An­dre Bap­tise

Dar­ren Bra­vo is slow­ly be­com­ing the for­got­ten man in West In­dies Crick­et, as the Crick­et West In­dies con­tin­ues to labour over his sit­u­a­tion, while it would ap­pear with­out adopt­ing the req­ui­site prop­er labour laws which are ap­plic­a­ble world­wide, and more im­por­tant­ly cer­tain­ly en­force­able in this coun­try.

The fact, that the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed left-hand­ed bats­man is not be­ing al­lowed to rep­re­sent T&T in both the re­gion­al four day tour­na­ment and the up­com­ing re­gion­al Su­per-50 over tour­na­ment, has to be a cause of con­cern for the T&T Crick­et Board, for many rea­sons, but their col­lec­tive si­lence on the is­sue is deaf­en­ing. Are they all asleep?

How­ev­er, the new­ly ap­point­ed cap­tain, the back in favour De­nesh Ramdin, has open­ly ex­pressed his dis­plea­sure with the in­or­di­nate de­lay in Bra­vo's mat­ter be­ing solved and even that of young Nicholas Pooran. If one did not know bet­ter, it could be pre­sumed that this was in­ten­tion­al by Crick­et West in­dies, to frus­trate both play­ers.

In the mean­time, both young men will have to en­sure that by par­tic­i­pat­ing in their lo­cal club crick­et, they can guar­an­tee they are fit and ready should these mat­ters be solved quick­ly, which at this stage seems hope­ful.

An­oth­er school of thought that ex­ists is the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry which sug­gests that the longer these two mat­ters de­lay both Bra­vo and Pooran may en­sure that T&T will not be able to make a suc­cess­ful de­fence of its Su­per 50-overs ti­tle.

It ap­pears that Bra­vo has been vic­timised be­cause he spoke the truth on state­ments made by the CWI pres­i­dent Dave Cameron on a pay pack­age pur­port­ed to have been of­fered to Bra­vo. Bra­vo has stat­ed what was spo­ken by the Pres­i­dent was not the truth. I agree that per­haps his re­sponse may have been too strong for the pub­lic, how­ev­er, in sim­i­lar fash­ion, one would agree that the Pres­i­dent Cameron's own state­ments was as er­ror of judge­ment and which would have pre­ced­ed those of Bra­vo. A lev­el of con­trite re­morse should be two way and not one way.

And while it ap­pears in T&T, we for­get our he­roes, let me re­mind the peo­ple of this Re­pub­lic that Bra­vo has been in­stru­men­tal over the last five years in par­tic­u­lar with T&T's suc­cess in both T20 and the Lim­it­ed Overs (50 overs) for­mats in the re­gion, and his ex­pe­ri­ence and tal­ent are vi­tal to our fu­ture suc­cess.

Thank­ful­ly from my un­der­stand­ing both Bra­vo and Pooran, have a strong fam­i­ly up­bring­ing that means they can de­pend on oth­ers for com­fort and so­lace dur­ing these dif­fi­cult times and this will en­sure that both play­ers re­main stead­fast in their goals to con­tin­u­al­ly achieve more in crick­et.

So as we wait for the Crick­et West In­dies and the T&T Crick­et Board to awak­en from their long slum­ber and be pro ac­tive, it should be not­ed that every­one is watch­ing in­clud­ing those out­side of the Caribbean based on the nu­mer­ous ques­tions, I have an­swered on these mat­ters and yet again, it ap­pears that both of them (thanks Mighty Spar­row) are back­ing back on each oth­er and not go­ing for­ward.