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Cricketing Guppies

Mar 28, 2010 Editorial

West Indies are now firmly established as one of the “minnows” of world cricket. After the scare of their initial defeat by the Zimbabwean team, it was pathetic at how relieved our officials were to sweep the rest of the series.
The performance of the team to secure that series victory did nothing to encourage their long suffering fans that there was any light at the end of the tunnel as far as any hope for a reversal of cricketing fortunes. But if the WI team are minnows, then the Guyana team are definitely guppies.
What else could we be when Guyana is languishing at the bottom of the rankings in all forms of the game among the various national teams of the West Indies? And mind you, some of these islands have less that a tenth of Guyana’s population!
Last year, during the crisis that was precipitated in WI cricket by the players’ strike, we wrote a series of editorials about what was “killing” the game in our region.
The reasons for our local abysmal standing are no different from that of our wider malaise – the administration of our cricket. In our case, as with most of such cases, the stench begins at the head: in this case, the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB).
Sure we could talk about unmotivated, undisciplined younger players and the competition for talent from other sports such as basketball – and the GCB invariably harps on these factors – but it is precisely to address these and other challenges that we have a cricket administration.
The bottom line is that just as with the WICB, the GCB had obdurately refused to initiate and sustain the changes that are necessary to revive our cricket. The test of the cricket is in the playing and we cannot deny that our playing has become a joke.
The irony is that the introduction of huge financial incentives into cricket over the past decade, which should have been the motivation for drawing talent into the local game to boost its performance, has worked to the opposite end. The finances flow through the administrative structures and this has encouraged all sorts of skulduggery by incumbents to control the cricket boards and in effect, the purse strings.
The power struggles to control the GCB are legion – making the national political arena a veritable sea of calm and stability by comparison. Nepotism, bribery, corruption, favouritism and arm twisting have become the norm.
Even the race card is regularly played. In our case, we have one man, Mr Chetram Singh, who has been at the head of the GCB since 1991, and who obviously has presided over our steady and inexorable decline.
But it is not only Mr Singh that must go – it is our firm belief that the entire administrative structure that must be revamped to ensure that we do not end up with the same rot in short order.
The administration of cricket has to become capable of dealing with the increased professionalisation of the game: cricket is no longer the province of talented amateurs. This means that the democratisation of representation on the GCB must be undertaken apace and experts with working experience of the game must be placed in positions of authority.
Maybe along the lines suggested by the Patterson Committee for WI cricket, the GCB should be scrapped and literally reconstructed. A two-tiered Cricket Guyana comprised of a Cricket Guyana Council drawn from a wide range of stakeholders and a Cricket Guyana Board selected by the CGC, the county boards, players’ associations and RDC’s might be the way to go.
The intent has to be to open up the composition of the governance body to make it more responsive to the needs of the game.
Cricket is too important to be allowed to be strangled to death by selfish administrators. We invite the public, which ultimately funds the game to be heard on this crucial issue. Guppies cannot be our cricketing lot.

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