Top cricketers rewarded

West Indies captain Jason Holder copped the President’s Award, while Roshon Primus and Deandra Dottin were named the Most Outstanding Male and Female Cricketers respectively when the Barbados Cricket Association Awards Ceremony was held at Mahogany Ridge, St James over the weekend.

BCA president Conde Riley (left) as he introduced West Indies captain Jason Holder (right) to the audience.

For Holder, receiving the President’s Award was the icing on the cake for an outstanding 10 months in international cricket in 2018. During that time the tall all-rounder had a number of outstanding performances with the bat and ball, but it was in the Test format of the game that brought out the best in the towering Holder.

In nine Test matches between June 2018 and January this year, Holder took 29 wickets and scored 532 runs.

His performances in the oldest format of the game led to him ousting Shakib Al Hasan of Bangladesh from the number one position on the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) all-rounder rankings in January this year. He became the first West Indian cricketer to be rated the top all-rounder since the legendary Sir Garfield Sobers was ranked in that position 45 years ago.

Holder led the West Indies to a 2-1 victory in the recent Test series against England and scored a match-winning double century in the first Test at Kensington Oval. In the One Day Internationals, the regional team under Holder’s leadership drew the series 2-2.

Primus who was not selected to play for Barbados Pride during the 2018/19 first-class season or in the 2019 regional Super50 tournament was the only batsman in the Elite Division to compile five hundred runs.

The 23-year-old all-rounder played seven matches and scored 541 runs at an average of 60.11. He stroked three centuries and two fifties, and his batting in the latter part of the season assisted Wanderers in staving off demotion from the Elite Division to the First Division.

Dottin has performed outstandingly in international and regional cricket over the last four months. In February, she became the number one all-rounder in Twenty20 Internationals after playing a key role in the West Indies’ 2-1 defeat of Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates where she scored 158 runs at a strike rate of 139.82 and also took two wickets.

Her good form continued in the recently concluded Regional Super50 Cup in Guyana where she was the leading scorer in the tournament with 299 runs and took eight wickets with her medium pace bowling. Dottin is currently representing Barbados in the Regional Twenty20 Blast in Guyana.

In the feature address, director of the Barbados Olympic Association Ytannia Wiggins who spoke on The Business Of Cricket In The 21st Century, traced the evolution of sport as a profession from the start of first Gentlemen versus Players match played in England in 1806, to the ending of the distinction between the amateur and professional player in 1962.

She noted that over the last sixty years the sport of cricket had undergone drastic changes in its approach towards professionalism. Wiggins stated in the past two decades there have been innovations to the game such as Twenty20 cricket, individual rankings, major investment in sports science and improved training methods that have resulted in the sport becoming a multi-billion dollar industry.