KINGSTON, Ja­maica – De­feat­ed Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) pres­i­dent Dave Cameron and his run­ning mate Em­manuel Nathan are hop­ing that the new hi­er­ar­chy will build on what has been left be­hind.

Cameron, who served the re­gion­al body for 17 years – six of those as pres­i­dent – and Nathan who spent 15 years at the West In­dies Crick­et Board and CWI, made the call short­ly af­ter Ricky Sker­ritt and Dr Kishore Shal­low de­feat­ed them 8-4 in yes­ter­day’s elec­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to sources close to the day's event, the fi­nal vote if yet to be con­firmed, but re­ports sug­gest that Sker­ritt, 62, won the elec­tion af­ter se­cur­ing sup­port from Trinidad and To­ba­go which nom­i­nat­ed both Dr Shal­low and him, Lee­ward Is­lands, Wind­ward Is­lands and Cameron’s home na­tion of Ja­maica. Up to the time of the elec­tion Ja­maica has not hint­ed which team it was sup­port­ing.

Cameron is be­lieved to have se­cured votes from Guyana and Bar­ba­dos. Al­though the in­cum­bent would not have been count­ing on the sup­port of his home na­tion, it was pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced that he had se­cured the sup­port of the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned teams.

In a state­ment re­leased by CWI, the two thanked those who sup­port­ed them dur­ing their tenure.

“We were glad to be able to serve and proud of our achieve­ments. We are hap­py that we left 123 play­ers un­der con­tract. West In­dies Crick­et now has a home owned by the board at Coolidge Crick­et Grounds. The World Cham­pi­onships and bring­ing back the Wis­den Tro­phy are al­so oth­er achieve­ments that we are proud of. More than any­thing else we have a fit youth­ful team that is pre­pared to face the world,” the state­ment read.

How­ev­er, af­ter the vote he said, “I am very sur­prised, but I just like to say thanks to the re­gion for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to serve West In­dies crick­et, it was a tremen­dous run. When we came in­to of­fice we found West In­dies crick­et in a state and I think we now leave it in a bet­ter state and we are very proud of those achieve­ments.”

He con­tin­ued: “I trust­ed the process that we are men of in­tegri­ty and I banked on that, that we are a group on in­tegri­ty and we stand for some­thing, so that’s where I am very dis­ap­point­ed that men gave me their word and then went a dif­fer­ent way.

“But that is elec­tion all around, I think we have a lot to be proud of win­ning back the Wis­den tro­phy af­ter 10 years and see­ing us com­pete the way we did against Eng­land just now. I tell you I am very ex­cit­ed for West In­dies crick­et if we con­tin­ue on this tra­jec­to­ry.”

“Un­der this team, we made sig­nif­i­cant strides and you trust­ed us to safe­guard the re­gion’s most valu­able as­set. The tenure was re­ward­ing and full of chal­lenges and we feel proud we have man­aged to take the crick­et to this lev­el.

“We an­tic­i­pate the sport will move to­wards its true po­ten­tial and we ask the new team to build up­on the progress and to con­tin­ue to fight for eq­ui­ty in world crick­et,” the state­ment added.

We were al­ways and will re­main grate­ful for your sup­port.