Tony Becca, Contributor

Ken Gordon, the immediate past president of the West Indies Cricket Board, is a successful businessman and, as such, he should know the importance of accuracy.

Although he hit the nail on the head in his farewell speech as president of the Board when he talked about the reasons for the failure of the West Indies team in recent years and included the attitude of the players to training and practising, he was, however, off the mark in relation to two important aspects of West Indies cricket - to the board's financial position and to the academy.

According to Gordon, the past 10 years, meaning from 1997, have been "a building financial disaster", so much so that the WICB was bankrupt.

Lines of credit had dried up

According to Gordon, the board could not pay its bills, lines of credit had dried up, the board had suffered a loss of US$6.5 million the previous year, and on top of that, there was a consolidated loss built up over the proceedings years of US$15 million.

According to Gordon, after two years the situation has been fundamentall to the extent that today the board's credit is good, it made a profit of US$1.5 million at the end of 2005-06, it is on target for another small profit at the end of this financial year, and if that is true, that is good.

If that is so, then taking into consideration the drop in returns caused by the Future Tours programme, and despite the fact that it was cuts to vital areas that made such profit possible, with the present state of things, with the constant quarrel between the board and the players association, with the contract entered into with Digicel, and with the West Indies team so often not at full strength, that is good, really good, and though, with the big boys absent, some of that money must have been saved from players fees.

What is difficult to understand, however, is Gordon's date as far as the financial crisis is concerned.

Ten years back from 2005 when he took over as president is 1995. Pat Rousseau, however, was president until 2000, and as far as I can remember, he left the board in a fairly good financial position.

And now to the academy.

Based on what Gordon has been saying about the academy, things such as, "now finally it is going to happen", that "a cricket academy has been shown to be a vital tool in developing players for the demands of international cricket and is critically needed in the Caribbean", and that "over the past two decades all the major cricketing nations of the world other than the West Indies have established cricket academies", he seems to believe that there has never been an academy in the West Indies.

Although it may not have been well thought out it was mostly run by Australians, because of the fear of the cry of insularity the players were not selected based on potential, but more so on where they were from, with the players spending only three months and were allowed only one visit it may not have been nothing but a waste of money, an there was one quarrel after another, I can remember an academy sponsored by Shell and situated at the St. George's University in Grenada.

That academy was launched in the late 1990s and lasted for a few years before, after all the quarrelling, after all the infighting about who was in charge and who should have been in charge, and after all the discussions about its importance, about its contribution to West Indies cricket, one day it just disappeared.

The good thing about the proposed new academy is that this time around it will serve some purpose and will hopefully develop into something that will serve West Indies cricket well.

This time around, facilities will be provided in each of the major territories so that at least training and coaching and teaching can be an on ongoing process.

In patting himself on the back about his accomplishments in his two years of office, Gordon should also not take credit for the proposed lottery - just as he should not take all the credit for putting together the Governance Committee to look at West Indies cricket.

A lottery for cricket

According to Gordon, the governments of the region have agreed to a lottery for cricket, the academy will cost some US$6 million, the governments have agreed to fund it through the lottery, and that is great.

Just as it was Dinanath Ramnarine, the president of the players association, who suggested some time ago that a body be set up to look at West Indies cricket and how it is governed, it was under Rousseau that the board had made a plea to the governments for a lottery with most of the money going to cricket, some to the University of the West Indies, and some to CARIFESTA.

If my memory serves me right, the CARICOM prime ministers and finance ministers had agreed in principle to the lottery, all that was needed at the time was the licence to operate from each government, and it was only delayed until now because of the religious beliefs and thus his failure to follow-up by one of the two presidents between Rousseau and Gordon, the same belief of one of the heads of governments, and probably because of the tardiness of the other president who, it is understood, left it in the hands of another board member.