BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):
TOP CRICKET commentator Tony Cozier has rapped the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) on its position taken over the multimillion-dollar Stanford Twenty20 project.
The WICB issued a stern statement on behalf of its territorial boards - Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Windward Islands and the Leeward Islands - last week Monday advising Stanford's group to execute his sponsorship of the innovative series in conjunction with "existing Caribbean initiatives, which are well advanced".
Writing in his weekly column "Cozier On Cricket" in the Sunday Sun newspaper (Barbados), Cozier said the territorial boards were effectively saying that they should decide what to do with the US$280,000 the Texan businessman was offering to teams for his previously announced Twenty/20 tournament next year, the first in the West Indies.
FUNDS
Suggesting that Stanford is justified in his plans to do his own distribution of funds to the participating teams, Cozier said: "The reputation of the WICB for handling money, after all, stands on a par with the chaos that accompanies its arrangement of its own tournaments and the extravagance of its personnel."
Added Cozier: "The prospect of them (the WICB) having even partial financial control of an event encompassing as many as 19 territorial teams would have scared away even the most naïve investor."
Cozier said the relevant territorial boards, perceiving a threat to their tenuous authority, speak of "an attempt to create duplication and division within West Indies cricket" unless Stanford sees things their way.
The noted cricket scribe invalidated that point by saying, with the board's inept handling of the switch of team sponsors, its acrimonious relations with players and much else besides, the WICB has itself been the catalyst for such "duplication and division".
INVESTMENT
"The cricket complex Stanford has constructed at the airport in Antigua, with its well maintained ground, impressive stand and adjoining Sticky Wicket restaurant, and the West Indies Hall of Fame he has inaugurated should long since have alerted the WICB to a wealthy, interested potential partner.
"It (the board) should not be surprised that he has now taken this new initiative on his own," Cozier said. Cozier also thumped the WICB territorial board's reference - in its message to Stanford - to the investor's "legends", his board of directors 14 of the most prominent past West Indian cricketers.
Cozier said it is noteworthy that the board's statement dismissively described those on his board as "envoys of Mr. Stanford".
"One by one, such eminent men have either been discarded by the WICB or have been excluded altogether," the experienced journalist stated.
"The latest was Clive Lloyd, captain during the glory days of the '80s and globally recognised as the embodiment of West Indies cricket excellence. When he sought the vice-presidency of the WICB in July, he was rejected in favour of a banker.
"Now Lloyd and the others have found another avenue through which to help arrest the free-fall that has brought a once proud institution from the summit of the world game to rock-bottom," Cozier stated.
