Good Riddance to Lequay's Cliquism

With dissatisfaction rampant in cricket circles throughout the region, Trinidad & Tobago has an opportunity to show the administration of the game the way back to a more healthy and productive path.

Alloy Lequay has announced his retirement from the TTCB and a window of opportunity is opened. The TTCBC had been born of the desire to have a national body, not a club or worse a clique, run the game.

Lequay was one of the hardest workers in that enterprise and when the first T&T Cricket Board was formed he was at the front of its executive.

When the new board was formed he dominated it and, with his experience in politics to guide him, eventually designed a constitution that would guarantee his team in place as long as that constitution remained in place.

For years, the members remained in place, re-elected, unopposed, to whatever position they had been placed as long as they continued to back up the chief. Different opinions were regarded as creating instability. They seemed to mistake a static board for a stable board. Do the chief?s will and let no pup whimper.

With the constitution in place, a clique took over the running of the game just as a club had once dominated the game, its promotion, presentation and selection of the national teams.

T&T Cricket benefited from the organisational skills of Lequay for half a century but, like many of our politicians, The Chief did not know how to change to meet the changing circumstances or when to leave to let a man, more in touch with the age, take charge.

The result is a brilliant career tarnished by a desire to hold on to office long after he had made his contribution. His last years saw him merely repeating himself and holding on for dear life.

Lequay was able to carry on as long as he did because the constitution of the TTCB allows its 41 members to re-elect themselves every two years. Having suffered under this abomination, the cricketers of the country must now take back their game.

In the last five or six years, two challenges were mounted but they were doomed to failure as long as the clubs had two votes and the other votes were controlled by the status quo.

Can you imagine, the 41 members voting to elect the new board!

People who were nominated by the sitting board had a vote. They represented nobody but owed their position on the Board to the current board. Members whose term had ended had a vote. They too, had a vote even though they represented nobody.

As a result when first, Tony Harford and later Deryck Murray challenged, they were defeated, to nobody?s surprise. In fact, after Murray?s challenge, one of the Board members, said it was time they ?got rid of the traitors.?

Anybody of the executive, who voted for Murray, was a traitor and some heads rolled.

That can not be allowed to continue but it would require the clubs of the country demanding and standing strongly for a more democratic constitution, with every club having a say in the election of the TTCB.

There must be no votes for nominated members or for representatives of the many fly by night leagues, some of which never functioned or for members whose term had ended.

Only the clubs should have the right to decide who they wanted to run, manage and control the game which they spend time and effort playing.

The manner, the closed shop that is the T&TCB, the unaccountability for its action to a docile and dormant community, mirrors the manner in which the WICB is run and by which it re-elects itself.

It allows the WICB to be autocratic and disdainful of all the criticism which follows the loss of millions of dollars in unauthorised, speculative investments, of less than co-operative relationship with the players and their organisation and with the media in the region.

The last disclosures about the treatment of the players and the unnecessary stand-off with WIPA after the acquisition of a new sponsor, are reasons for the careful look at the constitution of the WICB, of the lack of accountability and transparency of the board.

Let us hope that the players, the clubs in T&T cricket show the way to the rest of the region in restructuring the running of the game here. It worked well enough in its time but the time has come for change.

* This article appears by special arrangement with the Trinidad Guardian.