St John’s, Antigua – When the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) signed off with ESPN Caribbean as its exclusive television partner for the just concluded Super50 regional tournament, the final crew number was 44. In that crew included four employees of the Antigua and Barbuda Broadcasting Services (ABS TV).
The four ABS TV employees were Collin Armstrong, Catania Tonge, Marlon Carr and Lennox Phoenix. Armstrong and Phoenix were on camera and at points became crowd favourites as they roamed the Coolidge Cricket Ground for the nine live matches. Tongue worked with the Audio crew and Carr was in the Control Room handling video replays.
Armstrong and Phoenix expressed happiness with the experience and told us “the crew was great to work with and the chance to work on a team like that this was fascinating.”
Tonge added that the “cricket itself was exciting and that made the tasks interesting. I enjoyed working with the crew.”
Carr was always in the production room under the direction of Executive Producer, Peter Steep. Peter has had over 20 years working in this area of production. With five Olympic Games under his belt, Steep comes with “tremendous quality work we are always happy with” says WICB’s Commercial Manager, Nelecia Yeates.
The partnership with the WICB and ESPN saw just over 100 hours of live and delayed broadcast which included highlights packages. Nice matches including six group stage matches were carried live including the semi-finals and final, all from Coolidge Cricket Ground in Antigua.
The matches were broadcast to an estimated 100 million Pay-tv consumers across the Caribbean, USA, Latin America, Brazil, Europe/Middle East/Africa, UK and some sections of the Indian Sub-Continent.