NZC board exit flies under radar after fiasco
FUNNY THING happened the other day. The entire board of New Zealand Cricket confirmed its intention to resign and what happened? No-one listened. Or, at least, hardly anyone listened. Amid the near lunatic reaction to Ross Taylor’s captaincy fiasco, it’s as if chairman Chris Moller’s words were never uttered. Seems when a crowd’s baying for lynchings and stonings, news of a mass euthanasia just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Granted, NZC’s non-existent PR is as much to blame as anything. Whatever gravitas might have been attached to the board’s decision to stand down and reconstitute, Moller effectively blew it out of the water with the revelation his organisation was in receipt of ‘‘additional information’’ regarding Taylor’s plight. It’s doubtful anyone heard anything else after that. It was like sending the nation’s news media out on a snap treasure hunt.
Certainly, if Moller’s intention was to distract everyone from his reminder the board was stepping down at a special meeting early next year (to allow a new board to be formed under a new constitution), the performance was an enormous success. Seldom has such an important message been so completely undermined, in the space of just one sentence. And so needlessly, by the sounds of it. Moller said later there were ‘‘no hanging offences’’.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. I mean, there we were last week, screaming for heads to roll over the now-accepted mismanaged exercise that fuelled Taylor’s boycott of the tour to South Africa. The board should resign, shouted many. Reminders it was about to do precisely that, but over unrelated matters, have in no way curbed the blood lust. Seems it’s not accountability that some people want; it’s more like a bullet-riddled corpse.
But just a word on that. It’s become a little difficult to accuse those on the board of not having the game’s best interests at heart when, at the same time, they’re all preparing to stand down and cede power for the greater good. After all, the panel of: Moller, Bill Francis, Sir John Hansen, Stuart Heal, Therese Walsh, Don Mackinnon and Greg Barclay, could have easily rejected the recommendation out of selfinterest. You don’t often find turkeys voting for Christmas.
Let’s leave aside the Taylor outrage for the moment. What NZC is about to do is remarkable. As a rule, sporting bodies aren’t much taken with the idea of best practice, especially in relation to board structures. Blasted inconvenience. The International Cricket Council spent a fortune on the Woolf Report (which recommended replacing delegates with independents). Result? Laughed out of existence. The Indian delegates are reportedly still chuckling.
To be fair to NZC, it’s long been a frontrunner in this regard. Unlike the NZRU or Cricket Australia, it moved completely away from regional delegates in the mid1990s. The new, upcoming constitution seeks only to fine tune that system. One of the best changes allows two of the eight directors to be appointed, rather than elected. That is, the flexibility to actively search for candidates with skills considered lacking elsewhere on the board.
It’s a fair question: what difference might the new setup have made in terms of Taylor? Who knows? Maybe, if the claimed lack of cricket experience on the board had been addressed, there would have been a different outcome. Maybe if the deficiencies regarding NZC’s lack of investment in PR and communications had been highlighted, the episode would have been better managed. Maybe the damage control would’ve been more effective.
Then again, if what we’re hearing about the new terms of reference for the board is true, it sounds like it will be even more hands-off than the existing organ. The most recent word on issues such as team captaincy is that the board will no longer be required to even ratify a recommendation; that those responsibilities will rest solely with the chief executive and senior managers. In other words, the board would have no say in a Taylor-esque changeover.
Whatever happens there, you have to love cricket in New Zealand. When it comes to unnecessary drama and upheaval, it remains an industry leader. So many ex-players wanting to stick the knife into each other; so little time. So much vitriol and hate; so little sense of perspective. So much frothing anger, so little empathy for the other side of the story. How blind has been the standoff? So blind, the board can vote itself into oblivion and hardly anyone notices.