For­mer Prime Min­is­ter of Trinidad and To­ba­go, Dr Kei­th Row­ley has re­fut­ed claims by Crick­et West In­dies (CWI) pres­i­dent, Dr Kishore Shal­low that Cari­com gov­ern­ments were not do­ing enough to as­sist in the de­vel­op­ment of crick­et in the re­gion.

In fact, Dr Row­ley, who al­so served as chair­man of Cari­com’s Prime Min­is­te­r­i­al Sub-Com­mit­tee on Crick­et dur­ing his time in of­fice, said he was shocked to hear such ac­cu­sa­tions from Dr Shal­low.

In a pre­vi­ous in­ter­view on WESN Tv’s Face of Sports pro­gramme, Dr Shal­low charged that in­fra­struc­ture across the re­gion need­ed to be im­proved, and there was a need for more em­pha­sis to be placed on grass­roots crick­et pro­grammes along with school and club crick­et.

He con­tend­ed it was a mis­con­cep­tion that it was the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of CWI or the ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards to ad­dress those is­sues.

Dr Shal­low said CWI did not have the re­sources to un­der­take such a mas­sive ven­ture and they need­ed the help of gov­ern­ments in the re­gion.

How­ev­er, speak­ing dur­ing an in­ter­view on Is­ports on i95.5 FM re­cent­ly, Dr Row­ley main­tained that Cari­com gov­ern­ments were not to blame.

“As you know I’m no longer in­volved in Cari­com’s busi­ness or car­ry­ing the po­si­tions I held at Cari­com, so I don’t want to pre­tend to speak for Cari­com, but I am quite sur­prised that Dr Shal­low in the face of a man­age­ment dis­as­ter at Crick­et West In­dies could iden­ti­fy Cari­com gov­ern­ments as the prob­lem that we are fac­ing.

“I am not sure ex­act­ly what CWI is ex­pect­ing from Cari­com gov­ern­ments as they run the show of try­ing to com­pete in in­ter­na­tion­al Test crick­et,” Dr Row­ley said.

“As far as I am aware, Cari­com gov­ern­ments this last sea­son when I was there and Dr Mitchell from Grena­da, Prime Min­is­ter Gon­salves from St Vin­cent and now Pres­i­dent Ali from Guyana, it is my view that Cari­com did more than in­di­cate an in­ter­est in West In­dies crick­et and we ac­tu­al­ly tried to work along­side CWI.

“At that meet­ing we held here in Trinidad to see how Cari­com could sup­port CWI, that was a unique sit­u­a­tion. We brought a lot of peo­ple here who are stake­hold­ers and tried to un­tan­gle the web that is West In­dies’ con­fu­sion in crick­et, and I re­al­ly don’t think that Dr Shal­low means that Cari­com gov­ern­ments should be blamed,” he fur­ther added.

“Crick­et in the Caribbean at school lev­el and ju­nior lev­el is large­ly a gov­ern­ment thing; the fa­cil­i­ties, the in­fra­struc­ture are gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­ties in most in­stances and gov­ern­ments give tremen­dous sup­port.” (CMC)