BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):Outstanding former West Indies fast bowler Joel Garner has hit out at the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) for its poor management of the regional game.
The 54-year-old Garner, who snared 259 wickets in 58 Tests, said the WICB had lacked vision in failing to capitalise on the advancements in the sport.
"The board has missed the bus on many occasions, has failed to be proactive and embrace innovations that would help to make modern cricket more attractive to the viewing public, including night cricket and coloured clothing which were introduced 30 years ago," Garner said, while delivering the Keith Boyce Memorial lecture entitled "West Indies Cricket: What's the way Forward?' on Wednesday night at the UWI Cave Hill Campus.
"Furthermore, to date, only one of the stadiums across the region has floodlights which are a prerequisite for the Twenty20 cricket which is now set to be played on a world championship basis.
"You will also recognise the board does very little to prepare our cricketers for the future except for those few first-class games that are arranged annually."
Garner, a former West Indies selector, also criticised the West Indies players, contending they too had not taken advantage of the excellent platform left for them by past greats.
"The difficulties facing West Indies cricket are a mirror of the difficulties faced by those great players of the past who paved the way for the current crop of West Indies cricketers who have demonstrated most recently in the CWC World Cup tournament that they too, like some of our children, are not taking the opportunity to maximise the benefits left for them by their predecessors," the former Barbados and Somerset fast bowler argued.
"To be frank, in any analysis, there has to be a recognition that there is a crisis in the leadership of West Indies cricket."
Garner was a legendary pacer of the 1970s and 1980s halcyon West Indies era, forming fearsome combinations with the likes of greats Andy Roberts, Colin Croft and Malcolm Marshall.
