Saturday, February 17, 2007

I disagree Mr Captain

Steve Tikolo's assertion in an interview with the Standard that the Kenya team players were justified is holding a one day strike on Wednesday over the match fees from the canceled match against Canada could not be further off the mark. I have immense respect for Tikolo and what he has achieved in cricket both for himself and his country, but it is high time that Kenya's leading players realised that strikes should be an absolute last resort. Holding to ransom a body that has just confirmed it will pay you $5000 is poor enough form, but the potential damage the players did to themselves in the long run is far worse. All over a payment for a game they did not actually play. True, they did the hard work in training for it etc, but it should be noted that they were still paid their daily allowance for that day, it was only the actual match fee that was withheld.
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Tikolo's view was that they had done the hard work in training for the match, so should be paid anyway sounds in a way fair enough, but if Cricket Kenya got no income from the match, where does the money come from? Already some of the administrators have dug into their own pockets to keep the team afloat and in training while a sponsor is found. Striking does not help this search. All it does is give potential investors a reason not to support the game. Not a good long term strategy for the players at all, especially when they are dependednt on this to remain full time cricketers. I have already said my piece on this here on cricketEurope yesterday, and Martin Williamson also makes the point on cricinfo. Unfortunatley, the Nation continues to lose credibility in terms of cricket coverage with a bizarre article by Sulubu Tuva who starts well, but then gets carried away insinuating it was players and not the Ghai led KCA that lead to the 'strike culture'. Considering that the players would not have had to take this action if millions of shillings had not disappeared and sponsors been scared off due to financial irregularities, this is a perplexing point of view. Note also that if the KCA had not blocked private companies from investing in schools cricket during the wrangles, there would still be an active program running now and the number of cricketers (and hence attractiveness to sponsors) would be about doubled.
the good thing out of this is that it was handled well by Cricket Kenya and that everyone is now keen to put it behind them. So long as the players do not continue this sort of nonsense in the future.
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Samir Inamdar has made it clear that Cricket Kenya will use some of the sponsorship money to give contracts to leading players and he reiterates this and the administration's plans for the games development in an excellent interview by Oscar Pilipili in the Standard. hopefully this is the article sponsors will pay most attention to, because as Pilipili's heading so rightly puts it, 'Local cricket is on the right track'.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Off topic - but are there any Kenyan World Cup cricketers with day-to-day jobs outside of cricket. Or any cricketers with unusual jobs? any help would be great. Thanks, Rod
cricketworldreporter@yahoo.co.uk

Chemosit said...

Lameck Onyango is a policeman, Ravindu Shah is a businessman,
Mishra, Varaiya, Ouma and Odhiambo are all students and as far as I know the others are all professional cricketers.

Anonymous said...

Hi Nick,

Holding's blasted the minnows again, I don't agree with him so I wrote about it here. Sorry to learn about the Kenyan Cricket strike too, hope it all works out for you guys. Also, one last thing, there's an opportunity I need to tell you about, if you don't mind, and have the time, can you please email me here. Thanks, and once again good luck for the World Cup :)

Chemosit said...

Hi Zainub,

Good to hear from you again. I saw the article on Holding - he loses a lot in my opinion for that. When will people learn that in a sport played by 100 or so countries, only having the top 10 in the World Cup will end up killing the game. It has to expand to survive, and to expand it has to see the smaller teams given the chance to play the Test teams.

Anonymous said...

Has Holding forgotten what happened to West Indies in th '96 World Cup?

Anonymous said...

Hi Nick, was reading through the interview on the Standard website with Sam Inamdar and was quite surprised by his comments where he said and i qoute 'We have never had any sustainable youth programmes in place save for the one initiated by the Nairobi Provincial Cricket Association in the 1990’s, which unfortunately fell apart due to wrangles'.
Now i know he probably meant we havent had a national program but what about the one being run by Jaffery Academy and Jaffery Sports club every year for all Schools at the coast since 1995. Maybe Mr Inamdar needs to take a closer look at home and acknowledge the work that has been put in by the mentioned organizations.