Nihilism can’t fix cricket, football problems
Published:Wednesday | January 3, 2024 | 12:06 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
While The Gleaner stories on matters of national and international issues are usually of a high standard, stimulating careful thought and debate, it pains me that the same cannot be said about the solutions to fixing the ills of Jamaica’s football and West Indies cricket.
Your recent editorials calling for the dissolution of the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) and support for that vacuous Barriteau Committee’s call for the same fate for Cricket West Indies (CWI) were classics. You can do better.
It is conveniently forgotten that when West Indies were near the top of the world during the Goddard-Stollmeyer era (1948-54), and world champs during the Worrell-Sobers era (1962-67) and Lloyd-Richards era (1975-1990), the administration consisted of little more than a board of experienced ex-players, a secretary, an office, a phone and a typewriter. In football, all this current top heavy bureaucratic structure has brought us no success since our 1988 World Cup trip to France.
According to the news stories, because we select the wrong coaches and fire the right ones, emphasise excessive, mindless back and side passing and dysfunctional ultra-defensive formations instead of accurate shooting and ball control, our problems can be solved by scrapping the JFF, creating a new organisation (presumably with a different name) to be run by the same folks from our football community with the same thinking and behaviour.
When fast bowlers can’t bowl full, fast and straight as our match-winning greats Michael Holding did in taking 14 for 149 in the 1976 Oval Test or Hines Johnson 10 for 96 in the 1948 Kingston Test against England; when batsmen demonstrate poor technique, captains can’t set proper fields or think outside the box , selectors can’t pick proper teams and we destroy the foundations of our earlier success (keen school and club competitions), your recommendation is to dissolve the CWI. And then replace it with what? Like the Barriteau Committee.
You appear to give comfort to the critics of Sport Minister Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange and the Holness government for passing on the hosting of the World T20 this year and giving up the Tallawahs to Antigua and Barbuda. I trust the Government’s cost-benefit analysis of these major international events to the host country over the often self-serving, overly optimistic projections of sports officials. Having served, thankfully briefly, as deputy chairperson of the organising committee for the 2001 mini cricket World Cup (the Associates qualifying round), I am well aware of the heavy hand of the International Cricket Council when it comes to laying down “conditionalities” on host countries. How quickly we forget the financial bath West Indies took with that 2007 World Cup fiasco. Babsy and the Government did the right thing. Hopefully, she will invest sufficient funds in grassroots cricket to rebuild a foundation. You cannot build house from the top down.
ERROL TOWNSHEND
Canada