Editorial | CWI gobbledygook

Cricket West Indies (CWI) – and by extension West Indies cricket – has a problem.

CWI is so addicted to obfuscation and opacity that even when it has a credible case to argue, its inclination to spin leads the contortions that confuse its publics, further diminishing trust in the institution. Which ought to have been the first problem the organisation fixed in implementing its 2024-2027 strategic plan, the report on the first year of which was recently released.

On this matter, CWI, the administrators of cricket in the Caribbean, must, in the cliché of West Indies team captains and managers after every defeat, “go back to the drawing board”. They should commit to speaking clearly and frankly to their constituencies as part of the process of transparency and accountability, which is one of the six pillars of the strategic plan. It is mere coincidence, we take it, that this is the last-named of the plan’s pillars.

The cricket board’s penchant for being murky was on display last week when it announced the new format for this year’s men’s regional first-class cricket competition.

The matches, to be played over four days, will involve six teams, rather than the eight (the West Indies Academy and the Combined Campuses and Colleges are out) of the previous two seasons. It will not be played on the round-robin basis of the past.

Last year’s tournament produced 28 matches, with the potential for 56 innings for the regional batters and bowlers to hone their skills.

In this year’s format, the six regional franchises (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, the Windward Islands, and Guyana) will, in a first round, be paired on a seeded basis from the result of the 2025 competition.

The winner of the seeded round will go straight to a final. The two next best teams, based on points, will go to a playoff. The winner will become the second finalist.

FIVE MATCHES

The competition, therefore, will have five matches: three in the first round, plus the playoff and the final. You might claim six if a practice match that the winner of the seeded first round will play against the West Indies Academy is counted. Described differently, this year’s first-class tournament will have 79 per cent fewer matches than in 2025, thus fewer playing opportunities for the region’s senior cricketers.

Cricket West Indies, on its face, has a good argument for the truncated tournament. In making it, though, this newspaper would expect it to go further, explaining whether it was a short-term measure and a timeframe for returning to more games, with a predictable format, instead of the myriad chops and changes of the past decade.

From a reading of CWI’s audited accounts for 2024-2025, up to last September 30, the problem is money. Two things are immediately apparent from the financial statements: CWI’s income for the last financial year declined by 54 per cent, or US$47.4 million, to US$40.88 million; and it recorded a loss of US$28.5 million against a profit of US$22.6 million the previous year.

In the previous year, when the West Indies co-hosted the T20 World Cup, CWI earned US$80.27 million in profit distribution from the International Cricket Conference (ICC), media rights and ticket sales. In 2024-25, these line items generated US$32.1 million, a decline of 60 per cent or US$48.2 million.

There are other issues related to income and expenditure (especially the 46 per cent increase in personnel expenses to US$10 million when staff increased by three to 59) that can be interrogated. But fundamentally, its governance crisis apart, CWI has an income problem, or the structure of its income flow.

As it explained in a note to the accounts:“The revenues of the group are cyclical in nature as per the bilateral tour arrangements by which international cricket is organised and planned. Each full member of the ICC is able to sell the rights associated with their respective international home tours, with the value of those rights fluctuating depending on the tour content and on which country is visiting the West Indies.”

IMPACTED

The performance and standing of the West Indies men’s team (they lost 80 per cent of their Tests, two-thirds of ODIs, and 60 per cent T20s over the review period) and the absence of rich, cricket-crazed India as tourists,limited the amount of money CWI could take to its income accounts. That impacted the profit and loss statement and the organisation’s ability to fund regional tournaments.

That is capable of being simply and transparently conveyed to stakeholders. Instead, in its usual obfuscatory waffle, they were told that “the revised format forms part of CWI’s broader strategy to strengthen player pathways, improve performance outcomes, and ensure the sustainable management of resources across regional cricket”.

They also said this: “Guided by a purpose-first approach, the review assessed what each tournament must achieve – whether talent identification, selection finalisation, tour preparation, or pathway progression – and redesigned formats to preserve relevance and competitive impact while managing operational costs.”

At least CWI finally got around to finances. This attempt to befuddle stakeholders with gobbledygook is to be read as one with Kishore Shallow’s clinging to the post of president of CWI while being a member of the Cabinet of St Vincent and the Grenadines despite the real potential for conflicts of interest.