In the name of God, go

Anyone looking at the USA Cricket Association's website could be mistaken for thinking all is well. The front page leads with recent elections results, and the only doubts that all might not be well are buried inside one of the PDF attachments where the election auditor refers to an election process that was "full of controversy from the very beginning".

That the USACA decides that the abandonment of Project USA, possibly the single most far-reaching announcement concerning US cricket ever, is not worthy of a mention highlights what a discredited shambles the current administration is.

For many months the cancellation of Project USA has been on the cards. Even when it was suspended in February, there was an alarming lack of any action on the part of the USACA, and an equally worrying reaction from some inside the US cricket fraternity that the ICC was bluffing and that "it needs the USA more than the USA needs it". Anyone who knows how the ICC operates or who had spoken to the hard-working Gary Hopkins, Project USA's CEO, would have known that was simply not the case.

The last chance the USACA had was to be seen to react positively and to implement the changes which would have made free and fair elections possible and to make the current leadership accountable for what Malcolm Speed, the ICC's chief executive, described as "the unsatisfactory state of governance" in USA cricket.

Instead, it did nothing. Well, that's not entirely true. On the eve of the ICC executive's crucial meeting in Delhi, Gladstone Dainty, the president, sent a stark reminder of just what a farrago he had engineered by suspending the association's secretary and barring three candidates who opposed his controlling group. Timing, as they say, is everything. It made the abandonment of Project USA a rubber-stamping exercise.

And so the moment has passed into history and the ICC bandwagon - and the millions it would have brought - will roll into another town. There are probably those who still believe that this is a bluff. They also probably believe that Elvis is alive and well.

The biggest shame is that Dainty and his associates still cling to power. Despite having done massive damage to the development of cricket in the USA by antics that were often more at home in the school playground, they cling to power, pretending that this is all a little local difficulty and that it will all turn out OK.

To someone looking in from the outside, it is remarkable that, in a democracy such as the USA, people like this cling to power in a manner more reminiscent of old eastern European dictators. As with those despots, the only remaining option appears to be a revolution from within. It cannot come soon enough.

The words of another revolutionary, Oliver Cromwell, spring readily to mind. "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately," he told the English parliament in 1653. "Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"