ST JOHN’S, Antigua – The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) will first have to carefully study the report, submitted on Saturday, by the high-level task force commissioned with investigating the ill-fated tour of India in October before deciding whether or not they will implement the any of its recommendations.
This is according to Corporate Communications Officer for the WICB, Imran Khan, who said it is still too early to determine whether implicated parties could face disciplinary actions.
“The Board itself is studying the complete report and will make an announcement in due course. Once they would have had an opportunity to fully study the report and make a determination as to the way forward, and once that is done, we will make an announcement as to how that aspect of the business will move on,” Khan said.
The task force, in its report, said the WICB, players union (WIPA) and West Indies players were all at fault in the controversy.
The task force said that while the board and WIPA had “erred significantly” in their administration of the new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), the players also needed to shoulder a “significant proportion of the blame” for the abandoned tour.
The decision by players to abandon the India tour resulted in the BCCI threatening legal actions against the WICB, a situation Khan says the regional board is still trying to handle.
“I’d think that yes, it would be fair to say it is a lingering issue, but it is an issue that significant gains and advancements are being made. The WICB is in discussions with the BCCI with regards to that issue, but I don’t think that issue, in any reasonableness, has been concluded,” Khan said.
The task force, headed by Michael Gordon QC and including ex-WICB president Sir Wes Hall and prominent Barbadian attorney Sir Richard Cheltenham, also laid out eight recommendations aimed at preventing a repeat of the debacle.
This follows a month-long investigation of the crisis, which stemmed from the one-day team’s decision to walk off the tour of India, in a contracts dispute with WIPA and the WICB.
West Indies players on tour, contended the new MOU would have resulted in a reduction of up to 70 per cent of their earnings and asked for the agreement to be revised.
When this did not occur, they quit the tour following the fourth ODI in Dharamsala, abandoning the fifth ODI, the one-off Twenty20 International and the scheduled three-Test series.
