Money in the bank - Windies players paid, franchise cricketers still await funds owed

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):

Cricket West Indies (CWI) chief executive officer Johnny Grave says Windies cricketers should receive all of their outstanding match fees by the end of this week, but players in the domestic four-day competition will have to wait a bit longer.

He said that CWI had started processing payments for the international male and female cricketers and that efforts would be made to do the same for the domestic players in the eight-franchise West Indies Championship earlier this year.

The men had not been paid their match fees for the home series – three One-Day Internationals (ODIs) and three Twenty20 (T20) Internationals – against Ireland in January or the February-March Sri Lanka tour, which included three ODIs and two T20Is. The women were owed for the four matches they played in the T20 World Cup in Australia between February and March.

“As of the start of this week, we were able to email and contact the international women’s players and confirm that their T20 World Cup match fees will be paid in full this week. We’d already paid the prize money, as I confirmed a few weeks ago, back in March,” Grave said on the ‘Mason and Guest’ radio show on Tuesday night.

“We’ve also confirmed to the men’s international players that their outstanding match fees from both the Ireland series and Sri Lanka series will be paid this week as well. So the international players are being brought up to speed.

“We’re not yet in a position to do that with the franchise players. We’re working hard to try and resolve that, and, as I’ve assured all the players and the franchises, it is our number one priority, from a financial point of view, for us to clear that, and I hope to do so sooner rather than later.”

In March, after eight rounds of the 10-round competition, CWI ended the competition because of the COVID-19 pandemic and declared point leaders Barbados Tridents the winners of the 2020 tournament. A large percentage of those match fees – for January to March – is outstanding.

The delay in paying players has been blamed on CWI’s cash crunch that has been worsened by the novel coronavirus, which has curtailed cricket and other sports globally.