We have been told that the reason, prior to offering free entrance to Kensington Oval, why the attendance to the CWC matches so far have been so low is due to the elimination of India and Pakistan.
As these countries participation could in no fair way be guaranteed, it seems strange there appeared to be no plan B in place to minimise the financial damage.
The quoted ’75,000 cruise ships passengers’ did not require a Caricom visa, so let us concentrate of the land based visitors.
The last media reference to the Caricom visa I can find is in a Melissa Wickham article entitled ‘Lets check it out’ which appeared in the Nation on 1st April 2007.
Ms Wickham stated ’30,000 have already been issued with an estimated 5,000 more to be issued before the end of CWC’.
Deputy Prime Minister, Mia Motley is the chairperson of the Caricom Committee for CWC 2007 security, and as such had overall responsibility for the visa implementation.
Ms Motley, can therefore easily state exactly how many visas were issued to Indian and Pakistani nations.
And then give the public a breakdown of how many of the total was issued to cricket teams and their support staff, members of the media and all other groups that would not necessarily fall under the description of visiting cricket fans.
Of course, it wasn’t just Indian and Pakistani nationals who required the CariCom visas.
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand and any others I have not mentioned also required them.
So if you add up the cricket fans from all the other countries who required visas, then it should not be difficult to quantify the negative effective the loss of India and Pakistan had on attendance.
With the financial implications to our tourism industry still to be evaluated, I am sure putting this information into the public (taxpayers) domain would go a long way to pacify concerned citizens.
Adrian Loveridge
16 April 2007
Update:
After reading the BLP blog tonight I think I now know why the Caribbean governments became sold on the idea of CWC by Chris Dehring.
Lessons from Cricket
April 18th, 2007 · 7 Comments
�
In all this we have a West Indies team to rebuild. In fact we have to put in place a plan for the full usage of the region�s newest assets, our stadiums. We must now zero in on all our sportsmen and sportswomen to ensure that they are included in a development programme to maximize the use of these facilities for their social and economic benefit. The world is in our grasp, let�s reach out and hold it.
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.