Story come to bump...more cricket

[Willi]

M.A.D4U
Re: You have echoed my sentiments..
Sun Jul 3, 2011 19:26



Check this out

Dr. Beckles one of the WICB’s directors described the attitude some players, namely Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels, exhibit as ‘donmanship’. He said, "Those who follow him (Gayle) and his cohort in the team do relate to him as their don and it is said that he has brought the donmanship into how things operate in the (West Indies) team. What the WICB is trying to do at the moment is uproot this donmanship culture,"[ii] He added that the WICB is attempting to uproot that element from the culture like Jamaica attempted to uproot alleged crime boss Chris ‘Dudus’ Coke from its politics.
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Dr. Beckles spoke about a time of West Indies’ cricket superiority and the reasons for it as a way to explain its arrival at this ‘donmanship’ period. He lauded Frank Worrell’s activism. Worrell had refused to tour India unless he received better remuneration. But now as a WICB director, Beckles is unable to see the value of Gayle’s activism.
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Sagicor is a great example of this insidious problem of a corporation peddling power without a real bond with the peoples’ history: but is itself a relic from this very history of oppression. Yet it is positioned as some savior of Caribbean cricket. It’s Executive Chairman Steve McNamara, a citizen of both St. Lucia and Ireland, heads up the St. Lucia based law firm McNamara and Partners. This may explain the St. Lucian connection to power within the WICB. The WICB has a St. Lucian Chairman, St. Lucian CEO, and St. Lucian Captain. It was Sagicor’s ‘funds’ used to build the High Performance Center where Dr. Beckles plans to graduate the new Caribbean cricketer model. Dr. Beckles is a shareholder and also a director on the board of Sagicor, Sagicor Life Jamaica, and many of its subsidiaries, and of course WICB. WICB is, in practice a subsidiary of Digicel.

The entire article is found here...VERY INFORMATIVE!!

http://rootsandculture-chungeh.blogspot.com/search/label/Chris%20Gayle%20and%20Beckles%20define%20the%20axi s%20of%20power%20in%20Caribbean%20cricket

[Peter R]

Very informative....but I need to read it again. The volume of history presented leaves me with the feeling the writer has done a fair bit of meandering, meandering to put the WICB / Gayle "impasse" in context.

That these companies (Sagicor etc) have been built on, and supported by, the backs of West Indian peoples is the talk of a previous era, a throwback to the sixties and seventies of the Michael Manleys and other Caribbean "revolutionaries" he mentioned... that kind of talk in today's "globalised" environment is (considered) passe by the centres of present power.

The perspective is very interesting as it puts Beckles' comments in a different context and lumps him squarely among the "oppressors" of the ordinary Caribbean folk.

I will re-read to see whether my understanding of what he says changes.