Says Orin Davidson
It hurts badly to see Guyana’s cricket disintegrate to such a sorry pass.
Two outright defeats from two matches against two of the weakest teams in the current West Indies Cricket Board-funded four-day competition says it all.
It comes on top of an embarrassing failure in the recent WICB Limited Overs competition and limited success this decade in the regional four-day competitions.
This year’s disastrous performance so far, may be attributed to a lack of preparation and the unavailability of the country’s best players or the away from home disadvantage. But the problems run much deeper that that.
The game in Guyana has been gradually sliding down a path of insignificance that has left the domestic structure in tatters.
Club competition is at its lowest ebb and the end result is poor playing standards that fail to attract the interest of spectators and a lot of players.
Without a strong domestic structure you cannot expect to produce players of any calibre, even to compete at West Indies levels.
This is a dilemma that was festering for many years and the repercussions are beginning to kick in now.
Club cricket these days has been reduced to an overwhelming majority of young players of school level calibre, carrying the mantle for what passes as first division competition in all three counties
The reality is that the players who have graduated from the national junior ranks, and those with regional first class exposure, who should be maintaining acceptable playing standards, have moved on to greener pastures.
They play in Trinidad and Tobago and comprise by far the greatest concentration of foreign players, representing clubs that can afford to pay players to play.
Those with a minimum of one season of regional competition are the prime ones who have given up on local club cricket.
The more fortunate ones with better resumes ply their trade in the English leagues where they can earn a comfortable livelihood for three months of work.
Their absence has stripped domestic competitions of any modicum of standard and prestige and we are producing players who cannot even stand up to lightweight teams like the Combined Campuses and Colleges and the Windward Islands.
It was a sad irony to read last week about Mahendra Nagamootoo and Troy Cornelius making runs and taking wickets for their Trinidad clubs while the Guyana national team was taking a beating in Grenada.
Just as unfortunate is the reality that the Guyana administrators never saw this disaster approaching or if they did, never displayed any concern
Thus, they cannot escape the collective responsibility for allowing Guyana’s cricket to go backward because of blatant misplaced priorities.
Many are more concerned with power grabbing while the game is disintegrating before their eyes to the pathetic state it is now.
Almost everyone is obsessed with becoming the new president, vice president, secretary, treasurer or committee member of county boards, area boards and clubs.
It has led to favouritism becoming the norm rather than the exception in the appointment of officials and in many team settings.
The latest outburst of discord within the Demerara Cricket Board is a pertinent example.
With the swirl of money in West Indies cricket these days, a poisonous mentality has developed where the prime objective is to have accomplices filling teams as officials and players, to grab a slice of the pie, primarily from the flood of Twenty20 competitions.
But lest those officials realize that poor standards from our players will soon topple the money train, the better it will be for the game.
Even before the present dysfunctional state of affairs, the structure upon which Guyana’s domestic cricket is built, was always flawed.
Club competitions are restricted to play within the counties and in Demerara’s case, only in the area boards.
Thus the competitions are diluted as the best clubs do not compete in a league setting at a national level in the longer form of the game, like is done in every other country.
Clubs are sometimes engaged in sporadic limited overs competitions which do nothing to develop basic skills. And in the present scenario of dwindling talent, you understand why Guyana cannot field teams of any consequence without Shiv Chanderpaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Mahendra Nagamootoo, the latter who seems banished from selection for no seemingly valid reason.
The size of the country has always been a problem to entertain national club competitions in the past.
But the time has come for Guyana’s cricket to move with the times.
The Guyana Cricket Board has to modernize its operations and find a way to improve a system that is not working.
It has to restructure the domestic competitions format and devise a strategy to compel the leading players to play at home.
A better plan to start with, would entail having the Georgetown and Berbice clubs which have the strongest ones, compete in at least one three-day competition and one of the 50 overs variety, along with representative East Coast, East Bank, West Demerara and Essequibo teams, in a first division series. This has to be organised by the GCB.
The other clubs in the respective counties would be left to compete among themselves in competitions organized by the ruling bodies there, in second division series.
It would require the GCB and to a lesser extent clubs, to become more business oriented, where revenue earning would be a primary objective.
Money would be needed for attractive prizes for the competitions and to assist clubs in finding means to pay players and cover expenses. That would be the GCB’s responsibility and if it could help the teams find sponsors, to run their operations, it would be better.
Most sports ruling bodies around the world are business oriented. Even in the West Indies it is happening for cricket in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica
Guyana has no choice but to follow suit, or be known forever as a nation that used to produce strong teams.
