TWO new twists were added to the ongoing saga of the West Indies Board-players rift yesterday. One was raised by Jeffrey Dujon, the former Test wicket-keeper and assistant team coach, the other by Ellis Lewis, a West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) director. Dujon said in an interview with the BBC Caribbean Service that some players had signed personal endorsement contracts with Cable & Wireless against the advice of the WICB. Lewis, one of the two Trinidad and Tobago WICB directors, blamed the board for its lack of information on the issues. “I understand that some of those contracts (with Cable & Wireless) were entered into while negotiations were going on with the new sponsor who obviously was in competition and that the board had indicated to the players not to go ahead with that,” Dujon said. “I think the WIPA need to be a bit more reasonable where this is concerned because the most important thing here is West Indies cricket,” he added. Cable & Wireless is the giant British telecommunications company that sponsored West Indies cricket for 18 years before the WICB signed a new five-year deal, worth US$20 million, with the Irish mobile phone group, Digicel, Cable & Wireless’ direct competitors. The players’ personal contracts with Cable & Wireless are at the centre of the impasse between the WICB and the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) which led to 18 players refusing to sign their letters of invitation to the planned three-week camp in Barbados to prepare for the forthcoming tour of Australia. The intervention of Grenada Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, current head of CARICOM, and Barbados Minister of Sports Reginald Farley, led to the two sides agreeing on Friday to an independent arbitrator to try to settle the issue. The WIPA has indentified the key issue as “the board’s failure to recognise the players’ personal rights and those obligations which a player may assign to the WICB but only in his capacity as a member of the West Indies team”. Reported in the Trinidad Press, Lewis said the lack of information had brought comments “from several corners” that were “sometimes more than speculative”. “There are differences in the position of both parties,” he noted at an induction ceremony for players entering the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board’s development programme last Friday. “Big bucks are at play while the society goes through the trauma of an impasse among a sector in our society which contributes to one of the most positive sources of strength and self-esteem or our people,” he said. He added: “I have been listening to some of the comments on the impasse. Some of them have been made without all the facts and are sometimes more than speculative.” “I blame the West Indies board to some extent if all the facts are not available. In doing so, people sometimes jump on the bandwagon to make statements which are inaccurate on an unsuspecting public.” Reprinted from nationnews.com