United States cricket in turmoil

In freefall: Chris Douglas smashes another boundary for Bermuda during a game against the USA. Both nations are struggling on the pitch, and the US are not in great shape off it either



Students from Indianapolis Public Schools' Gambold Prep High School play a cricket match Thursday, May 16, 2013, in Indianapolis. Indianapolis is spending $6 million to equip one of its parks with a premier cricket field, known as a pitch, and space for Gaelic football, rugby, hurling and other sports mainly popular overseas. Mayor Greg Ballard hopes his World Sports Park project brings international exposure to Indiana's capital and helps local companies attract talented overseas workers by offering them a home for their favorite games. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)



If you thought cricket in Bermuda was in a mess then spare a thought for our cousins across the water.

While the Bermuda Cricket Board is trying to figure out a way to stop the terminal decline of the national team, the United States could soon find themselves cast out into the international wilderness for several years.

Not that this would be anything new. The US were expelled from the ICC Intercontinental Cup in 2005, and suspended by the International Cricket Council in 2007 after an internal dispute over the constitution for the governing body of the game in the country, the United States of America Cricket Association.

That suspension was short-lived, this time things are slightly more serious. Once again USACA is mired in internal wranglings that have left it $4?million in debt, without a ratified constitution, and facing a genuine challenge to their authority as the rightful governing body for the sport in the US from the American Cricket Federation.

The rules governing membership of the ICC are clear. Associate Rule 3.1 states that membership is dependent on there being one sole governing body, something the US does not have.

The ACF have their own national domestic competition, a host of affiliated leagues, and last month announced their intention to launch Team USA, a fully functioning national team programme, in direct competition to the ICC-recognised United States team which was relegated to Division Four of the Pepsi World Cricket League alongside Bermuda last October.

However, Rule 3.1 might be about to change. On Tuesday the ICC sent out a confidential memo asking members to approve changes to the membership criteria removing the word sole and giving the ICC discretion to decide who is the governing body in the event of a dispute.

This could have one of two implications. It might mean that the ICC will be able to continue to support USACA or it could pave the way for the ACF to take over the running of the game in the US. The memo says that the ICC would look at the appropriate status, structure, recognition, membership and competence when deciding on a governing bodys suitability.

Jamie Harrison, the ACFs chief executive officer, is not entirely confident that the change in the rule will be to the benefit of his organisation, but he does think one way or another, somethings about to give.

While I am disappointed to learn that Rule 3.1 is being amended to save [Gladstone] Dainty [the USACA president] and USACA, I am simultaneously encouraged that the ICC will then have to take immediate responsibility for affirming USACAs fitness as the national governing body, Harrison said.

Having been empowered to deal with USACA without constraint, it must be concluded that electing not to deal with USACA would therefore represent tacit approval of its status, structure, recognition, membership and competence and I do not believe the ICC approves of USACAs governance.

In June last year USACA barely survived a vote at the ICC Annual General Meeting which would have placed them under notice of suspension, the first step to being expelled by the governing body. ICC officials will not comment on USACAs precarious position other than to point out that the first of four meetings the world governing body holds in a year is scheduled to take place on January 28.

By any standard, the game in the US is in a mess, and an open letter from Harrison to the remaining members of USACA earlier this week has done little to suggest otherwise. Harrisons addressed his remarks in a Facebook posting to the leagues who remain affiliated with USACA, and has urged them to switch their backing to his organisation.

Congratulating them for continuing to fight to resolve the governing bodys issues, Harrison said that it was time to realise USACA could no longer be salvaged and that a new path should be followed.

There is however, another way, Harrison wrote. There is a democratic organisation that is ready to accept you and share power with you. This organisation has fair representation for all cricket stakeholders, term limits [so no cliques can take over], and no crippling debt.

We also have a functional national domestic league, a successful national championship event, a thriving USA-Canada series, plus lots of other great benefits. And, perhaps most importantly, we have a constitution where fairness and justice are enshrined forever.

Harrison also implies that the ICC are simply waiting for USACA to collapse before embracing ACF as the new governing body.

Believe me, once USACA is mostly depopulated, the ICC will then be free to recognise the new American reality. I know this because theyve told me so, Harrison wrote.

What the ICC think is still open to debate, but privately officials have expressed doubts about the governance of the game by USACA, and questions have been raised as to whether the Twenty20 World Cup regional qualifier scheduled to be held in the US in May can go ahead.

