So far, the ongoing franchise-based Caribbean Premier League (CPL) Twenty20 (T20) cricket tournament has provided good entertainment even for Jamaicans, who are left with no option but to watch from afar, on television.

Among the encouraging aspects have been a few promising young Caribbean players testing the waters and putting up their hands for future consideration by regional selectors.

As we have said previously, there is clear need for a focused domestic T20 tournament to better expose regional talent in short-format, white-ball cricket.

The CPL is big business, catering for global television audiences with top cricketers from around the world on show. In other words, with the best will in the world the CPL can’t be the main avenue for regional youth development, be it male or female.

Yet extreme resource constraints and an already tight schedule mean that the clearly much-needed regional domestic T20 tournament is much easier talked about than done.

That aside, it’s hard for Jamaicans to avoid the feeling that they are on the outside looking in, given the absence of the Jamaica Tallawahs from the current CPL.

Readers may recall that the Tallawahs franchise was given up by its owners last year because of what the latter described as lack of support from the Jamaican Government.

They opted instead to take charge of the Antigua and Barbuda-based Falcons for the current CPL campaign.

That followed what this newspaper considered the Jamaican Government’s shameful decision to refuse to host ICC T20 World Cup matches in the Caribbean and United States in mid-year.

The Government’s position was that it did not believe the approximately $450-million price tag would have been money well spent.

That lost opportunity meant cricket infrastructure, including Jamaica’s proud headquarters of cricket, Sabina Park — already badly in need of upgrade — has fallen even further into disrepair.

It’s against that gloomy backdrop that we welcome news that in response to lobbying from local cricket authorities, the Indian Government is reportedly donating an electronic scoreboard worth approximately US$700,000 for the iconic cricket stadium.

We are told the scoreboard will be installed ahead of a scheduled Test match at Sabina Park between West Indies and Bangladesh later this year. The demise of the previous scoreboard meant Sabina Park fell way below modern standards as an international venue.

Jamaica Cricket Association President Dr Donovan Bennett was reported in early September as saying India’s “previous donation of lights to Sabina Park was a testament to their love for the game, and this new scoreboard is another example of their commitment to [cricket]. So when we…approached them, it wasn’t a difficult ask. It was an easy ask …”

Dr Bennett tells us that there is much more to be done — not least an upgrade to the lighting system at Sabina.

“A lot of people don’t know that the lights we have there don’t really conform to international standards, and so we are going to have to tackle the problem. It is not a cheap problem to fix, and so I think at some point in time we will have to go to the [Jamaican] Government with a proposal to get that done…” Dr Bennett said.

We will keep our fingers crossed.