Orville Taylor | F for football and the JFF

When Dave Cameron was removed as president of West Indies cricket, it was not surprising to me, because some of the power brokers in regional sport and the academy have strange relationships with truth and even lie directly to your face with smiles. From my conversations with Cameron, the clear impression that was given to him was that, given the amazing success that regional cricket had under his leadership, the renewal of his appointment would have been a cinch. After all, simultaneously winning World Cup, Women’s World Cup and Youth Championships is unprecedented.

Of course, the renewal of his tenure had to do with votes from regional cricket bodies and apparently at the last moment, someone betrayed him like Uriah the Hittite and he was left in the wilderness.

There is a simple formula when it comes to resources which are not your own. Personal feelings, prejudices and unresolved malice from outside of the system should never have any impact at all, when decisions are being made on behalf of the whole.

And herein lies the problem. To date, it seems as if we have got what we paid for and West Indies cricket is at this point easily deserving of the name ‘Worst in dis’. If you ask me, and even if you don’t, I believe that the entire slate of persons who are at the helm should simply have conversations with the entity that my brethren, Dennis Chung, used to chair and be removed like solid waste.

Growing up watching Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Maurice Foster along with Michael Holding and others, the sad state of this game makes me wonder if it is the shortage of good pitches, bats or perhaps balls. True, I’ve never been a fan of games with small balls; but cricket gave me a sense of pride as we dominated the scene during my teens and early adulthood.

In the late 1990s, our Reggae Boyz brought a different kind of pride and honour to this little island and, coached by René Simões, created history in setting a new watermark for our ‘fuchebol’.

We have been through many permutations since and recently we seemed to be on the cusp of a revival. Under the leadership of Theodore ‘Tappa’ Whitmore, we played some very good games. However, there is one in which it seemed incredible, that so many imported players were forced together and glued with white wood adhesive, rather than cyanoacrylate. Predictably, not only did the opponents kick the ball in our impregnable National Stadium, but they did the same to our well-exposed posterior.

There is still a lot of mystery surrounding the selection of that hurriedly put together squad, because the absence of chemistry is always a great predictor of failure. Whoever selected that team, or forced the hand of Whitmore in ensuring that loss, should have long gone to the pile of landfill managed by Chung’s erstwhile National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA).

On the face of it, as with the non-renewal of the tenure of Cameron, the termination of Whitmore’s employment by the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) was unfair and unjustifiable.

There are indeed circumstances, under Jamaican statutes, where a termination on the expiration of a fixed-term contract may still be unjustifiable, especially if there was a realistic expectation by the dismissed worker, of a renewal of such contract. Similarly, the refusal of the JFF to continue the contract of record-breaking head coach Lorne Donaldson is not completely defensible, simply because the contract came to an end. Just four years ago, the NSWMA has such a case, regarding Jennifer Edwards, which the JFF should find instructive.

Beyond the strict legal parameters outlined by the Employment Termination and Redundancy Payment Act and the myriad common law cases, the dismissal of a worker may be contractually right and thus ‘good law’, but patently unfair, inhumane and dysfunctional.

In a country, where the research and data point to a pretty strong correlation between mistreatment of workers in the last two decades and the level of homicidal behaviour on the whole, whatever kind of mockery or muck the JFF has in its arsenal; it gets an F.

Against the run of play, and on the crest of the high wave of approval from Jamaicans on the whole, the JFF discarded Donaldson as if he were refuse collected by an NSWMA vehicle on the way to Riverton City. The level of malice towards Donaldson must either have been high, or the powers that be within the JFF clearly have no adult-level understanding of consequences. After all, there is at least one incident, where decision-makers within the JFF showed scant disregard for processes, ultimately leading to a result which would embarrass anyone with a normal moral compass.

Whatever or whichever white fowl Donaldson might have had interactions with, someone clearly despised him so much, that they were willing to sacrifice the interest of the Reggae Girlz, the support of the nation and the gains we have made over the last two years, on the altar of some other interest that remains a mystery to the Jamaican people.

No one removes a coach just weeks before a major assignment, and worse, treats the communication with these adult female players with disrespect.

Against the background of unpaid money to the women, including funds already paid over by FIFA, the whole thing seems ‘susfishious,’ as my child used to say.

Sometimes, cows kick over the pail of milk. But there are no cows here and all this is a lot of bull.

Whatever might be the decision of the delegates in the upcoming elections of the JFF, let’s hope they choose what is good for Jamaican football and not what serves a tiny hidden interest group.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.