More questions than answers at Board's AGM

After two days of meetings in Barbados, the directors of the West Indies Cricket Board are no closer to resolving two long-standing issues on separate matters.

The Board is still hoping that its prediction of a resolution between itself and the players' representative body, the West Indies Players' Association (WIPA), will be reached by January 31 - a highly optimistic position, according to one source. Issues relating to retainer contracts, a collective labour agreement, a match tour contract and players' code of conduct were discussed at the meeting. "We're still engaging both parties on this issue," was all Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, the head of Caricom's cricket committee, would say on Monday.

At the core really is the "ownership" of cricketers, an issue which had emerged during a previous World Cup when the Indian players protested the use of their images by sponsors. Now, cricket boards everywhere will have to brace for the gathering storm as cricketers demand more than just face value for their use.

The other issue which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a no-show was that of the merger between the West Indies Women's Cricket Federation and the WICB. Down in last position on the agenda, it never made it to the table before the meeting wound up on Sunday. The WICB had hired the firm of Ernst & Young to do a management plan for the merger, and its recommendations were to be studied by the directors. Obviously disappointed that the matter had not yet been discussed, the WI women's coach (and WIWCF member) Ann Browne-John could only hang on and wait. She observed: "Since August 2004, Ernst & Young had presented their report - and a decision has to be made because the ICC has mandated that the mergers be done by March 31, 2005."

The West Indian women's team, which has qualified for the World Cup in South Africa this year, has still not secured funding to enable them to participate. A few days ago, the Trinidad & Tobago government offered to pay the cost of airline tickets, but the team has had to train and prepare without the assurance that they will find the US$216,000 that the tour is expected to cost.

The lack of support for women's cricket is particularly marked in the Caribbean, a region where only in October 2004 the Queen's Park Cricket Club grudgingly voted to allow women members, although they warned potential female applicants that it might still be a few years before they would actually get in.

That the WICB could still not have discussed the five-month-old Ernst & Young report, just two months shy of their ICC deadline, is symptomatic of a wider Caribbean malaise.

The other, more pressing items on the two-day agenda included a presentation from its subsidiary company, ICC Cricket World Cup West Indies 2007 Inc., on latest developments; a review of financial statements and management accounts; a review of recommendations on the Board's Memorandum and Articles of Association; a review of the international and domestic cricket schedules up to 2007, and a discussion on a report on a "Review of the Structure of Cricket" commissioned by the ICC.