Fresh approach

Businessman and Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) member Adrian ‘Smiley’ Bailey believes that local and regional cricket is at the crossroads and has some great ideas on how to get it back on track once successful in his bid to serve on the board.

Bailey, who for the past 49 years has followed local Division One cricket and has been a member of Carlton club for almost 30 years, is offering up himself to serve on the BCA board as a member when elections are held no later than July 31.

Head of the Bridgetown Port Co-op Society Limited, Bailey would like to see the BCA join forces with the Ministry of Sport to change the status quo of cricket in Barbados. He also thinks that the BCA should follow a module that could be beneficial to local clubs through Barbadian players who represent the West Indies.

“If you look at the state of club cricket in Barbados when a player comes from Carlton Club or St. Catherine’s or Wanderers or even Maple and goes on to play for the West Indies, there should be some sort of royalties going back to these clubs, to keep these clubs alive and afloat.

“These clubs would have nurtured these cricketers from a young age – 10, 12, 15 years old – and at the end of the day, the ICC stands to make millions of dollars via television rights. I would hope that if elected to the board, that we can work in some areas to bring the Cricket West Indies on board with Barbados and the region so we can see if we can get some royalties paid back to the local domestic clubs,” Bailey told Barbados TODAY.

As someone who is passionate about the game and wants to see it grow and develop, Bailey suggested during the telephone interview that the BCA and CWI should look to follow the module of France which was successful in winning two World Cup titles in the last 15 years.

“If you look at the makeup of France’s football team, the last World Cup that played, there were seven black players in the starting 11 and about another six black players on the bench. These players are not French-born, they were born mainly in Africa. What France and most of the clubs in Europe are doing, they are going into Africa and these nations are setting up academies for these young talented black players, then as soon as they are developed they would bring them into France to play for Monaco and other teams for a very low price.

“Within two years the French team can sell these players for millions of dollars and this is a module that the Cricket West Indies board should be looking to use. Whereas we have the talent in the Caribbean but we don’t have the capital. The ICC should be putting programs right through the Caribbean to develop cricketers. There is no academy. We are in 2021 and there is not a single academy in the West Indies. If you go into England, Australia, India and New Zealand especially have turned their cricket around because they now have six academies.

“We should be targeting the ICC to get some royalties to pay back to the local domestic clubs, the BCA, and right through the region. Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Islands, so that we can develop our cricket. These are the ideas I want to take to the BCA board of management that we can work with,” Bailey explained.

He added: “All of these T20 tournaments all over the world, soon as a Barbadian cricketer represents any T20 team, royalties should be going back to the local club that nurtured him, brought him out of the embryonic stage where once these royalties go back to clubs like St. Catherine’s, YMPC, Empire and Spartan, this is where these clubs can survive. If we have to sit around today with the clubs we have in Barbados, within the next five years a lot of clubs will fold in and be forgotten about.”

As a young boy in 1972 Bailey and his good friends, Dale Elcock and Christopher King dedicated their lives to Carlton Club. However, as a longtime observer, Bailey believes now more than ever cricket clubs are under financial pressure.

“A lot of the clubs in Barbados are under financial pressure. To run a cricket club today in Barbados is a very costly expense. Why is that? Gone are the days where members of the clubs who would have gone into their pockets and supported the clubs, not only by paying their subs but members supported the club from all financial angles.

“Sponsorship today is difficult to obtain for club cricket in Barbados, maybe because of other factors that are around. It is [discouraging] a lot of the hardened cricket supporters from around cricket, mainly the young people who normally would have come through over the years to support a club just like how I did as a young boy in Carlton Club,” Bailey stated.

(morissalindsay@barbadostoday.bb)