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Tony Cozier experiences first hand the WICB bungling led by its Chief Operations Officer Tony Howard. Cozier has to pitch in to rescue the stranded West Indies players coming in South Africa.

The situation bore the unmistakeable stamp of customary West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) bungling.

Pedro Collins and Daren Ganga arrived at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport by British Airways from London early yesterday morning, after 36-hour journey from the Caribbean, expecting to join the West Indies team that had flown in the last evening from Zimbabwe for the fourthcoming tour of South Africa.

They found no one on hand to meet them, had no idea where the team was, carried no contact numbers for West Indies or Cricket South Africa (CSA) officials and no instructions to advise them of their next move.

Fortunately, I was at the airport at the time and could offer some help.

As earlier e-mailed efforts to obtain names and numbers for West Indies team hotels and management from the WICB had proved unsurprisingly futile, I telephoned Michael Owen-Smith, the CSA media manager, to inform him of the predicament. He immediately contacted CSA headquarters in Johannesburg from his office in Cape Town and called back to state that no one there had any notice from the WICB of the scheduled arrival of the two players, who replace Ravi Rampaul and Narsingh Deonarine from the Zimbabwe team.

*Does anyone actually know of any (other) company where this sort of thing happens and the persons responsible are not seriously reprimanded? The more things change, the more they remain the same. The charade continues.