Skerritt hails impact of “positive campaign”

For­mer West In­dies team man­ag­er Ricky Sker­ritt and Dr Kishore Shal­low are the new pres­i­dent and vice-pres­i­dent of Crick­et West In­dies (CWI).

Both were elect­ed dur­ing the An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing (AGM) at the Ja­maica Pe­ga­sus Ho­tel in Kingston on Sun­day, af­ter de­feat­ing in­cum­bent Ja­maican Why­cliffe ‘Dave’ Cameron and his vice-pres­i­dent and run­ning mate, Em­manuel Nan­than 8-4.

The vic­to­ry will see Sker­ritt, 62, a for­mer Min­is­ter of Sports and Tourism in St Kitts and Nevis and Shal­low, the cur­rent pres­i­dent of the St Vin­cent & The Grenadines Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tion, tak­ing up of­fice for the next two years. They de­nied Cameron and Nathan a fourth-con­sec­u­tive term.

Sker­ritt ex­pressed sur­prise at the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, as the elec­tion was ex­pect­ed to be a close bat­tle.

Pri­or to the elec­tions, Sker­ritt was as­sured of the back­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Lee­ward Is­lands and pos­si­bly Ja­maica, while Guyana, Bar­ba­dos and the Wind­ward Is­lands had thrown their sup­port be­hind Cameron.

“I am not even sure where the eight votes came from, but I can tell you that every­body has the right to pri­va­cy with their votes. I am in­deed grate­ful that we were able to get eight votes and that gave us more than a one-vote mar­gin,” Sker­ritt said.

“But in this busi­ness, we have learnt that if the mes­sage res­onates with in­di­vid­u­als, even those in­di­vid­u­als who may have what you call a man­date, and if they feel strong­ly enough about an is­sue they will ac­tu­al­ly go against the man­date.

“That was the ba­sis on which we start­ed our cam­paign, know­ing that we could build our vot­ing base by be­ing con­sis­tent with good ideas, [and] reach­ing out with a pos­i­tive cam­paign to bear on the vot­ers and I think that hap­pened. I am hum­bled and deeply ho­n­oured to be elect­ed as pres­i­dent and we pledge to work for im­prove­ment on and off the field for West In­dies crick­et,” he added.

His run­ning mate Dr Shal­low was al­so grate­ful stat­ing that: “My role in this is to sup­port my pres­i­dent 100%, to keep him en­er­gised and fo­cus and chal­lenge him. I am grate­ful and hum­bled by the sup­port of the mem­bers of the ter­ri­to­r­i­al board. This is a vic­to­ry for West In­dies crick­et.”

Cameron, who was first elect­ed in 2013, was pleased about his six-year run in of­fice.

He, how­ev­er, ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment with the out­come, hav­ing con­fi­dent­ly stat­ed that he was in no dan­ger of los­ing the CWI top job.

“I am very sur­prised, but I just like to say thanks to the re­gion for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to serve West In­dies crick­et, it was a tremen­dous run. When we came in­to of­fice we found West In­dies crick­et in a state and I think we now leave it in a bet­ter state and we are very proud of those achieve­ments,” Cameron shared.

He con­tin­ued: “I trust­ed the process that we are men of in­tegri­ty and I banked on that, that we are a group on in­tegri­ty and we stand for some­thing, so that’s where I am very dis­ap­point­ed that men gave me their word and then went a dif­fer­ent way.

“But that is elec­tion all around, I think we have a lot to be proud of win­ning back the Wis­den tro­phy af­ter 10 years and see­ing us com­pete the way we did against Eng­land just now. I tell you I am very ex­cit­ed for West In­dies crick­et if we con­tin­ue on this tra­jec­to­ry.”

The pro­ceed­ings were done un­der the watch­ful eyes of in­ter­na­tion­al au­dit firm, KP­MG. (CMC)