US development still plagued by politics

As if the USA Cricket Association did not have enough to deal with, its politics are interfering with one of the few promising initiatives that it has tried to launch in 2006, and threatening to put it back into the perennial doldrums that it has been for the past five years.

The trouble started with the call for an open-ended meeting by Clifford Hinds, one of the most respected figures in US cricket, to brainstorm program ideas and find consensus objectives for US junior cricket following the successes of the USA in the U-19 World Cup in Sri Lanka.

Hinds had put forward an ambitious action plan, which was quickly given a seal of approval on the USACA Web page, which labelled him as "the Man with the Plan". Some critics called the Hinds plan no more than a statement of good intentions, but there were hopes that with him at the helm, something might come of the efforts to jump-start US cricket in an appropriate direction.

Almost as soon as the plan had been floated, there were caveats that threatened to scupper the entire idea. The official announcement of the meeting carried the requirement that only USACA member organizations could participate; that they would have to be authorized by their USACA region, submit to USACA jurisdiction and take what amounted to a loyalty oath to the USACA.

Since most of the organizations involved locally with US junior cricket had been operating independently of the USACA, and many had been highly critical of the USACA's past inaction on US junior cricket, these requirements would amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater--almost by definition, most active entities in US junior cricket would be excluded from the proceedings, or would choose not to participate.

The sensible thing for USACA to have done would have been to hold the kind of open meeting that Hinds had envisaged, and then see what kind of organizational structure could be fostered under USACA auspices. But common sense, it seems, is in short supply these days.

The contradiction became momentarily public when a political issue emerged out of the woodwork. Chidambar Joshi, the principal of a well-known cricket academy in the Mid West, had either been invited by Hinds or had asked to attend the meeting and been accepted - for the present purposes, it does not matter which. The USACA director of the Central East region, invoking the rules in the official announcement, claimed that Joshi's organization was not a USACA member, did not represent his region, and should therefore be excluded from the proposed meeting.

Hinds replied to the objection with considerable rectitude. He informed the regional director that he was for an open-ended meeting, he felt he could invite whoever he chose, and he believed that this was in the best interests of US cricket.

The veil of secrecy that seems to surround much that USACA is involved with, has descended once again. It is not known if the USACA will support the position taken by Hinds, nor whether the controversy will discourage the attendance of independent organizations at this meeting.

But the controversy does illustrate the problems facing USACA in re-inventing itself - and why the task may prove to be a difficult, if not impossible, one.