The nine-day wonders that cause us to get emotional have long past and it is business as usual in our cricket.
Where else but in the Caribbean could the Jeff Miller saga play out as it did and no feathers have been ruffled in the bosom of the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA)?
When such things are allowed to happen it compromises the good governance of any organisation.The message being sent in this particular instance is that there appears to be no accountability in matters that touch certain members of the BCA.
If this is the case, it can be argued that there should be untouchables right across the board because we can’t justifiably sanction some and not others when there are questions to be answered about serious issues.
Clearly, by any yardstick somebody should have been made to pay for the mess the Miller case turned out to be.
Let me state emphatically that the former chief executive officer of the BCA is not to be blamed for anything. He didn’t recruit himself nor did he appoint himself to the post.
It wasn’t his fault either that the association didn’t appear to recognise what was common knowledge about his legal problems. Of course, the BCA in its defence said it did due diligence so one can only take their word.
In any event, this storm in a tea cup has passed quietly and with the installation of David Deane to carry out the duties of a CEO in the interim, seems to imply that everything has been forgotten and the association continues in a go-as-you-please mode.
There was talk of bringing a motion against the persons who handled the Miller situation but it fell way short of the amount of votes required to move it.
If this is so, the charge of complicity in brushing aside a matter that made us the laughing stock of the Caribbean, could be laid against those who didn’t have the courage to be agents of change in an organisation that set standards for the rest in Barbados.
The local sports media have been very soft on the issue also. It is the hot potato nobody wants to touch.Why?
It is the same for the West Indies Cricket Board too in light of the abandoned tour of India.
The timeline of the events leading up to the abandonment clearly shows that the WICB was extremely slow to react in trying to get to the bottom of the dispute or to having it resolved so that the tour could have continued.
In fact, there’s every indication that the only meeting they were interested in was the prescheduled one set for October 21 to discuss with the players the terms of the Memorandum Of Understanding and the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the board and their bargaining agent, the West Indies Players Association.
Somebody should have paid the price for allowing the matter to get out of hand and to the point where the board is now indebted to the Board Of Control For Cricket In India to the tune of US$42 million.
Did we reach that juncture too because we were even slower in engaging the Indians even though it was clear that we were at fault?
Still, nobody from the WICB was reprimanded. Business as usual, so how do we expect the governance of the game to improve when it is so easy to gloss over things that are fundamental to the operations of the board?
As the Vincentian Prime Minister
Dr Ralph Gonsalves pointed out, the question of governance wasn’t addressed in the report of the Task Force who investigated the reasons that caused the premature end to the Indian tour.
I fail to comprehend why we don’t want to accept that inept management is the biggest reason our cricket continues to be in the doldrums.
Why, though, does it seem that absence of proper governance in West Indies cricket is terminal?
Who benefits?
• Andi Thornhill is an experienced,award-winning sports journalist. Email:[email protected].
