History of cricket’s corruption

THIS YEAR marks exactly 20 years since the initiation of the infamous Udecott project known as the Brian Lara Cricket Academy. After two decades, we are still paying the price.

In a few weeks’ time, the region will co-host the 2024 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup. But instead of the mood being buoyant, stakeholders and politicians have been issuing all manner of anguished cries of distress and indignation over the state of the game.

“There is great dissatisfaction with our management of West Indies cricket,” said the Prime Minister last week, opening a special Caricom cricket conference in Port of Spain. “We want to play cricket and we want to do it well. Cricket is our history.”

At the same event, fast-bowling icon Michael Holding told the audience he was depressed. He had seen audited financial statements from Cricket West Indies painting a picture of fraud or questionable transactions. He cited reports of whistleblowers being sidelined. And he took aim at the commess in the TT Cricket Board, involving claims of blank cheques, misused funds and a subsequent police investigation.

“The same things keep on happening,” Mr Holding said.

Another cri de coeur came from batting legend Brian Lara, who knocked “the lack of good facilities and academies.”

“The science of this beautiful game of cricket has significantly changed,” he said, participating remotely. “We have to catch up.”

These lamentations, which are by now familiar, are the legacy of not only years of mismanagement, but also the failure of specific interventions like the Tarouba academy.

The Tarouba project was conceived for the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup. Part of the deal was that it was supposed thereafter to serve as a state-of-the-art “training facility for the development of world-class cricketers.” A whopping $1.1 billion was spent.

But nobody can really confirm this figure for sure.

The Uff Commission of Enquiry into the public construction sector in 2010 found mismanagement and financial irregularities on a scale that was “nothing short of scandalous.” A forensic analysis was unable to unravel hundreds of millions in “advanced payments” that sank into the soil on which the Udecott facility was built.

At one stage, Mr Lara himself expressed disquiet about his name being attached to the project.

It was all eventually salvaged and rehabilitated somewhat and will feature in the upcoming T20 tournament. The PM, though, has been at pains to emphasise the complex has never been used as an academy.

But with the Government earlier this month announcing plans to allocate land to a conglomerate of private and public entities for the construction of a separate, brand-new facility in Trinity, and with a National Cricket Centre already standing in Couva, there is an uneasy sense that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.