Vin­ode Mam­chan

In a day and age where our play­ers' men­tal ca­pac­i­ty for a fight is be­ing ques­tioned, I am forced to be­lieve that we are miss­ing a top class man­ag­er like Omar Khan.

The for­mer West In­dies man­ag­er was cast by the way­side two sea­sons ago and I get the feel­ing it had more to do with off the field is­sues rather than on it. Men close to the sit­u­a­tion tell me that he was re­moved for po­lit­i­cal rea­sons.

I was cau­tious about pen­ning my thoughts at the time be­cause I want­ed to be fair to his re­place­ment, the for­mer Min­is­ter of Sport Manohar Ram­saran. Now that 'Mano' who had an up and down ses­sion has called time on his ca­reer as man­ag­er, I thought that the board would have gone back to Khan re­al­is­ing their mis­take from ear­li­er on.

How­ev­er, they went for the for­mer T&T Un­der-19 man­ag­er in Roland Sam­path. I think that Khan's name would have come up around the dis­cus­sion ta­ble in Cou­va but egos would have held sway. I think that many men on the ex­ec­u­tive of the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) know of Khan's pedi­gree as a man­ag­er; how­ev­er go­ing back to him would have made them look as if they did not know what they were do­ing in the first place.

I like the pres­i­dent of the TTCB, Az­im Bas­sarath who in my opin­ion is a very good ad­min­is­tra­tor, but some­times he needs to take the bull by the horns and run the board as he sees fit, even if his de­ci­sions are un­pop­u­lar with his peers. He has a good head on his shoul­ders and has re­mained pop­u­lar with the peo­ple even in­to his third term.

He needs to un­der­stand that you don't al­low a team to suf­fer just be­cause men did not want to cor­rect a wrong. Every­one can't be wrong! Every play­er I have spo­ken to con­cern­ing this sit­u­a­tion, was against the re­moval of Khan as man­ag­er.

I was told by a mem­ber of the board that Khan was too play­er friend­ly. Well, he got the play­ers to per­form and at the end of the day that is what mat­ters most. We are liv­ing in times where the prover­bial 'big whip' can­not be used any­more. When deal­ing with young peo­ple these days we need to have di­a­logue. We can­not speak down to them, we can­not force them to do what we want them to do. We need to sit them down and rea­son with them, find out if they are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties with some­thing and ap­proach it from that an­gle in or­der to get the best out of them.

I look at the tremen­dous lev­el or­gan­i­sa­tion Khan has brought to the Guyana Ama­zon War­riors, which he man­ages in the Caribbean Pre­mier League. I have been to Guyana cov­er­ing the crick­et and I have no­ticed the lev­el of re­spect shown to the man. The Ama­zon War­riors is a force to be reck­oned with in T20 crick­et, hav­ing fin­ished run­ners-up in the first two edi­tions of the tour­na­ment. They may even claim that they should have been award­ed the ti­tle in St Kitts last year ahead of the Bar­ba­dos Tri­dents.

The Ama­zon War­riors team is a very tough one men­tal­ly and this came along due to ex­ten­sive work done by the man­age­ment of the team in class­room ses­sions head­ed by Khan.

His lev­el of or­gan­i­sa­tion is sec­ond to none and he has got­ten play­ers to give off their best. Even his stint as man­ag­er of the West In­dies se­nior crick­et team, was a suc­cess­ful one dur­ing a pe­ri­od where the team was gen­er­al­ly not do­ing well.

He then man­aged the West In­dies Un­der-19 team be­cause of his ca­pa­ble man­age­ment tech­niques. A team that was ex­pect­ed to come home ear­ly from the 2010 Youth World Cup in New Zealand, just lost out in the semis.

Some might say that I have writ­ten this col­umn be­cause of my close ties with Khan (we both host the sports show CRICK­ET360). Well, while you are think­ing that, think about how long it took me to write this ar­ti­cle af­ter he was oust­ed. I think that be­cause of my close as­so­ci­a­tion with him, I am in the best po­si­tion to write about the man's qual­i­ties as a man­ag­er. Let's hope that the TTCB can cor­rect this wrong but then again the horse has prob­a­bly al­ready bolt­ed.