Nevis Activities

Andrew Miller
March 25, 2007

John Maynard now divides his time between net-bowling duties to visiting World Cup teams and
appearing as a guest summariser on Test Match Special At www.Stanford2020.com

To an English cricket fan of the early 1990s, John “The Dentist” Maynard was one of the most
evocative characters imaginable. One might even go so far as to suggest he is the most famous West
Indian (Nevis, West Indies) fast bowler never to have played a Test. Those who were not hooked on the coverage of England’s tour of the Caribbean in 1993-94 will probably have no idea who he is. Others, like
myself, could give chapter and verse on his marmalisation of England’s middle-order during their
build-up to that winter’s Test series.

Maynard, to this distant long-wave listener of Test Match Special, typified an era when a tour of
the West Indies was the ultimate examination of body and soul. The arrival of a Test team in the
Caribbean, particularly if it had come from England, was a call to arms for every aspiring
cricketer in the region. Long before Duncan Fletcher turned tour games into a 12-man-a-side
glorified net session, Maynard and his cronies were cranking up the pace and injecting the venom,
eager to advance their claims to Test selection, but equally determined to crush the tourists’
morale before they embarked on the main event.

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March 20, 2007
By John Mehaffey
Basseterre, St Kitts,(Reuters)

St Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas defended World Cup ticket prices and predicted a sell-out crowd for Saturday’s Group A fixture between champions Australia and South Africa at Warner Park.

Douglas said the minimum price for a ticket was $25 U.S. while the per capita income in the tiny Caribbean nation was $8,000.

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Charlestown, Nevis (March 20, 2007)

Works are ongoing for the provision of a local craft display area in Charlestown. Minister of Agriculture the Hon. Robelto Hector made the disclosure on Friday March 16, 2007 at the Gingerland Primary School, at the end of Basketry and Pottery workshops for students hosted by the Cooperatives Division in Nevis.

“Shortly, with some help from the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society, and the Cooperatives Division, I am trying to get an area, some of you know it as the old Cemetery, where we can make space available for you [students] or persons in craft to display their crafts. So persons who are a part of that industry to be able to make a dollar as we say, when we have tourists visiting our shores,” he said.

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March 20, 2007
By Lloyd Noel

Now that the ICC CWC2007 has in fact been opened and is ongoing as planned; and the Opening Ceremony on Sunday 11th March in Jamaica, could really be classified as the best ever, from the point of view of show-casing the history and culture of the Caribbean as a whole; and at the same time bringing together parts of the history and traditions of the other competing countries from around the world, it is, perhaps, the appropriate time to pose the above question.

And I say so, because with five weeks still to go before the final in Barbados on April 28, there is still ample time for the Local Organising Committees (LOCs), to more forcefully put forward another case to the ICC and WICB, to make some amends to the entry fees and prices of food and drinks at matches.

And just as significantly is the fact that it is not simply wild speculation on anyone’s part to say that the estimates and calculations about the World Cup bonanza were hopelessly over-exaggerated.

To begin with, it is already very clear that the estimated one hundred thousand visitors, expected in the region for the World Cup will not be realised.

And that realisation comes from the facts that, for the first round matches in which all sixteen teams are participating, the turn outs of the crowds at St Kitts – Nevis and St Lucia especially, have been very disappointing.

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By Neil Manthorp

‘Smokey’ the taxi driver has very quickly become our surrogate big brother. We lean on his every word, though most of them are unintelligible to us. He knows where everything is, naturally, and the likelihood is that will, too, after a week on this tiny but perfectly formed island community.
 
He mockingly berates one of us for referring to the capital as ‘Bass-e-terre’ instead of ‘Bass-terre’. The ‘e’ is silent. “Dis no Frech island, dat pleeass (‘Bass’e’terre’) be in Guadalope,” says Smokey.
 
Before arrival we had been led to believe that St.Kitts was little more than a large rock with two hotels, a couple of restaurants, a port and church or two. How wrong that impression was.
 
A population of 36,000 certainly makes it sound small, especially when the illegal hotel operating next door to my home in Cape Town has that many guests over for Sunday lunch, but that number discounts the tourists inhabiting the enormous ocean liners which cruise into the harbour on a regular basis.
 
As we flew into the larger and more established Antigua en-route to St.Kitts there were four enormous ships docked in the harbour although St.Kitts could never manage those logistics at this stage of it’s tourist economy life.

The sugar cane industry on which St.Kitts and the neighbouring Nevis islands depended for centuries was finally shut down after years of loss-making forcing the islanders to confront the stark reality that their visitors were now also their bread and butter.

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