‘Players who quit India tour should have been fired’ – St Lucia PM

(Trinidad Express) St Lucia’s Prime Minister Kenny Anthony says that all the players who quit the tour of India in October last year should have been fired.
“For my part, I would have started with a new fresh team,” said Anthony, who was speaking at the Caricom Leaders Lecture series hosted on the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies last Tuesday evening.
Emphasising that he didn’t think politicians should interfere in the administration of West Indies cricket, Anthony said that Caricom leaders nonetheless needed to review the West Indies Cricket Board of Control and set up a better system. “The WICBC are not answerable to the people of the region,” he said, adding that, once the board’s structure was changed, the politicians should leave it alone.

The St Lucian prime minister was speaking on the topic “Delivered or Denied: The Dividends of Integration”, arguing that the problems in WI cricket were part of a larger breakdown plaguing the Caribbean. “Caricom is in crisis,” he told the audience who filled most of the auditorium at Daaga Hall. “It is a crisis of our institutions, our societies, our economic models, and our governance.” Referring to the global economic contraction, Anthony said, “What is happening in the Caribbean now, especially the Eastern Caribbean, is traumatic. It has never happened before – never!”
Trinidad and Tobago, he noted, had failed to assist its less well-endowed neighbours, despite promises to do so. “There is tremendous vacillation in what T&T will invest in – natural gas, petroleum, a pipeline,” he revealed. “The other islands have given up on getting an answer, and are busy investing in alternative energy.”
While supporting the concept and ideals of Caricom, Anthony said that the body had not paid many dividends. “Caricom is out of touch with the realities of the region,” he said. “It has lost a golden opportunity in this time of economic transformation by ignoring the needs of member states.” He was very critical of the manner in which issues were handled by the Caricom Secretariat. “Procrastination is often disguised as documentation,” he said, adding, “We have confused conversation with implementation.”
The prime minister also noted that “many governments are not paying their dues” to the regional body, but revealed that automatic payments had been accepted in principle at last month’s Heads of Government meeting in the Bahamas. “There has been a breakdown in the arrangements of functional cooperation,’ Anthony said, as he touched on issues such as the buyout of Columbus Communications by Cable & Wireless, saying that there should have been a regional authority to deal with that matter. In respect to the inability of regional heads to agree on one candidate for the post of Commonwealth Secretary General, Anthony recommended that all three candidates should be withdrawn and a board of eminent persons be set up to choose one candidate from the region.

Insularity is still the basic flaw of the Caricom body. Guyana is underpopulated but just mention a plan to reverse this reality using brothers and sisters from the region and all hell will break loose in Guyana. The region will always be a backwater to the attractive bright lights of Canada, the USA and Europe. I also agree the players who refused to play in India should have been permanently banned from ever representing the West Indies.

Workers have a right to strike, anytime, anywhere.

The correct thing to do was for the WICB to fly over to India and agree to the player's demands, or immediately fly over a replacement team at the first sign of trouble.

The WICB would then have the option of either negotiating new pay contracts, or gutting the side outright (and signing new players), for the subsequent South Africa tour.

The ST Lucia PM sounds like he is as incompetent at leadership as the WICB.

Where has he suddenly appeared from? When his country men namely Hunte and Hilaire were jointly ruining our cricket he was hiding in Castries. Suddenly he is calling for the heads of the cricketers. The first thing the people of St Lucia should do now is to cut his salary by 75%, take away some of his properties and share it among those struggling ex slaves, that are continued to be treated as slaves on that island. I know he would start jumping up in the air crying out that it is discrimination.

Brilliant  catch @ midwicket   

St Lucia has numerous problems and Kenny Anthony and his government have not even got to first base in trying to solve them.

their problem was not with the employers but with their own union and it's head


whom they elected again

Folks tend to forget that Cappo :

Wavell gettin a pass  !

[quote author=ketchim link=topic=96276.msg623326#msg623326 date=1425582012]
Brilliant  catch @ midwicket   
[/quote]

from where you have been all the time you were opposed to all midwicket cud possibly mean in his post.
where really are you ketchim ::confused::

you have a real point of view or yuh jess like to make comes' ::confused::

Why didn't he speak out when the St Lucians were running West Indies cricket into the ground? When Hunte and the other one were doing absolutely nothing but bringing the team into conflicts and what not, why didn't he speak out?