To­day marks an­oth­er year of life for me, the day fol­low­ing the birth of Je­sus Christ. The im­por­tant fac­tor in this is that I don’t feel a year old­er, but I know many of you may wrong­ly sug­gest I look it.

Many dif­fer­ent things have hap­pened in sport in the last week, both on and off the field to end the year. Let’s start with crick­et —I men­tioned last week that the West In­dies’ prob­lem at the mo­ment is in our bowl­ing and so we couldn’t de­fend 315 vs In­dia. Al­though we showed some fight and de­ter­mi­na­tion and had the In­di­an fans ex­treme­ly ner­vous com­ing to the end of the game, our bowlers lacked the ex­pe­ri­ence to close it out. I am cer­tain this is some­thing both Phil Sim­mons and Kieron Pol­lard will be pay­ing close at­ten­tion to and while we showed the willpow­er to beat In­dia, we al­so des­per­ate­ly need qual­i­ty bowl­ing, which is not there at the mo­ment.

Our next se­ries is against Ire­land be­gin­ning on Jan­u­ary 7 and I ex­pect us to win com­fort­ably. But it will be in­ter­est­ing when the fi­nal squad is cho­sen, as some im­por­tant ques­tions re­main. Will Dwayne Bra­vo be brought back to bol­ster the bowl­ing? What about An­dre Rus­sell? Will he ever be fit again for the rigours of in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et? I un­der­stand Sunil Nar­ine is avail­able for the T20 se­ries against the Irish, but will he even­tu­al­ly be fit for the ODIs? The oth­er ques­tion will be should the se­lec­tors stick with this present crop of bowlers in the hope they will im­prove over the com­ing year? Whichev­er route the se­lec­tors choose, it will be a tough de­ci­sion. How­ev­er, the year has end­ed on a pos­i­tive note for Windies crick­et thanks to Sim­mons and Pol­lard.

Off the field, I read that for­mer In­di­an open­er Gau­tam Gamb­hir has crit­i­cised the In­di­an Pre­mier League (IPL) fran­chise Kings XI Pun­jab (KX­IP) for se­cur­ing the ser­vices of Shel­don Cot­trell for US$1.2M. Well, Gam­bir is no Kohli, Ten­dulkar or Gavaskar, but even by his own ad­mis­sion there were no bet­ter op­tions. If that was the case, one must ex­pect to pay a pre­mi­um price if se­cur­ing the ser­vices of a re­li­able fast bowler is the ex­pect­ed out­come. Cot­trell has been out­stand­ing this year for the West In­dies. His bowl­ing and field­ing went above and be­yond ex­pec­ta­tions and one can eas­i­ly analyse his im­prove­ment game by game. So is the mil­lion dol­lar price tag a des­per­a­tion buy? Let’s hope from a West In­di­an per­spec­tive, he makes Gam­bir choke on his words. Of equal im­por­tance is why didn’t he say the same KX­IP got a steal of a deal when get­ting Nico­las Pooran for US$591k where­as the Del­hi Cap­i­tals paid $1m for Shim­ron Het­my­er? One may sug­gest Gam­bir un­der­stands pol­i­tics very well.

The new ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Trinidad & To­ba­go Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) ap­pears to be work­ing at pace. They re­mind me of when Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) changed their lead­er­ship and be­fore you could blink, the house was giv­en a thor­ough clean­ing. Ad­mit­ted­ly, I ex­pect­ed some of the changes. For ex­am­ple, they were un­for­tu­nate­ly left with no choice re­gard­ing Den­nis Law­er­ence, as the re­sults can on­ly be de­scribed as abysmal; and so in comes Ter­ry Fen­wick. This was one area I was hop­ing would have tak­en a lit­tle more time, as they ab­solute­ly must get this ap­point­ment right. But let us give Fen­wick the chance. From all re­ports, four ap­pli­ca­tions were re­ceived for the post and al­though Fen­wick’s ask­ing salary was more than the oth­ers, his avail­abil­i­ty to start the job on Jan­u­ary 1, 2020, played a ma­jor part in the de­ci­sion to hire him. Talk­ing with some fans, this rea­son did not go down well. How­ev­er, we must be mind­ful that we have games com­ing up to start our Gold Cup 2021 qual­i­fi­ca­tion cam­paign and it was in­evitable that we had to get some­one on board im­me­di­ate­ly to put a team in place for us to have any hopes of qual­i­fi­ca­tion. This was brought on by the fact that we fin­ished last in Group C of the Na­tions League and missed out on easy qual­i­fi­ca­tion via this tour­na­ment. Fen­wick, who has been open­ly crit­i­cal of the na­tion­al set-up, in­clud­ing past coach­es, now has the chance to put his CV where his mouth was and not on­ly get us in­to the Gold Cup, but re­store pride in the na­tion­al team while mov­ing us up the FI­FA rank­ings from where we cur­rent­ly stand at 104 - Ja­maica sits at 48. I tru­ly wish Fen­wick well for the sake of our na­tion­al foot­ball, but I am sure there are many foot­ball fans who will let him have it if he fails.

Stay­ing with ad­min­is­tra­tion, I was sur­prised to see the res­ig­na­tion of new­ly-in­stalled Trinidad & To­ba­go Cy­cling Fed­er­a­tion (TTCF) pres­i­dent Lar­ry Ro­many. On the heels of his res­ig­na­tion comes the news that the cy­cling com­mit­tee has to ac­count for miss­ing pay­ments. The per­for­mances of our cy­clists has been one of the bright lights in T&T sport for 2019 and I have been im­pressed look­ing in from the out­side with the TTCF’s han­dling of the sport’s af­fairs. Hope­ful­ly, this is just a bump in the road and the cy­cling com­mit­tee pro­duces what­ev­er doc­u­men­ta­tion is need­ed to ver­i­fy the pur­chase of equip­ment for the na­tion­al sprint team. If they don’t, for the in­tegri­ty of the sport, I will ex­pect prop­er ac­tion to be tak­en.

Last­ly, I nev­er had the chance to com­ment on our na­tion­al crick­et team’s per­for­mance in the Su­per 50 Cup, where I saw our coach Mervyn Dil­lon blame the se­lec­tors for us not get­ting to the fi­nal and win­ning. Re­al­ly, Mervyn? Aren’t you one of the se­lec­tors and shouldn’t you, along with the cap­tain, have the fi­nal say? Mervyn, a good trades­man nev­er blames his tools.

As this is my fi­nal col­umn for 2019, to all my read­ers, I hope you had a won­der­ful Christ­mas and I take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to wish you, your fam­i­lies, friends and all our sports teams a bright and pros­per­ous 2020.

Ed­i­tor’s note: The views ex­pressed in this col­umn are sole­ly those of the writer and do not re­flect the views of any or­gan­i­sa­tion of which he is a stake­hold­er