Vin­ode Mam­chan

Re­cent­ly re-elect­ed West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) pres­i­dent Dave Cameron has got­ten the full sup­port of all the ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards, as they bid to con­tin­ue the move for­ward for West In­dies crick­et.

Cameron in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian said: "In the last elec­tions I did not have the full sup­port of all at the be­gin­ning but we were able to bring all to­geth­er this will not be any dif­fer­ent. All boards pledged their full sup­port af­ter the elec­tions and we are go­ing to con­tin­ue to do our best to take the game for­ward."

Om March 7, 2015 Cameron was vot­ed in for the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive term as head of the re­gion­al body, de­feat­ing WICB di­rec­tor and pres­i­dent of the Bar­ba­dos Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tion (BCA) Joel Gar­ner 8-4 in the vote. His run­ning mate Em­man­u­al Nan­ton was re-elect­ed to the post of vice-pres­i­dent by the same mar­gin, get­ting the bet­ter of Bal­dath Ma­habir from T&T.

Asked about the mood of the meet­ing af­ter the elec­tion re­sults, the Ja­maican replied: "The gen­er­al mood was very good as most per­sons want­ed us to con­tin­ue the progress we have made thus far."

Cameron and young bright Ja­maican busi­ness­man had a chal­leng­ing first stint af­ter he took over from St.Lu­cian Dr. Julien Hunte. This is how he saw his first stint :"The suc­cess­es of the first term are many, but of course the launch of the PCL (Pro­fes­sion­al Crick­et League) and CPL (Caribbean Pre­mier League) were big. We now have a prop­er do­mes­tic sea­son last­ing about sev­en months with win­dows for IPL (In­di­an Pre­mier League) al­though there will be a clash this year and CPL as well as the Cham­pi­ons League."

Speak­ing on his over­all lead­er­ship style in his first two-year stint he said :""Not much I would have done dif­fer­ent­ly in the first term, but would have hoped for dif­fer­ent out­come and that has to do with our re­view of our the com­pen­sa­tion sys­tem and the at­ten­dant fall­out in In­dia. We cer­tain­ly did not an­tic­i­pate what came out and re­gret­ted the out­come."

The West In­dies crick­eters abort­ed their tour of In­dia due to a pay­ment struc­ture dis­pute with their play­ers as­so­ci­a­tion and this has left the WICB with a bill of US$41.97M rep­re­sent­ing loss­es in­curred by the Board of Con­trol for Crick­et in In­dia (BC­CI).

That mat­ter is still be­ing dealt with the pret­ty soon the WICB will give an up­date on the mat­ter.

One of the chal­lenges in mov­ing for­ward and an is­sue that has to get im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion ac­cord­ing to Cameron is the re­brand­ing of West In­dies crick­et.

"The biggest chal­lenge ahead is the re­brand­ing ex­er­cise of the WICB as is re­quired. We were told at the meet­ing of the stake­hold­ers that our biggest prob­lem was our PR and com­mu­ni­ca­tions and we are go­ing to look at this im­me­di­ate­ly."