Bad diagnosis by CSA's spin doctors

THE slow drip of the cricket crisis has left all of us burnt, itchy and irritable. Some - a silent majority, perhaps - have simply walked away, an understandable response to something boring, convoluted and apparently endless.

Yet not for the first time cricket in this country stands on a precipice, still faces the potential dissolution of its board and still faces the possibility that Gerald Majola might face either civil or criminal charges.

Because the doctors of spin on Corlett Drive have obfuscated their way through the moral maze doesn't mean the situation isn't terminal.

And it might get worse.

On Friday, Bernard Matheson, Mtutuzeli Nyoka's legal counsel, was hoping to compel instructing attorney Sivin Samuel to furnish him and Nyoka with copies of the Azhar Bham judgment.

The need for this arose as a result of KPMG, the authors of a monumental forensic audit nearly 300 pages long, feeling they were unable to pass judgment on what they identified were four possible violations of the Companies Act and many instances where Majola played fast and loose with his travel expenses.

Bham apparently recommended stiff sanction for Majola, based on his reading of KPMG's forensic audit, but until Samuel furnishes the Nyoka camp with a written copy, he and his allies can't proceed.

If Bham's findings suggest suspension and a disciplinary investigation for Majola, as some suspect they do, then CSA's board have a problem.

It was the board, after all, who approved the press release after last weekend's board meeting and subsequent annual meeting, in which their deliberation of the Bham finding suggested things were finished and klaar.

"As far as CSA is concerned, this matter is now closed," commented vice-president AK Khan on the weekend.

They are words that might yet return to haunt the board because there is an increasingly good chance that there is a wide gulf between Bham's recommendation and what they chose to do.

The KPMG report makes a great deal of Majola and the board's fiduciary duties as directors, with fiduciary duties being defined as the need to put the company's interests before individual ones.

It would appear, not for the first time, the board are confusing themselves by putting narrow self-interest in maintaining the status quo over their duties as directors.

By attempting to put a lid on the entire sorry mess, they are simply in denial, as they have been since the crisis broke out shortly after the conclusion of the IPL in mid-2009.

They might reflect that denial has not got them very far. It has not guaranteed that their major domestic limited-over competitions have a sponsor.

Neither has it resulted in a trouble-free period for cricket. Indeed, cricket is as troubled now as it has been at any time in the post-1992 period. And there appears to be no solution on the horizon.