stage.

Row­ley is the cur­rent chair­man of the Cari­com prime min­is­te­r­i­al sub-com­mit­tee on crick­et, which has been man­dat­ed to ex­am­ine all mat­ters re­lat­ed to the de­vel­op­ment of the sport in the Caribbean to bet­ter po­si­tion it so that West In­dies could re­turn to the glo­ri­ous days.

The T&T prime min­is­ter con­ced­ed that a lot of work was need­ed to ar­rest the slide of not on­ly the West In­dies team, but the sport gen­er­al­ly in the Caribbean, and he has em­barked up­on a mis­sion to de­sign a long-term strate­gic plan to ad­dress sev­er­al is­sues.

“If we do not get our act to­geth­er now, we will strug­gle to beat the Unit­ed States be­cause they have now come in­to the game and their or­gan­i­sa­tion­al skills, their re­sources, and man­age­ment of sport, they will leave us be­hind,” he said in a wide-rang­ing ra­dio in­ter­view on I95 FM this past Sat­ur­day in Port-of-Spain.

“You no­tice now that there will be Twen­ty20 World Cup match­es in the Unit­ed States? We do not have much time to get to the root of our prob­lems and try to grasp the net­tle and put down a plan.”

Row­ley said the is­sues im­pact­ing West In­dies crick­et were com­plex, and the sit­u­a­tion need­ed to be han­dled care­ful­ly to get the best out­comes.

“It is a com­pli­ca­tion that re­quires, first and fore­most, to un­der­stand what ex­act­ly is the prob­lem, what is the mine­field you are cross­ing, and how do you cross that mine­field,” he said. “I am work­ing on un­der­stand­ing these three things.

“My ob­jec­tive is work­ing to­wards a de­vel­op­ment plan, and hav­ing spo­ken to some of my prime min­is­te­r­i­al col­leagues that is the ap­proach we want to take. Fly­ing around and blam­ing peo­ple and de­press­ing our­selves about the state of the game is not get­ting any­body any­where.

“We need to get the peo­ple who can help us to put our fin­ger on the pulse of the prob­lem. We need to di­ag­nose the prob­lem – and it is not uni-faceted, it is mul­ti-faceted.”

Row­ley said he hoped to con­vene a meet­ing in Jan­u­ary with sev­er­al stake­hold­ers in­side the sport and oth­ers too, to re­flect on the best way for­ward, so that a for­mi­da­ble strate­gic plan can be de­signed to set West In­dies crick­et on a firm foot­ing.

“The first part is to do a gen­er­al con­sul­ta­tion, and I think I have heard a lot (since tak­ing up the post) and some peo­ple have sub­mit­ted mem­o­ran­dums, so I am mov­ing in the not-too-dis­tant fu­ture to host a vir­tu­al meet­ing with a wide cross-sec­tion of peo­ple,” he said.

“I am not just talk­ing about peo­ple who want to pon­tif­i­cate, we want peo­ple who have some­thing that they want to con­tribute to the up­lift­ment of the game to have some­thing to work with be­cause of what I have done so far, there sev­er­al di­ver­gent views. How do you get these di­ver­gent views and dis­till them to get a plan out of it?

“Once there is a plan in place, there will be a role for the gov­ern­ments, and the gov­ern­ments should and could get in­volved in en­sur­ing that the nurs­ery (of the game) is kept alive and that our boys and girls are prop­er­ly re­sourced and trained, and then feed up­wards.”

Row­ley drew ref­er­ence to a boys’ school in the two-is­land re­pub­lic, where crick­et fa­cil­i­ties were left to ru­in, and they were re­cent­ly re­fur­bished be­cause of his in­ter­ven­tion.

“This rep­re­sents what could be the fu­ture for West In­dies crick­et…,” he said. “There were crick­et nets at a boys’ school, a boys’ school, where no crick­et was be­ing played in those nets. The grass was grow­ing and it was taller than me.

“Even­tu­al­ly, they came and re­moved the grass, the fence, and every­thing, and all that’s left there now are the two con­crete pitch­es on the ground where crick­et used to be played in a boys’ school in T&T. That sum­maris­es West In­dies crick­et.”

He said: “If we do not deal with that and where our boys are com­ing up un­der a school­mas­ter and be­ing taught the game… be­cause one of our prob­lems is that some of our peo­ple have reached (in­ter­na­tion­al) crick­et and have not been taught the game.

“You watch the game and you won­der why peo­ple are choos­ing reck­less and some of those ag­gres­sive shots when they are bat­ting – shots that get them out time and time and time again. They have no de­fense. One of the most ba­sic shots in crick­et is a for­ward de­fence, and when you do not have it, you try to hit your way out. When you are in doubt, lash out.” (CMC)