By Neto Baptiste
There will be no West Indies Championship, formerly dubbed the regional four day competition, hosted by Cricket West Indies (CWI) this year.
This was revealed by the body’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Johnny Grave, who said the regional board will not host any competitions following the ongoing Caribbean Premier League (CPL) in St Kitts but will, instead, plan for 2022.
“We are really looking to kick-start that again in the new year and hopefully we will have fully vaccinated teams at the regional level by then and, hopefully, with a bit more regional travel, we would be able to move a bit more freely around the region and therefore get regional cricket back up and running with a real focus on four day cricket which is been the big casualty I guess, in terms of the formats of the game since the pandemic started. We haven’t played any four day cricket since March 2020,” he said.
Grave underlined the impact of Covid-19 on the game both internationally and regionally, adding that CWI has done well given the circumstances.
“We were successful now of having two editions of CPL and we have had one edition of the men’s CG Insurance Super 50 Cup. We brought in about 60 to 70 under-19 boys into Antigua to the backend of July who have obviously just left [for England] to have a 12-game month-long camp but all of these have been, from a logistics point of view, a real challenge and extremely costly. We haven’t had any youth tournaments from an under-15s, under-17s and girls in the 19s format but we have played our first ever women’s A Team series,” the CEO said.
Barbados won the 2020 instalment of the West Indies Championship.