THE DISPARITIES in the administration of Barbados and West Indies cricket during Peter Short’s prolonged involvement in both from 1964 and 1996 and in the dispensations that have followed are stark and unflattering.
It has heightened the acclaim of Short’s influence on the game, particularly in Barbados but also throughout the region, that followed his death last week at the age of 89.
Barbados and West Indies cricket had never been stronger, on the field and off it, than it was during Short’s unprecedented 19 years as BCA president and subsequent four as head of the West Indies Cricket Board of Control (WICBC). Paradoxically, its decline began when “control” was erased from the title, with good intentions, under his successor, the Jamaican attorney and businessman Pat Rousseau.
In the two decades since, the West Indies have tumbled to eighth on the International Cricket Council (ICC) Test rankings, now ninth in ODIs, meaning that, for the first time, they won’t qualify for the finals of the Champions Trophy in England in 2017. The management of the BCA, the WICB and some regional bodies has become an ongoing story of incompetence, internal wrangling and court cases. The more each has grown, with escalating, fully professional personnel, the more the problems mount.
With six WICB presidents over the past 15 years, continuity and stability are impossible. Voting for the post by the 12 members is now conducted with the antagonism of political elections.
There have been strikes by leading players. Prime ministers have been involved in an attempt to settle one issue or another. Appointed delegates defied the mandate of their association in a recent presidential election. The organisation of the game in Guyana has been in turmoil for more than two years as its various constituents wrestle over its control.
In keeping with the times, no one any longer serves without payment; it would be unrealistic to expect them to. Like those who worked alongside him on the BCA for 30 years and subsequently the WICBC, Short devoted his life to the management to the game that was his obsession without thought of remuneration or personal advantage.
In its 1992 publication, 100 Years Of Organised Cricket In Barbados, the BCA noted that he cited “a host of able administrators” who served with an under him as its “main strength”.
Men like Keith Walcott, Cammie Smith, Peter Lashley, Charles Alleyne, Harold Griffith and Charlie Griffith would be prominent among the “host”.
Under them, the game at domestic level in Barbados was significantly transformed. As a player with Wanderers which he captained to the 1959 Division 1 title, he recognized the need for a larger club base in the BCA. Several rural teams were introduced, growth that led to the need for zones in the intermediate and second divisions.
They had been under the Barbados Cricket League (BCL), an organization as central to the island’s cricketing legacy as the BCA had been; Mitchie Hewitt, its indefatigable secretary, was Short’s equivalent.
In addition to his love of the game, Short’s leadership was underpinned by the clearly reciprocated respect he had for others and a character that typified the adage “cool, calm and collected”.
Only once in the 30 years or so I got to know him as a genuine friend did I see him angry. I remember it well because I was his culpable partner when he was run out on one of his Wanderers invitation team’s tours of England in the late 1970s.
It was a special match for Peter, against the team of Sir Michael Stoute, the internationally renowned Bajan horse racing personality. He wasn’t especially receptive to my apology afterwards or excuse that I couldn’t know that the swift cover fielder with the pinpoint throw was left-handed.
He invariably had his critics.
It was claimed he allowed standards at club level to fall while, in his latter days as president, he concentrated on the upgrading of Kensington Oval from, according to the BCA, “an inadequate Test venue into a facility becoming an island of such a rich cricketing heritage”; the 2007 World Cup initiated its entire makeover the ICC deemed mandatory for the staging of the final.
His intervention, as WICBC president, that persuaded Brian Lara to return to the team on the England tour of 1995 was seen in some quarters as making the player believe he was greater than the game; Short saw it as saving the finest West Indies batsman of his time from himself.
A white Bajan with a trademark handle-bar moustache who had served in the British Army and risen to the rank of his enduring title “captain” would normally have labelled him as an anachronism. It would have been deceptive racial profiling.
“Peter Short, I believe, was misunderstood,” Sir Hilary Beckles wrote in his tome, The Development of West Indies Cricket in 1992. “He did not represent the old dispensation as many have said. Rather, he was part of the respected nationalist network of civic society that believed in cricket as a cultural activity for gentlemen, part of the infrastructure of high moral values and social contact”.
Such words no longer apply to the governance of Barbados and West Indies cricket.
