THE Trinidad Cement Limited (TCL) Group of Companies are to pump some $3 million into West Indies youth cricket over the next three years.

The sponsorship deal was announced at the Hilton Trinidad yesterday as TCL chief executive officer Dr Rollin Bertrand described his company’s commitment to the annual West Indies Under-19 tournament—which will now see them as title sponsors in the renamed TCL Group West Indies Under-19 Challenge—as “an investment not only in our fine young athletes but in the Caribbean at large”.

The Under-19 Challenge, which will showcase a limited overs contest and three-day competition, is to be used to select the West Indies youth team to represent the region at a yet-to-be announced World youth championship venue in 2004.

“Cricket is, perhaps, the most unassailable of this region’s ongoing attempts at unification,” noted Bertrand. “We believe our commitment to the Under-19 championship will also supply what many analysts of the game see as the missing link between primary school performance and the often-pilloried adult version.”

Bertrand added that TCL had identified the “issue of succession planning” as a first point of concern, stating that continuity, re-instilling confidence, and building up of a ready pool of heirs “to reclaim our place of prominence” is of paramount importance.

He reasoned that because of the significance of the game to the regional psyche, “we must guard jealously our position in those few things at which our supremacy as a ‘region-nation’ “ is sustainable.

Bertrand related that the TCL Group, which has companies throughout the region, hold the role of team sports in character building in high esteem at this point in the Caribbean’s development.

And he hoped that his company’s investment will lead to technical and social improvement in West Indies’ youth players.

West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president, Reverend Wes Hall, who said the “West Indies is never really short of talent”, thanked TCL for their investment that, he hoped, will prepare them for making “the quantum leap into first class and, indeed, Test cricket”.

Hall singled out present West Indies senior team members Carlton Baugh Jr and Dave Bernard Jr as “prime examples” who benefitted from the youth phase of the WICB development programme, “coming through the ranks, into the (Shell Cricket) Academy and then into the Test team”.

Congratulating the West Indies team on their victory against world champions Australia at the Queen’s Park Oval last Sunday, Hall indicated that many of the youthful cricketers in the current WI One-Day and Test squad—which has an average age of 24—are “superstars under construction”, who will take West Indies cricket back to the lofty heights of the “60s, 80s and early 90s” in a year or two.