Harrison expects to be ignored publicly by the ICC right up until the minute it finally declares USACA to be dead, something he does not expect to happen for at least 18 months.

That does not mean there has not been communication between the ACF and ICC. Harrison acknowledged that he had had conversations with the likes of Giles Clarke, the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and Tim Anderson, the ICCs Global Development Manager.

Its not like they dont know me, Harrison said. But they have also made it very clear that ICC rules are explicit. It is a members organisation, and all power is held by members. USACA, for all its warts, and dysfunction and problems, is still a card-carrying member. And rule one of the ICC is you never betray a card-carrying member of the ICC.

Ultimately, Harrison expects the ACF to have to go it alone for a while, using their own resources and initiative to fix a game in America that he believes is broken. And that suits him down to the ground, especially as he does not have much confidence in USACA surviving as a viable entity on or off the pitch much passed June.

Once they [USACA] are suspended the ICC money is cut off, Harrison said. Now, they are $4m in debt, insolvent, with really no revenue stream whatsoever. Their own auditor has suggested that without ICC money they can no longer be a going concern.

The question is how long does it take for them to go belly up? Three months, six months, who knows? At some point it will cease operations. The question is when do [domestic] leagues abandon USACA?

Is it at the moment of suspension once they realise there is no longer any hope of participating in ICC events? Do they wait it out for USACA to actually file bankruptcy, do they wait for USACA to cease functioning.

It will be up to each individual league to decide at what point they are finally going to walk away from the corpse. I suspect that will happen over the course of 2015.

Harrison does not expect the ACF to be immediately crowned as the new governing body and welcomed into the ICC family with open arms. He suspects that it will be a long and painful journey back for US cricket, one that includes a boat load of bureaucracy and paperwork, and forms to check off, and things to do, and it could be two or three years, before the ICC [admits us].

Once USACA ceases to exist, as Harrison believes it must, then the ACF will present themselves to the ICC as the last man standing, and that two or three year process can begin. Harrison is happy for it take that long, because he is of the opinion that the US needs the time to develop a game that functions at every level.

Harrison points to the present structure in America as a perfect example of how not to run a national programme. The present USACA pyramid is a mishmash of leagues and teams and in October played its first national domestic championship since 2011, a Twenty20 affair in which only three matches out of 19 were played to a conclusion.

Selection for the national team has been largely done on an ad hoc basis, and there have long been accusations of favouritism thrown at USACA when it comes to team selection.

The impending suspension, which Harrison has no doubt is coming, and the need to develop the game in the United States beyond a failing national team drove the ACF to announce the formation of Team USA. The ACF intend to hire a general manager, a national coach, and select an initial squad of 20 players, with the aim of being ready to re-enter international competition in 2017 or 2018.

The problem for the United States has been that we have never really had a national team programme, and I mean never, Harrison said. A programme isnt pulling 15 names out of a hat three weeks prior to a tournament, putting them on a plane and sending them off, thats not a programme.

We could wait until USACA is suspended and even expelled from the ICC, but we thought that would be wasteful. Its going to take months, maybe even a year to create an effective national team programme. Weve never had that in the USA, so we are basically recreating the entire programme from scratch, and thats going to take time. We felt like it made no sense at all to wait for this artificial deadline in the future to begin doing what we knew had to be done anyway.

Harrison believes that stepping away from the ICC and the associated commitments will make the game in the US stronger in the long run, and has no concerns about operating in glorious isolation for the next couple of years. If anything he welcomes it. As a relative newcomer the ACF is not awash with cash, and he views USACA as a salutary lesson in financial ruin.

One of the albatrosses around USACAs neck forever has been that it is required to participate in all these very expensive far away ICC events that do nothing to build-up the national programme, Harrison said. From a money standpoint Im looking at it as a plus. It gives us complete freedom to manage it as we will, and to arrange the finances as we will, and not have to worry about spending $100,000 getting players to and from Malaysia.

We need to spend time here, investing in our players, investing in our infrastructure, building a team, working that team. There are plenty of teams in the US and Canada that would be more than happy to take on a team calling itself Team USA, just for the delight of trying to beat us.

One thing Harrison cannot get away from is the fact that USACA still exists, is still the governing body of the game in America, and has the weight of the ICC behind it. For all his plans for the future they are dependent on the collapse of the United States of America Cricket Association, and if the past has shown anything it is that Dainty is not one for giving up without a fight.