Beamer
International Vice-Captain
So I would say we are a risk, more due to finances than anything. Hosting cricket in the Caribbean is the most expensive in the world by far (not me saying that, it's our CEO Johnny Graves) as it requires flights to multiple different countries, hotels etc. It is so expensive that we can't even afford home and away domestic tournaments and have to host them in one or two islands.
Ever since the ICC changed to a financing model where away teams recieve barely any money for touring (which we voted against), we have been financially hamstrung and whenever we host anyone who is not England or India we lose huge amounts of money. Absolutely nothing has been done by the ICC to remedy this as the big 3 get richer and we struggle more and more. We literally had to wait for a year in which both India and England toured to have enough money to set up our new academy. How on earth are we supposed to compete when the playing field is nowhere near level?
Match this with the proliferation of T20 leagues and our selectors incredible lack of flexibility and we never even get to select our most talented players. Given how small our talent pool is, losing the top 20% of talent from red ball cricket is massively detrimental for us, it's miraculous that we still win as many tests as we do tbh.
The current administration have put a lot of things in place like an academy, a big training programme for local coaches etc but you have to remember that different islands feed into our system and some of the territorial boards, like the Jamaica Cricket Association, are asleep at the wheel with very little money to work with even if they were capable.
Unless the ICC levels up the financial playing field we won't be truly competitive in the long term, that's the unfortunate truth. They need to decide if they want a diverse selection of international teams or if Australia, England and India are just happy to play themselves and collect all the $$$$.
Ever since the ICC changed to a financing model where away teams recieve barely any money for touring (which we voted against), we have been financially hamstrung and whenever we host anyone who is not England or India we lose huge amounts of money. Absolutely nothing has been done by the ICC to remedy this as the big 3 get richer and we struggle more and more. We literally had to wait for a year in which both India and England toured to have enough money to set up our new academy. How on earth are we supposed to compete when the playing field is nowhere near level?
Match this with the proliferation of T20 leagues and our selectors incredible lack of flexibility and we never even get to select our most talented players. Given how small our talent pool is, losing the top 20% of talent from red ball cricket is massively detrimental for us, it's miraculous that we still win as many tests as we do tbh.
The current administration have put a lot of things in place like an academy, a big training programme for local coaches etc but you have to remember that different islands feed into our system and some of the territorial boards, like the Jamaica Cricket Association, are asleep at the wheel with very little money to work with even if they were capable.
Unless the ICC levels up the financial playing field we won't be truly competitive in the long term, that's the unfortunate truth. They need to decide if they want a diverse selection of international teams or if Australia, England and India are just happy to play themselves and collect all the $$$$.
