For decades, fans and cricket stakeholders across the Caribbean have voiced growing anxiety over the steady decline of West Indies cricket, a once-dominant force in the global sport that now faces cascading on-field and off-field challenges. Now, former St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who led the island nation for 24 years until his election defeat in November 2024, is stepping forward to demand urgent systemic change, arguing that regional governments must claim a formal seat at the decision-making table to reverse the sport’s downward trajectory.
The urgency around reform has spiked sharply over the past 12 months, after West Indies suffered a humiliating Test series defeat to Australia last summer, capped by a shocking 27 all out at Kingston’s Sabina Park – one of the lowest batting totals in the team’s long international history. Current International Cricket Council (ICC) rankings underscore the depth of the on-field crisis: the men’s senior team sits in the bottom half of all ICC global rankings, holding 8th place in Tests, 10th in One-Day Internationals, and 7th in the Twenty20 format.
Off the pitch, the sport’s regional governing body, Cricket West Indies (CWI), is facing severe financial strain, with the organization projecting a $26 million USD loss for the current year, though it forecasts a return to profitability by 2027. Gonsalves argues that these overlapping crises cannot be resolved by CWI’s current private governance model alone, and that regional governments must be granted formal decision-making authority if they are expected to inject much-needed public funding into the sport.
Speaking in an interview with the Jamaica Observer, Gonsalves noted: “The governments have to get involved but the governments [are] not going to get involved seriously if Cricket West Indies continues to think that government will pour money into Cricket West Indies without them having a say.” Currently, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) maintains a cricket subcommittee – once chaired by Gonsalves himself – but the regional bloc holds no formal governing power within CWI. ICC rules also ban official government interference in the internal administration of its member organizations, a regulation Gonsalves says is outdated and ill-suited to the Caribbean context.
Drawing a comparison to South Asia, Gonsalves pointed out that the Indian Supreme Court has already ruled that top-tier cricket is a public good that cannot be managed exclusively by private entities. “I’m sure if it comes to our courts that they will rule similarly because it makes perfect sense,” he said. “The law is right reason and right reason indicates that you can’t have a public good, of this type being run by a private entity and certainly you can’t expect the parliaments to vote money to put it inside of the organisation, Cricket West Indies, where they seek to conflate Cricket West Indies with cricket in the West Indies. I’ve thought long and hard about this thing and, I dare anybody to tell me that my conclusions are not correct.”
Gonsalves’ proposed path forward calls for regional leaders to collectively present a formal diplomatic demarche to the ICC, outlining the severity of the current crisis and requesting approval for expanded government involvement to restructure and reform CWI. “If this matter is discussed within the context of the region and governments decide this is way we’re going to do it and we want to play a part in the management of it and to restructure it, we have to make a demarche to the ICC and say this thing cannot continue like this, because if it continues like this, it would fold,” he explained. “So I don’t think it’s a question of trust. It’s whether we as governments in the region decide whether we’re going to be involved in this matter. And in order to comply with the perspectives of the ICC, where are the tolerable limits for the state’s involvement because we are in a crisis.”
West Indies cricket is set to return to the international spotlight next month, when the team will host Sri Lanka for three ODIs and three T20Is at Sabina Park, against a backdrop of growing calls for sweeping systemic change to secure the sport’s future in the Caribbean.