Ken Gordon ... stepped down yesterday as president of West Indies Cricket Board. - File

President of the West Indies Cricket Board Ken Gordon stepped down from his position yesterday. Below is part of a prepared text he delivered at the board of directors' meeting in Trinidad and Tobago. The rest of his speech will be carried in tomorrow's Gleaner.

One of the major commitments I made at the time that I assumed the presidency of the West Indies Board was that there would be full transparency in the manner in which the board conducted its affairs.

We have discharged that pledge and kept the public fully informed of developments even where these may not have been favourable to the board. Indeed, even targeted operational objectives have been announced publicly at six-monthly intervals, and we have followed this up by announcing our success or failure in implementation of such objectives.

We are pleased to take that promise of transparency to a new level with a resumption of the West Indian Cricket Board's annual report. This will hereafter be done on an annual basis.

The consolidated accounts for the years 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 are both contained in this report. They represent the recent history of the organisation, not its current financial realities.

The significant turnaround of the WICB commenced during the second half of the 2005/2006 financial year, and will be fully captured when the accounts for the current financial year September 2006- August 2007 are published. Our focus in this report will, therefore, be on the major activities, including managementaccounts of the current financial year and the foundation which has been put in place for the future.

The process of transforming the WICB into a results-driven organisation has begun. At the beginning of my term I asked to be judged on the basis of results, and now as I depart, this statement will report on what has been achieved and the structures which have been in place for the development of West Indies cricket.

1. Cricket: The performance of our team on the field has been for the most part disappointing. We have changed captains selectors, lost one of the best batsmen the world has seen, had our coach depart prematurely, appointed a Cricket Committee and made innumerable adjustments to our team, but the results continue to be up and down and far more often down. With some exceptions, we remain a tragedy of unfulfilled potential.

Outstanding performance

There were moments before the World Cup when we dared to dream of winning it. More recently there was the outstanding performance of the team in winning the ODI series in England. Hopefully that may represent a new beginning, but the evidence suggests that with the best of intentions we have been tinkering for too long with a problem that requires a fundamental change of culture and commitment.

A change that will impose discipline as a matter of course and make people accountable for their behaviour. Our team lacks the toughness, mental and physical, of professional sustainability. At a time when our players are amongst the best paid in the game, we hear complaints that a "curfew is too restrictive", "training standards are too vigorous", "the fellas need a break". All this while we remain at the lower end of the international scale and the leading teams conform to the demands of today's professional cricket as a matter of course.

Our performance in the World Cup was our moment of truth. Now we must acknowledge the failure of not only our cricketers, but even more pointedly the failure of those of us who have had the responsibility to do the things we have not done.

Media circus

The other fundamental objective to which I committed myself at the beginning of my term was to pull together a foundation from which West Indies cricket could be rebuilt. Too many things flowed in different directions.

Cricket was and still is all over the place and because of the intense emotion it generates in our six million-plus people whatever goes wrong is fed into a media circus. Those with agendas feed this and there is little breathing space to take considered co-ordinated action when addressing one or other of the myriad problems which occur daily.

But the truth is, that, it is impossible to do so when you are also insolvent and kept alive only by the goodwill of your debtors. You live in a state of firefighting rather than managing effectively. Clearly then, the underlying problem in the belly of it all was the finances of the WICB. And that had to be the first order of transformation, for without it nothing else was possible.

2. Finance: The parlous state of WICB's finances was accelerated on its downward slide with the introduction of the Future Tours Programme.

The past 10 years have been a building financial disaster. When our administration took office in August 2005, the WICB was bankrupt. That is a simple statement of fact. We were unable to pay our bills, lines of credit had dried up, we had suffered a loss of $US6.5 million the previous year and there was in addition a consolidated loss built up over the preceding years of $US15 million.

After two frequently unpleasant years, the situation has been fundamentall Our credit is good, we made a profit of $US1.5 million at the end of 12 months (September 2005-Sep-tember 2006), an improvement over the previous year of $US8 million, and we are on target for the current financial year with a small profit.

Difficult financial period

This, during a year when there were no 'at home' games and, therefore, a notoriously difficult financial period. Also, assisted by the returns from the World Cup, wehave discharged our liabilities and subject to final audit we expect our consolidated loss of $US15 million to be virtually discharged.

It is important to emphasise that the World Cup assisted. It was not responsible for the turn around which had commenced one year earlier with an improvement of $US8 million in our performance between 2005-2006 and the previous year.

The WICB can therefore look forward to being clear of all major debt for the first time in more than a decade and operating in a healthy financial environment.