Three weeks to save the game

If Gladstone Dainty remains, the chances of salvaging Project USA appear non-existent © Cricinfo

On Thursday afternoon the ICC's patience with the United States of America Cricket Association finally ran out, and it announced the suspension of its funding initiative Project USA. The news may not make the headlines - especially in the US - but it is a hammer blow for the future of the game in potentially the world's largest untapped market. Frustratingly, it was one that was entirely avoidable.

Nobody could question the ICC's commitment to the USA. It identified that within the country there was a large audience - mainly first-generation expats, the majority from Asia - which was available to provide the platform for development, and so it launched Project USA, the idea of which was to develop international world-class cricket in America. The ultimate goal was to stage major one-day internationals there, to bring in the best teams in the world, and to use the revenue from those events to develop domestic grass-roots cricket. It was a model that had worked exceptionally well for soccer, and the ICC even hired one of the key people responsible for the explosive growth of soccer in the 1990s.

The statistics are astounding. It is estimated that there are between five and seven million cricket fans in the States, of which something like 2.5 million are Indians who have arrived within the last decade. The Indian population is also extremely prosperous. It is thought that about one third of all the software engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian origin; 20% of start-ups in the USA are owned by Indians; and Merrill Lynch estimates that 200,000 Asian Indians are dollar millionaires. Add this to the existing West Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Commonwealth expat communities, and it is obvious that cricket has an inbuilt fan base waiting to be served.

There are tens of thousands of people who play the game every weekend, and more who follow it on satellite and the internet. In Miami, almost $40 million is being invested in he USA's first purpose-built cricket stadium. It has to be hoped that the local politicians who agreed to spending such a large sum will have their faith rewarded.

But because of a few blinkered individuals at the head of the USACA, the dream that was Project USA is on the rocks. Such was the ICC's commitment, that making the decision must have been incredibly hard - and that it was prepared to take it shows how serious the mess inside the association has become.

Anyone who has been following American cricket cannot have failed to notice that for some time its higher echelons had been dogged by self-interest and infighting, but the hope was the greater good of the game would win through. Sadly, it didn't, and the squabbling intensified, to the extent that it overshadowed many other facets of the game.

The USA's debut in the ICC Champions Trophy in September was farcical. A chance to show off "Team USA" ended with a hotch-potch of ageing ex-pats being humiliated on the world stage. In the months that followed things deteriorated, culminating in the letter from Malcolm Speed and Ehsan Mani which warned that things were at crisis point. Gladstone Dainty, the USACA's president and a man singled out in their letter for criticism, added fuel to the flames with some outspoken remarks, and although he denied them, the damage had been done. Last week's bickering over the forthcoming elections turned out to be the final straw.

So where now for the United States? On the surface, the game is up, and the future looks grim. As Speed himself said last month, there are plenty of countries eager to fill the void that have better administration and who fulfill the ICC's requirements. The show can move on to another town.

But there is a tiny window of opportunity. The ICC executive does not meet to discuss this until March 17. Ten days before that, the USACA holds its elections.

If the association's current senior officials are re-elected, then the meeting in New Delhi will only need a few minutes to rubber-stamp the decision to abandon Project USA. But if the rank and file in the States - who once the disappointment wears off will largely be livid at the position they have been landed in - can oust the current leadership, then a brand-new executive could lobby the ICC to be given another chance. The will is there on the ICC's side, but not with the existing leadership.

The other scenario, which again could only happen under new management, would be for the ICC to appoint a chief executive of its own to oversee the USACA. It would go against its own hard-and-fast rules not to get involved in domestic issues, but there is a strong argument that the USA as a special case. It lacks cricketing administrative experience but is a massive market. A fixed-term appointment would enable it to build and learn, and then the reins could be handed over once the show was on the road.

Whatever happens, the bulk of the current executive have been shown to be incapable of taking cricket in the USA forward, and have jeapordised a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. For the good of the game, not only just in the USA, they should be shown the door. After today's news, they should all resign anyway. But, unfortunately, their track record of acting responsibly makes that unlikely.