By Vaneisa Baksh

LAST Sunday, Dr Mohammed Irfaan Ali was sworn in for another term as President of Guyana. That night, he attended the second of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) home matches for the Guyana Amazon Warriors, who had beaten the Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR) the night before. They were playing the St Kitts and Nevis Patriots, a suffering team so far. The Warriors lost that match.

Dr Ali’s cricket enthusiasm and knowledge were on full display as he settled himself in the commentary box between Ian Bishop and Alex Jordan for a fairly long period of talk.

He spoke of his intention to construct a cricket academy and three new stadia soon. He has discussed this with Cricket West Indies (CWI), and the plan is to outfit them with the latest in equipment and technology.

Awash with oil money, Guyana has been spectacularly transforming itself over the past few years. Footage during the CPL matches has revealed an almost unrecognisable landscape that must be the pride of Guyanese people everywhere.

That the President has put his plans for the development of cricket out there for the world to hear gives some hope that he will indeed execute what he promises to deliver.

There is no doubt that he is passionate about cricket; his public statements have demonstrated that he has personally studied the future of the game and its possibilities in terms of business success, but also that he is keen to see its branding as a West Indian legacy commodity.

Recall his thorough virtual presentation at the CARICOM conference on cricket in April 2024 in Trinidad.

Dr Ali is the current chair of the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Cricket, and he certainly seems to have a different kind of energy to bring to the role. He is possibly the youngest regional leader to hold this position, but that is not the most significant aspect. He is obviously not afraid to challenge the status quo, or to stand up to colonialist sneers that still find their way to occupy the global media. He is now at the helm of a government so wealthy that it is being courted by international players, each seeking to dip their ladles in the Guyanese pepperpot.

The fact that he was re-elected to office would have given him the confidence to pursue his plans for Guyana’s future.

It is not unreasonable to assume that this declaration of intent with regard to cricket will come to pass. It is also reasonable to conclude that these plans are regional in scope, that his vision encompasses a rising force of West Indies cricket that will illuminate the faces of the next generation and the next, as he put it.

I was intrigued by his remarks at the match, and immediately my mind turned to an element which is of particular concern to me. I suppose it consists of multiple components.

An academy that offers all the training—physical and mental, and so on—should have a robust library. In the course of my own academic research, I had gone through probably more than a hundred autobiographies and biographies of West Indian cricketers going back a century. There are other books relating to West Indies cricket. I keep saying there is an astonishing corpus of literature relating to our cricket, and it doesn’t end there. Calypsoes, films, poetry, videos of all kinds, they tell our history.

Dr Ali has the resources to fill up a signature collection that doesn’t just house West Indian materials, but materials from the cricketing world. It could be an international repository.

A month ago, speaking after CWI held its emergency strategy meeting, director Enoch Lewis acknowledged it was important to raise interest in cricket by taking its history into the schools as early as the primary level.

I had become excited by the possible ways this could be rolled out. Given that this was meant to be a regional endeavour, I wondered how it could be introduced to schools, and how the various ministries of education would respond to the idea of putting regular sessions on the curriculum.

In my primary school years, weekly radio broadcasts, produced by the Government Broadcasting Unit, were regularly aired. Perhaps a syllabus of sorts could be devised, using a mixture of stories and videos that tell our history. It could be really exciting for young minds. Technology makes delivery simple. The challenge is to construct the content.

There is another aspect that I think is very important to rebuilding not just our cricket, but in preserving our records. We need a museum, an archive of our cricket heritage. I was trying to find out if CWI has something of that nature, or if it had considered digitising whatever materials it still has. My enquiry has been met with silence.

It’s a peculiar thing to me, this aspect of our regional culture. There is no interest in archiving. I know I am particularly keen on this, but I genuinely can’t understand the indifference. Dr Nigel Camacho, Queen’s Park Cricket Club’s president, had been very excited about creating a virtual museum by digitising their collection of memorabilia. I fear it is languishing because of a lack of support for this worthwhile endeavour.

I know things are tight everywhere, but these pillars of a civilisation have been eschewed even in times of plenty.

It’s not just about cricket, but also about preserving and honouring our heritage. (Sunday Express)