We are happy for the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) - at least it will be able to dig itself out from under a mountain of debt. The WICB deserves to get something right.

While Ken Gordon, the WICB president, did not provide an overall profit-and-loss statement, he attributes the board's impending good fortune to having "successfully hosted" the Cricket World Cup earlier this year. Chris Dehring and his team at the WICB subsidiary that was established to manage the event performed splendidly, Mr. Gordon says.

We are, of course, pleased with the accomplishments of regional individuals and institutions, and so in no way wish to detract from the glory that WICB, albeit with the support of others, may be pouring on itself. But we are bound to note that the financial performance highlighted by Mr. Gordon in his review, without apparent irony, was the performance of the gate.

According to Mr. Gordon, 672,000 tickets were sold for this tournament, which is about seven and half per cent more than were sold for the previous Cricket World Cup in South Africa four years ago, and over 40 per cent higher than the one in England in 1999. Indeed, the gate receipt of US$32 million was the highest ever for the tournament, Mr. Gordon tells us the comparative figures were not provided.

While all this gladdens us, the joy is overlaid by a thick coat of sadness. For the important question neither posed nor answered in Mr. Gordon's analysis was the proportion of West Indians who live in these Caribbean islands, who were in the grounds to watch the CWC matches and were among the more than two-thirds of a million people who purchased tickets.

We will be told, of course, that any observation we make is merely anecdotal, competing with empirical information dished up by Mr. Gordon and his team. That may be so. Nonetheless, we trust our eyes and, more important, we stand with the profound and tried and tested perceptive qualities of the mass of West Indian people. They, for the most part, felt themselves priced out of the World Cup. Even though the West Indian people need no such crutch, should they require vindication on this point, they need only recall the writings and analyses of myriad journalists from outside of the Caribbean who covered the tournament.

We had hoped that, at the very least, the CWC would have been a Caribbean carnival, a festival that would serve as a platform for the relaunch not just of cricket, but the idea and sense of cricket, in the West Indies; that is, it was an opportunity to recapture the largeness of cricket painted by C.L.R. James. In the face of the meekness of their current team, the West Indian fans need to be physically close to the game.

And accommodating that engagement of sport and humanity need not have meant a diminution of profit. So, while Mr. Gordon's accounting exercise is good, the returns fall short.