Great expectations

To avoid being disappointed, frustrated or infuriated, the best thing is to expect nothing. On the eve of another general meeting, at the end of another presidency, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) seems no closer to charting a way out of the mediocre performances, internal strife and deteriorating player-administrator relations that remain the unfortunate defining qualities of the contemporary regional game.

Like his immediate predecessors, Ken Gordon departs the helm of the WICB with promises unfulfilled and targets missed, save for an adherence to greater fiscal responsibility and a considerably healthier financial position that has almost everything to do with World Cup revenue.

It is a measure of the depressed state of West Indies cricket now that the event trumpeted as the third largest among global sporting occasions arrived amid a mix of optimism and skepticism, dragged on for far too long and is now becoming an increasingly distant and unloved memory just two months after the final.

West Indian stocks at Test level were already plummeting like a stone down a bottomless pit for nearly a decade by the time the rhetoric and confrontations between WIPA and the WICB intensified into open warfare. It obviously didn't help an already bad situation, however the problems in West Indies cricket go way beyond getting both sides to shake hands and go down the road together

Fed up with the unending series of acrimonious exchanges between the players association and the board, the people have lost their appetite for this particular brand of bacchanal. They couldn't get enough when issues started to boil over and standoffs became the order of the day three years ago. But like two drunks arguing outside a rumshop, the entire unsavoury spectacle has become embarrassing and repetitive while achieving exactly nothing.

It is indeed bewildering that the administration should continue to parade itself as in the right after enduring its own 5-0 "blackwash" in consecutive arbitrations involving WIPA. But it is also way off the mark to suggest that the decline in the senior regional team's fortunes on the field was triggered by the clear expressions of mistrust between Dinanath Ramnarine and successive presidents.

West Indian stocks at Test level were already plummeting like a stone down a bottomless pit for nearly a decade by the time the rhetoric and confrontations between WIPA and the WICB intensified into open warfare. It obviously didn't help an already bad situation, however the problems in West Indies cricket go way beyond getting both sides to shake hands and go down the road together.

As per usual in this parochial environment of personality cults, the new man at the wheel is expected to save the day, except that the new man is an old hand at the games that board members play. In the time-honoured fashion of career politicians and other public figures in the Caribbean, former WICB member Julian Hunte is saying all the right things ahead of his weekend coronation as the new figurehead of the game's administration in the region.

Even if he were so inclined, the convoluted structure that is the WICB makes it almost impossible to effect fundamental change without a significant majority of members and directors coming on-side. And given the way they work so hard at undermining each other, achieving consensus to effectively vote themselves out of apparently cherished positions is well nigh impossible.

So what will become of this highly-touted report on the governance of West Indies cricket by a three-man committee of respected Caribbean citizens? Messrs Patterson, McIntyre and McDonald are essentially recommending a complete overhaul of the administrative structure, quite apart from other issues such as the formation of a fully professional regional league.

To have so much time expended on the exercise, only for it to be rejected outright or surreptitiously deferred, may seem a scandalous waste, except that's the way things are done around here.

Just look at the number of Commissions of Inquiry held in T&T and the attendant costs to the taxpayer of such elaborate old talk without substantive results.

Meanwhile, the game of pretense and propriety goes on, with the incumbents resisting fundamental change and the critics growing ever more strident. Inevitably, much discussion will be generated on the basis of the WICB's pronouncements following the weekend meeting, not to mention the remarks by the outgoing and incoming presidents.

It was the same two years ago, and two years before that. Optimism without foundation. Expectation anchored in quicksand.

In the midst of the World Cup disappointments, Deryck Murray said the time for talking was over. As president of the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board, the former West Indies wicketkeeper and two-time World Cup winner is one of the local representatives on the WICB, not to mention being a key figure in the endless negotiations with WIPA.

Is he intent on living by those words, uttered in frustration more than two months ago, or will he succumb to the futility of resistance in the face of a general trend of presenting a united front and toeing the party line?

As much as we enjoy ridiculing and demonising them, the present insurmountable structure of the administration of West Indies cricket means that these men of position and influence are the ones who need to recognise that things just can't continue going on this way.

Even if the cynics are correct in ascribing self-serving and power-hungry qualities to them, there surely is still an element of genuine concern for the welfare of this most popular and iconic of regional pastimes.

Short of accepting the governance committee's report and voting themselves out, the WICB members must acknowledge that some form of drastic action is necessary now. Failure to do so at this weekend's meeting will merely confirm that these gentlemen, at least as a group, like things just so.