One might have thought that the clever thing for President Ramotar to have done was to drop the calumnies of local cricket from his own agenda and get on with the business of fashioning his own agenda. After all, it’s not as if there are not other things that need fixing in the Republic. But, no! Recall that the new President has made a pact with his predecessor and a deal is a deal even if it leaves one to wonder as to whether or not the Ramotar administration intends to beat a path of its own.
Word is that Minister Frank Anthony absolutely loathes being involved in the protracted and raucous run-in between the jousters for power in the local cricket set up but that the poor man has no choice. He was pitchforked into the affray by Jagdeo and now, it seems, he is stuck with it. In that sense the announcement that the government has decided to set up its own interim Board to run the local cricket show is really no surprise. And a show it is, indeed! The protracted hullabaloo over who governs local cricket has been given a new dimension by Khemraj Ramjattan whose new-found position as part of the majority-minority in the National Assembly appears to have imbued him with a new sense of zest and verve. Ramjattan has placed himself firmly on the side of the sidelined Board President Ramsay Ali and his beleaguered executive who say they oppose the move though what they can or will do about it is another matter.
They really should have made Bharrat Jagdeo head of the IMC. After all the man has been parading his credentials as a cricketing expert across the Caribbean for some time now, not afraid to lock horns with Julian Hunte and company over what he says are the inadequacies of the WICB.
Now even if we begin by conceding that few people would burst into tears if the existing WICB were to be given their marching orders, picking a row with the West Indies Board is certainly no way to go about it; and what this new state-run IMC is likely to do is to provoke the Board to anger and once that happens our cricket will probably be in an even sorrier state than it is right now. Setting cricket aside not much has been done by the powers that be to push sport in Guyana. In every single sporting discipline we lack the tools with which to take the sport to the top and there are instances, many of them in which there is simply no excuse for this state of affairs……….and since cricket is the only sport in which Guyanese excel, consistently, that is, at the highest levels of the game, all the more reason why the government should stop making high-sounding pronouncements and invest in the development of the game.
One gets an eerie, ‘big brother’ sort of feeling about this new IMC. You only have to look at the list of government-appointed members to determine the sort of job the IMC has been set up to do.
