The ancient county of Berbice has produced a bounty of cricketers for Guyana at both the junior and senior levels and various West Indies teams. However, over the past year, the governing state of the Berbice Cricket Board (BCB) has been thrown into turmoil with an injunction placed against the board by Godwyn Allicock and David Black.
A worry is that Berbice’s premier cricket facility could become a “white elephant” if urgent work is not done to resolve the current fiasco with the BCB
The rational being the injunction stemmed from the fact that Rose Hall Town Youth and Sports Club along with Young Achievers were inadvertently omitted from the Guyana Cricket Administration Act 2014 as voting members and would have participated in the elections to elect Anil Beharry and executive, which the plaintiffs of the injunction deemed to be illegal.
The Beharry led executive term in office would have expired as of December 31, 2016, with the injunction still intact. It begs the question now as how will the cricket affairs of the county be governed with no legitimate office bearers.
A source close to the matter in speaking to Guyana Times Sport on Wednesday when quizzed on the progress of the court matter revealed that “as far as I’m aware, there has been no progress on the court matter, in fact the life of the administration came to end in December 2016, nothing has been heard on the case, no effort is being made to have the injunction lifted so the board can continue its work.”
It was furthered disclosed that “nobody knows what is going on with Berbice cricket, there have been talks about the formation of a committee of first division teams to run cricket but in my mind, that would be totally illegal because the Berbice Cricket Board constitution does not cater for that; the situation is causing lots of clubs to close down and clubs are hardly attracting new members.”
It is understood that in 1990 there were over 120 cricket clubs in Berbice playing at the second division level while as many as 60 clubs had teams at every junior level. However, it seems difficult to find 40 second division teams and 20 clubs with youth teams.
Considering the impasse will continue to be harmful towards the sport in Berbice, the official close to the cricket affairs in the county made a call for the cricket Ombudsman to intervene in the matter.
The official stated, “Dr. Winston McGowan, who according to the cricket bill is the Cricket Ombudsman, should be the best person to deal with the matter or Christopher Jones of the National Sports Commission could intervene in the matter.”
The worry by the official which is also the view of many persons deeply engaged in the sport in the county, is that with county teams, needing selection and the organization of tournaments needing to done, who will officiate these process, with the technicality of no county being in place.
