Kenya’s press are up to their old tricks, and on the eve of Cricket Kenya’s elections the Standard has printed an error-strewn and arguably mischievous article which appears to be aimed at undermining board chairman Samir Inamdar.
If this was a one-off, then it might be forgiveable. But ever since Inamdar ousted Sharad Ghai as chairman in 2005, the and the Nation have not failed to snipe at the new regime and present a rosy, some would say slanted, view of the old days.
That it appeared on the same day the Nation ran an article typical of it claiming the players were boycotting training is not a coincidence. Board insiders suspect this is the start of a weekend of scurrilous comment to coincide with the elections. Watch this space.
Among the worst of a string of misleading comments in the Standard is one that states there has been a “massive pull-out of sponsors” of late. This is simply untrue. As things stand, CK has sponsorship from Tusker and Nimbus. Not one sponsor has been lost since 2005, although a board insider fumed that such articles only served to dissuade potential commercial partners.
The reality is that at the time of the 2005 elections Kenyan cricket had no sponsors. So bad were things that the only major sponsor had pulled out two months before the 2003 World Cup.
The paper also slams the CK constitution, one that it forgets was agreed by the ICC and the country’s stakeholders. It cites the case of former captain Asif Karim who, it claims, was dissuaded from standing against Inamdar. A board insider said the reality was that Karim was unable to stand as he could not even get enough support from within the NPCA to put him forward. Furthermore, he had declined previous invitations to get more involved in the administration despite his public claims he wanted to get more involved.
The Standard also implied that the lack of an opponent for Inamdar was a bad thing, harking back to a “fierce battle” between Ghai and Jimmy Rayani in 2003. Again, the reality is quite different. Between 1994 and 2005 there wasn't even an election, so dysfunctional was the administration. And Ghai became chairman when Rayani stepped down in 2004. It was an accession rather than a battle. That's the irritating thing about the internet ... you can check things so easily.
At some stage the patience of CK will snap and unleash its lawyers. That day might not be as far away as some of those involved think.
As predicted, today’s Nation carries a lament about how Kenyan cricket was so much better in days gone by. Charles Nyende actually ends his ramble with a comment that he misses the good old days. Aside from the usual inaccuracies (Charles, Kenya have not lost their ODI status) he seems to believe that in the good old days Kenya “could get fixtures against Test nations and given them a good run for their money”.
In the two and a half years between the ICC Champions Trophy in 2000 and the World Cup in 2003, Kenya played 18 matches against Test-playing counties – and won one. In the three years after the World Cup, after a tournament in Sharjah which followed straight on, Kenya was not able to get one match (aside from the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy which they were automatically invited to). The reason? The utterly shambolic state of the game nationally under the dysfunctional KCA.
It is tedious to keep having to make the same points again and again but the country’s newspapers seem determined to repeat the same untruths again and again.
RSS feed
