Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) wants an am­i­ca­ble end to the cur­rent le­gal bat­tle be­tween them­selves and for­mer se­lec­tors Court­ney Browne and El­dine Bap­tiste.

This is the word from CEO of CWI Jon­ny Graves, speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia Sports last evening. The le­gal firm of Thomas, John and Co. act­ing on be­half of Browne and Bap­tiste has writ­ten to the Labour Com­mis­sion of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da stat­ing that their clients were is­sued with ter­mi­na­tion let­ters by CWI on April 10, 2019. They stat­ed that the board made the ref­er­ence of a Task Force es­tab­lished to re­view the se­lec­tion sys­tem at all lev­els and that the com­mit­tee will be chaired by vice-pres­i­dent Dr Kishore Shal­low and is ex­pect­ed to present rec­om­men­da­tions to the board at this next meet­ing in June.

The let­ter from the at­tor­neys con­tin­ued: "Sig­nif­i­cant­ly and notwith­stand­ing that the Task Force had not yet met, or made any rec­om­men­da­tion to the board, the em­ploy­er went on to in­form our clients that 'the se­lec­tion pan­el' was dis­solved and that our clients' ser­vices will not be re­quired by CWI af­ter the 31, March 2019.

The May 7 le­gal let­ter to the Crick­et Board high­light­ed 19 com­plaints with re­gards to the re­moval of Browne and Bap­tiste as se­lec­tors.

Graves ex­plained: "We thought that the se­lec­tion pan­el would have en­dured un­cer­tain­ty know­ing that a Task Force was put in place to deal with se­lec­tion sys­tems.

"At the point in time di­rec­tor of crick­et Jim­my Adams and my­self called the se­lec­tors and spoke to them, let­ting them know that af­ter the rec­om­men­da­tion from the se­lec­tors come in, they are free to re-ap­ply for their po­si­tions or any oth­er po­si­tions that will be ad­ver­tised. We re­in­forced to them that we ex­pect­ed and want­ed them to ap­ply for fu­ture po­si­tions."

The lawyers, how­ev­er, are con­tend­ing that their clients have been de­nied earn­ings by be­ing axed. They out­lined that Browne stand to earn US$71,000 an­nu­al­ly plus US$6,000 tele­phone costs. Bap­tiste was to earn US$51,600 plus US$3,600 a year's tele­phone pay­ment.

Graves said: "As in­de­pen­dent con­trac­tors of the board, we de­cid­ed to of­fer the guys three months pay af­ter April. We were well with­in the line in terms of their con­tract to play this amount if we de­cid­ed to end it.

At the end of this pe­ri­od, the find­ings of the Task Force will be made known to us and we will ad­ver­tise the po­si­tions and they are free to reap­ply."

Graves added that there are now three dis­tinct ar­eas that se­lec­tors are need­ed for and all this will be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion by the Task Force. "This Task Force was not put in place to get rid of any­body. It was put to­geth­er to bring our struc­ture in line with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards, for ex­am­ple in terms of num­bers of se­lec­tors they may want to look at more than four peo­ple choos­ing teams across the board. We have three dis­tinct cat­e­gories, the men's se­nior teams, the women's team and al­so the youth teams.

"In my opin­ion that is an aw­ful lot of crick­et for four se­lec­tors to be look­ing at and se­lect­ing. Un­der the in­ter­im arrange­ment we have put in place, we have now giv­en the Head Coach and cap­tain vot­ing rights. Whether the Task Force agrees with this or not, we wait to see. Be­fore the se­lec­tors were trav­el­ling to the match­es. We have stopped that be­cause it costs a sig­nif­i­cant amount of mon­ey. Now with the cap­tain and coach hav­ing vot­ing rights, we have stopped se­lec­tors from trav­el­ling."

Guardian Me­dia Sports un­der­stands that the task force in­cludes Shal­low, Adams, Enoch Lewis, Jim­my Adams and three for­mer West In­dies crick­eters.