BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos – As Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) tries to stay afloat amid fi­nan­cial tur­bu­lence ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, a crick­et leg­end has sug­gest­ed that it needs as­sis­tance to re­duce costs as­so­ci­at­ed with play­ing the sport in the Caribbean.

Sir Clive Lloyd, an ac­com­plished for­mer Windies cap­tain, con­tend­ed that giv­en the cur­rent high cost of trav­el and ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion, it was dif­fi­cult for CWI to make a prof­it.

“We don’t make any mon­ey play­ing crick­et at home any­more, and that is be­cause of the costs…. We trav­el by plane, we stay at ho­tels in the high sea­son. We have to try and get some­body to look af­ter that,” he said on the Ma­son and Guest ra­dio show here Tues­day night.

“We can’t go to places to play Test crick­et where you’re not go­ing to make any mon­ey. We can play One-Day games in some of these places, which would be much bet­ter for West In­dies in­stead of tak­ing them to places where you know that no­body is go­ing to come for the four or five days.

“Crick­et is very ex­pen­sive so we have to look at all these things…. You have to have a plan…. All these years – we’re now 80-odd years – and we’re still in the dol­drums where fi­nances are con­cerned,” Sir Clive lament­ed.

CWI, al­ready in a tough fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion, has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic which has forced the post­pone­ment of some rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing se­ries that is now in jeop­ardy of be­ing called off.

Last week, pres­i­dent Ricky Sker­ritt said the sit­u­a­tion had plunged CWI’s “al­ready poor fi­nan­cial state in­to ICU”, and the ur­gency of the sit­u­a­tion re­quired cost-cut­ting and not sim­ply cost-sav­ing.

A quar­ter­ly board meet­ing sched­uled for lat­er this month is ex­pect­ed to have fi­nance as its sole agen­da item as the re­gion­al gov­ern­ing body at­tempts to stave off a cri­sis.

Sir Clive al­so com­ment­ed on the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing a re­cent CWI au­dit re­port which un­cov­ered “il­lus­tra­tions of ques­tion­able ex­ec­u­tive stan­dards and prac­tices”.

The au­dit was com­mis­sioned by the Sker­rit ad­min­is­tra­tion which took of­fice in March 2019 and was car­ried out by ac­count­ing and man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm, Pan­nell Kerr Fos­ter (PKF). The in­ter­nal re­port was sub­mit­ted to the Board last De­cem­ber but por­tions of it were on­ly re­cent­ly made pub­lic by in­ter­na­tion­al broad­cast­er and leg­endary for­mer West In­dies fast bowler, Michael Hold­ing on a YouTube crick­et show.

“We have a re­port that is all over the place. Things must be very chaot­ic at the mo­ment,” Sir Clive ob­served.

“I hope that good sense can pre­vail and they can sit down and work things out be­cause our crick­et needs to have some sta­bil­i­ty.”

Lawyers for Sker­rit’s pre­de­ces­sor, Dave Cameron, have threat­ened le­gal ac­tion against CWI un­less he gets a copy of the au­dit re­port.

Vet­er­an at­tor­ney Tony Astaphan, a mem­ber of Cameron’s le­gal team, has de­scribed some of the re­port’s find­ings as “se­ri­ous­ly lack­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty” and said his client was en­ti­tled to a copy so he could de­fend him­self.

(CMC)