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Apr 08, 2016 Sports
WICB President Dave Cameron talks about what he has done to turn things around for West Indies cricket, and the difficulties of getting everyone on the same page.
Dave Cameron smiles when reminded he has been WICB president for three years. “Three years and two days,” he says. We are sitting in the lobby of a hotel in South Mumbai a day before West Indies’ World T20 semi-final against India. The smog is heavy on the Arabian sea across the road at nine in the morning. Cameron arrives on the dot at the agreed time, wearing a T-shirt with the WICB insignia on the right bust, and jeans. Stern-faced to begin with, he opens up gradually.
Cameron has been painted as an autocrat, strong-willed and not given to bending to the wishes of others. In person, he comes across as strong-minded, forceful, a persuasive talker.
He thinks he is misunderstood. But he has no time to deal with opinions. He says he is sick and tired of West Indies losing their long-held eminence. In this interview, he talks of how he came to be WICB president, why he has taken the decisions he has in order for West Indies cricket to move forward, why the players should trust his vision for growth and development, and much else besides.
A big shot in the arm for you and the WICB that the BCCI has gone ahead with the India tour?
We are delighted. The next step now is to ensure we have a competitive series.
Did you expect this to happen?
We anticipated that the series would go on. We had it scheduled alongside the CPL, so we had made all the arrangements, including even the CPL draft, so that all the Test players would be available for the series.
Were any conditions put forth by the BCCI?
I don’t necessarily want to go into the conditions. At the appropriate time we will announce exactly what the arrangements are.
On March 27, 2013 you became president. You won the elections for a second time on March 7 last year. You are 47. You must feel proud to be elected twice to an important and influential position at a young age?
One needs to go back and reflect on how I have gotten here. At no time did I aspire to be president.
I am actually the president of my club – Kensington Cricket Club – in Jamaica. Proud, proud president of that club. Going 16 years now. I was then asked to participate in the Jamaica Cricket Association, and I took up as a treasurer. Then I was asked to sit at the WICB, where I have been for the last 14 years. At the tender age of 32 I went to WICB. Through serving the game they asked me to lead the sport.
I want to bring a different mindset to the leadership of West Indies cricket, in that my objective is not to be the president but to make West Indies cricket better. And that is why some of my decisions are a little unpopular because it is about turning around our sport, something that means so much to the West Indies civilisation. We have been very bad for a very long time. If you know history, it always shows that somebody needs to take a firm grip, make some very dramatic changes and then we will start to see the changes from there.
Unfortunately we have been putting band-aids on the issues over the years without really addressing them and restructuring the game. We have done that. That is my proudest moment. It has caused the issues in India [the team pulling out of the tour in 2014]. Very unfortunate, and we continue to be disappointed about the way that turned out, but again, the programme was all rolled out and agreed prior to [the India tour]. What we didn’t do, the step that we did not have covered, was to sit with our players and be able to explain exactly how it would been done. So we would have dispatched a team to come to India to sit with them, and that was scheduled for, I think, two days before the actual falling out of the events.
That is the unfortunate bit. We are 16 islands, so it is not very easy to have everybody in one place for discussions, so we felt it was better to come on this side [India], where we would have had all the senior players and met them between the end of the ODI series and the beginning of the Tests. All the players could have gone through the new system, and so hopefully that would have been prevented.
Be that as it may, we are here now, our new franchise system has been in place for the last two years. The first season, we did not really have a chance to prepare players. This year is our first proper season and we are starting to see a lot of young players coming through. Of course some of them are 27, 28, but they are mature enough to push for places in the Test team. I am happy that we have been able to do that. A little sad that it has taken the route it took.
What have been your biggest achievements in the job so far?
Our entire domestic cricket is professional. In 2013 the CPL was introduced under my tenure. Our players moved from being paid US$5000 for the tournament to being paid $150,000, since, for the first time, we introduced contracts. Then we introduced the Professional Cricket League (PCL). We are playing more [domestic] cricket. For the first time we have started to create a cricket industry where youngsters can actually look on and say, I can be part of that. I don’t have to be in the elite 15, as it used to be, to be able to earn a living and to be competitive in the sport. And, of course, I can’t leave out winning the Under-19 World Cup. It was very, very special to us.
What did the WICB contribute to that U-19 win?
We contributed everything. Because we have not been having issues with our players’ association for the first time in the last two years, we have been able to concentrate on cricket. Prior to 2013, when we took over, we were paying an average of over a million and a half dollars a year in legal fees. All we were doing was battling with our players’ association, arbitration, mediation. So we spent a lot of time just dealing with legal issues, and not focusing on the development of the sport. When we took over with the agreement we signed with WIPA, we were now able to focus on development and what our players needed to get better. For the first time the U-19 players played in our Super50 last year. We had a number of camps in between. We also had a high-performance team deployed to assist the U-19 squad. We also changed the format of U-19 cricket last year, to play more 50-over matches over three-day games.
We realised when our players got to U-19 tournaments, a lot of times they had only played four or five 50-over matches. So they lacked experience. Because of the professional set-up, players benefited from being a part of that. No longer do we have a semi-professional or amateur sport, we now have teams practising all year.
Take the case of [Shimron] Hetmyer, who has been a part of the Guyana franchise system for the last two years. Keemo Paul and [Tevin] Imlach got scholarships from the Guyana Jaguars as well. Alzarri Joseph has been playing in the Leeward Islands set-up from last year. These were the standout guys in the U-19 World Cup. Hetmyer came back and scored a century in the PCL. We are very, very proud of what we have achieved with those U-19s. We now have a blueprint and we will be improving on that in the next tournaments. Get nervous.
You are not a popular man in the Caribbean. Virtually everyone seems to disagree with you. Why is that?
(Smiles) My approach may be a little bit different from what is customary. It has been said that I am little forthright. My objective is that everyone understands me once they get to sit down and talk to me. I am very straightforward. It is probably a Jamaican thing: we will tell you exactly how we feel. It is not personal. It is just that I would like to win. We have a very, very strong sense of winning, of doing well. We have just been doing bad for a very, very long time. I just don’t have ten years to take my time to turn around what is a very big ship. So changing the way we do things, have discussions about being more professional about the way we go sometimes rubs people the wrong way. And if I do, then I apologise, but the truth is, I just want to get better. I am tired of losing.
We have had a win-loss record that is not something to smile about. The only way we are going to be able to turn that around is, we have to be more professional, force our players and the management and the board of directors to step up and be better at what we do.
Players are the most important asset for any board. How would you describe your relationship with them?
My relationship with the players is fine, as between any president and his players. Obviously I would have liked it to be a little bit different at this point in time. But again, coming out of what happened in India and the views expressed by some that they had lost money with the restructuring – again I need to explain for you because it has not been told in full… To be continued (ESPNcricinfo)
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