By Neto Baptiste
The touted Four Knights Cricket Academy will be re-launched later this month, some nine years after it was originally launched back in 2015 but never came to fruition.
This is according to legendary former West Indies batsman and captain, Sir Vivian Richards, who made the revelation while speaking on the Connecting with Dave Lester Payne programme on Wednesday.
“What we have here is a semi business to some degree and we’re quite thankful to him for us to be here today to announce that on the 29th of this month we will be hoping to have … the second official launching of this particular project … in conjunction with the Cool & Smooth tournament. Cool & Smooth and Amer [Hourani] have been a tower of strength in terms of not just sports in Antigua and Barbuda, but to us as individuals in terms of where we want to go. He’s a huge partner in terms of where we are today and what we would like to achieve in the future,” Sir Viv said.
Introduced following the 2014 general elections, the initiative was conceptualised highlighting four of the country’s former international cricketers. The other three are former captain Sir Richie Richardson and former fast bowlers Sir Andy Roberts and Sir Curtly Ambrose.
Sir Richie, hinting that the academy could cater for players under the age of eight, said plans are in the pipeline to open talks with Cricket West Indies once more about a possible partnership.
“We’ve met with them in the past and they have agreed to partner with us and also the government as we had met with the minister of sports at the time, and the government is going to support it. One of the things discussed with Cricket West Indies is that the Stanford Cricket Ground [at the time], now called CCG [Coolidge Cricket Ground] would be [the] home of the Four Knights. That’s where the academy would be based, but that was several years ago.
“Things have changed so we have now got to reach out again to Cricket West Indies to see if they still want to be in partnership with us and still want to go forward in the way we discussed before,” he said.
Businessman and financial advisor Garfield Joseph, who is now part of the renewed effort to move the initiative forward, said the final product must be positioned in such a way that it benefits both the sport and the country on a whole.
“We have some broad visions, one of which is to assist and support West Indies cricket, but the second component [which] I think is also very important for us, is to be able to promote Antigua and Barbuda — not only as a tourism destination, but a place to relaxation, wellness and recovery.
“Sports is associated with injury and you have stem cell research that’s taking place here now. How do we form that nexus and be able to have that competitive advantage? So the value of this is more than just the academy, it’s more than the promotion, the value of this is how Antigua and Barbuda will get the advertising and the publicity that comes free of cost or at no cost to the government,” he said.
The brainchild of former sports minister EP Chet Greene, the Four Knights Cricket Academy was originally introduced as a joint government/CWI initiative. However, several attempts to move the concept forward failed and in 2018 it was announced the four knighted cricketers would take full control of the project.
The April 29 launch will take place during the finals of the Cool & Smooth T20 Explosion at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium.
