Former team manager slams 'incompetent' USACA

Former team manager Imran Khan has criticised the USA Cricket Association (USACA) administration, calling its president Gladstone Dainty and the board of directors incompetent and blaming them for the national team's failure to advance from ICC WCL Division Three to the top echelon of Associate cricket.

"The people in charge have completely failed," Khan, who was USA's manager from 2008 until the tour to Hong Kong in January, told ESPNcricinfo. "Don't blame the team. They're at the low level. It starts right at the top. These guys have proven their incompetence."

Since his return from Hong Kong, Khan claimed he received no communication from USACA despite attempts to reach out to them. According to USACA general manager, Manaf Mohammed, Khan was not invited to be the team manager for the upcoming ICC Americas Division One Twenty20 tournament in Florida because he lived in England and it was not worth flying him in. Khan, however, said this was another indication of how USACA operates because he has been living at his summer home in San Francisco for several months.

According to Khan, as team manager, he made it a priority to write and submit detailed reports after each tournament. They covered the organisation of practice sessions, team selection, kits, travel itinerary and evaluations of each player's off-field behaviour on tour. Khan claimed the administration ignored the reports and any recommendations he made.

"The only response I've ever had is, 'Your reports are too long. Nobody reads them'," Khan said. "What is the point of writing these reports and giving the feedback and analysis when nobody cares? They just want a confirmation the tour happened and that's it."

The manner in which players were treated by the administration, Khan said, was unacceptable and the selection for the ICC Americas Division One T20 tournament was the latest of several confusing decisions made by the country's three selectors. Khan said the biggest problem was that the players were not told why they were dropped or where they stand. He claimed this was the case with batsman Sushil Nadkarni - one of 10 players cut after the Hong Kong tour - before he was abruptly brought back into the squad last week at the expense of Nauman Mustafa, allegedly on Dainty's orders.

"They are incompetent and they are not capable," Khan said. "I'm talking about the president all the way down to all the directors and all the people involved in leadership positions because I've met most of them … they don't have the ability to communicate such a thing."

The communication breakdown was not limited to the players, Khan said, and was responsible for damaging relationships with coaches as well as lost sponsorship opportunities. He said that, on the tour to the UAE and Nepal in February 2010, former chief executive Don Lockerbie had promised Dipak Patel, the former New Zealand spinner, who was with the team as a consultant coach, the position of head coach and the responsibility of building a national development program. After the tour ended, though, Patel did not hear back from anyone. Lockerbie's presence, Khan said, had also undermined the role of head coach Clayton Lambert and created disharmony among players loyal to Lambert.

"In my presence, he [Patel] was promised the main coaching job in the US, responsible for its development," Khan said. "He was going to take over. Dipak was even talking about moving his family to the US and how he would convey that to his family and how his wife and kids would react to that. A seed had been planted, 'we want you. Now we're going to talk about salaries,' and then once the tour ended, it finished."

Prior to the ICC WCL Division Four in Italy in August 2010, Khan said Mohammed had publicly discussed plans for the team to go to England for a pre-tournament training camp. Khan was organising that portion of the tour through his network of contacts. The arrangements included a day at Lord's and several warm-up games against representative XIs but USACA canceled everything at the last minute.

"That was shocking and embarrassing for me because I unfortunately burnt a lot of bridges in England and [lost] long-established contacts with reputable people," Khan said. "We talked to Jimmy Ormond who used to play for England and Surrey. They decided to host a Surrey XI, ex-professionals or current professionals, and we had got a Kent XI. We were going to organise a similar thing in Sussex, or up in Henley with a Berkshire XI.

Khan also spoke of a deal with Gray-Nicolls - "whose head I knew very well" - who would supply free kits to USA's first XI in return for the chance to sell merchandise through the USACA website. It needed the chief executive's signature but that never came.

Khan says the people most affected by the administration are those who come through the Under-19 system but fail to get the support necessary to develop their talent. "Dipak Patel offered to take the majority of these kids into club cricket in New Zealand to develop them," Khan said. "That Under-19 team that went to the World Cup in 2010, that should have been the majority [senior] team now. How many of those kids are in this team?

"Let's look at Ryan Corns. What has he done to be dropped? This is your young, prime talent coming through. He could be a future captain. He's from a white background, so from a marketing perspective it makes sense. Not only is he a great prospect for the future and a good player, but he also could be a good face for US cricket to sell to the domestic public. It just makes sense and yet you've kicked him out for Joe Average players nobody's heard of. It's a short-term thing done for votes."

According to Khan, the current administration is locked in a power struggle based on ethnic and cultural alliances that is damaging to all stakeholders. For the organisation to truly succeed, he feels, a wave of young business professionals independent of political influence needs to step up and take control.

"There will never be a unified structure until this old guard is completely replaced. This old guard with their back-home mentality is always the problem. I mean they do a lot of good things - they established the thing - but when they try to replicate what they had back home is when the problem begins."