Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:25 AM
May 01, 2014 Sports
By Sean Devers
The Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) which was founded in 1943, officially launched its website yesterday at the Board’s secretariat at Bourda and GCB Secretary Anand Sanasie informed that in 2014 the GCB made some very significant strides in preparing the only governing body for cricket in Guyana for the future in the administration of the game in Guyana.
“The GCB has just celebrated seven continuous decades of outstanding service to the cricketing populace, albeit, in a very low key manner with this year marking the commencement of its eight decade of existence. The entire cricketing world has had to face up with numerous challenges from various forces, both internal and external. In this regard, the GCB has not been spared having to withstand more than its fair share of challenges and obstacles,” Sanasie declared.
“Irrespective of these numerous distractions, if we may refer to them that way, the GCB has remained steadfastly focused on fulfilling its mandate of administering cricket in Guyana even whilst spending a fair amount of time and resources in fending off these challenges and laying the groundwork for the changes currently taking place in the cricketing landscape around the world,” the West Indies Cricket Board Director added.
Last December, at the GCB’s Annual Awards Ceremony, GCB President Dru Bahadur had prioritized his cricketing vision for this year with a few carefully orchestrated programmes, activities and events. These programmes were specifically geared towards, firstly, professionalizing the GCB’s operations while at the same time charting a course for the revitalization of Guyana cricket in all formats.
“Our aim is to get Guyana back to the top of the region by 2017. Our very first activity for the year was the comprehensive preparation of 26 members of our Senior Male teams for the Regional tournaments that commenced in February and have just been concluded. In the Super50 tournament, we reached the semifinals but succumbed after the majority of the team contracted the flu in TT. That epidemic in TT severely hampered the performance of several of our key players in that semi final encounter with Barbados and it was truly a stirring tribute and testament to the quality and character of our players that they were actually even able to contest this semifinal,” said GCB’s Marketing Manager Raj Singh.
According to Sansei, the performance of the four-day team was deplorable and prompted an urgent inquiry to determine the cause of Guyana’s poor showing in the longer version this year. “At best, the results in the Regional four-day tournament have been hugely disappointing for the Guyana team even though we had most of our top players available most of the time and as we speak the GCB is currently conducting a post mortem of this tournament to ascertain the true cause of this clearly lackluster performance by our team,” Sansei lamented
“In fact a four-man GCB delegation met with the Captain and the Management team in a debriefing session. We have not decided if the findings will be made public or be used internally by the Board” Sansei stated. “In January, we restarted our Scotia Bank Kiddies cricket countrywide and that programme has been a tremendous success with close to 200 primary schools participating and over 2000 students between the ages of 7 and 11 benefiting from this invaluable programme. Special kudos to Scotia Bank for remaining committed to this noblest of programmes. The benefit of this initiative is blossoming now and will begin to bear fruit in the near future. A database of these players is being developed and the new director of cricket at the WICB has mapped out a continuous programme for the development of these youths,” Singh explained.
In February the GCB launched its inaugural ‘ The Guyana Cricketer’ full color glossy magazine which contained its feature article on Test cricket’s great, Guyanese Shiv Chanderpaul on achieving his unique milestone of the first West Indian to play 150 Tests matches.
According to Singh, a few other articles, statistics and records of the Board’s activities for the year 2013 are featured in the magazine which was considered to be a tremendous success and attracted close to 50 corporate sponsors in its inaugural 70th anniversary edition.
The Board plans to make this activity an annual one after the GCB had launched its Grassroots programme in February which is still on-going and is aimed at students between the ages of 11 to 17years. “We are in the planning stages of having over 100 coaches and games masters in schools trained and certified with at least a Level 1 coaching certificate in the next few months. A Child Protection Seminar has just been conducted for these persons as a precursor for the coaching programme. A Managers and officials seminar has just taken place last Sunday. A scorers’ seminar took place on Tuesday and today we are launching our own website -www.guyanacricketboard.com,” Singh informed.
“This website is being developed in phases with the basic informational and interactive phase just concluded. The next phase would deal with incorporating statistical and scoring software for our players and matches and ultimately our goal is to have live scores for our matches streamed for our viewers. At the present time, this website provides a wealth of information for the cricketing public. It provides the history and administrative structure of the GCB, details of the staff and executive body of the GCB, the 2014 cricket calendar, our administrative structure, GCB’s members and their constituents, our members’ constitutions, our cricket programmes, current news, local, regional and international. This site also features scores for the regional and local inter county matches recently completed,” Singh continued.
It is the aim of the GCB to make their website the number one go-to website for all cricket news from Guyana for our regional and international audience.
“Our official sponsors are prominently displayed therein and a few have been granted the privilege of free ads for a few months thus ensuring maximum mileage for these sponsors. Our cricket magazine has also been posted online for those persons who did not secure a hard copy. The site also has several links to its parent, WICB, ICC and others along with its Facebook and Twitter accounts,” said Singh.
The site which was constructed and is being hosted and maintained by GxMedia and the Web Developer to Girendra Persaud has been given a year’s contract and is in the process of teaching staffers Savana Lake and Melinda Bishundyal the working of the Website.
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