By Neto Baptiste
Minister of Health and a former cricketer, Molwyn Joseph, believes communities should play a bigger role in the development of athletes through the organising of more village and or parish centered activities.
Speaking on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show, Joseph said cricketers and sportsmen, in general, do better at the national and international level once they would have come through the ranks of the village competitions.
“We need to have more village competitions; it’s healthy, it has some social redeeming factors because it brings out the elderly to watch in the afternoons and it helps to build the cricketers’ confidence too. A lot of our cricketers who have good physical skills suffer because they are not mentally prepared. They do not have the level of confidence and that comes from the support, especially out of the family,” he said.
The former batsman said competitions were also better structured and geared towards development within the communities.
“In St Mary’s, for instance, we have village teams in Jennings, Bolans and I think there was a combination of Johnson’s Point and Urlings and then we had a team out of Old Road. Those teams competed and at the end of the competition a team was selected for St Mary’s North and a similar type of pattern existed in the other parishes and for you to know, I was the captain for St Mary’s Parish and out of that came Antigua’s first Test cricketer, Sir Anderson Roberts,” he said.
Joseph would have captained the Empire cricket team in the country’s premier cricket competition while he also represented the St Mary’s Parish. His cricketing prowess however took a backseat to his Adventist religion which ruled him out of national selection.