In the aftermath of Bermuda's dismal performances against the touring Barbados squad, the obvious decline of the Island's national summer sport has once again come into the spotlight.

Ex-players, administrators and spectators have lashed out at those senior cricketers who did not make themselves available to represent their country, accusing them of being cowardly and unpatriotic. Some have demanded that these players be excluded from any future national squad while others have suggested that the international programme should be scrapped altogether.

There have even been calls for national coach Mark Harper to be sacked.

In times of acute crisis, of course, everybody looks for a scapegoat. The absent players and the coach have been convenient targets in what has developed into a pointless merry-go-round of finger-pointing and bitter recriminations.

None of the public criticisms, however, go to the root of the problem and are, in this writer's opinion, nothing more than naive, knee-jerk reactions which would be counter-productive in the long term.

In reality, the blame for Bermuda's shortcomings at an international level should not be placed on the players but rather, more fundamentally, on the system that breeds them.

Three years ago, whilst still a student in the UK, I wrote a letter to The Royal Gazette which launched a scathing attack on Bermuda's cricketing infrastructure. In it, I accused Board officials of being totally unimaginative with the cricketing format and of neglecting the development of cricket in schools.

I went on to argue that there needed to be drastic improvements to local pitches and practice areas, including the urgent need for the construction of a national cricket centre with state of the art indoor facilities.

In response, then Bermuda Cricket Board president El James accused me of having little more than a tertiary affiliation with the local game and being out of touch with the progress that had been made and "what was being planned."

With those words in mind, I returned home this summer for my first extended taste of the local cricket scene, hoping that the concerns I had expressed as a 19-year-old had been entirely unfounded. I regret to say that they were not.

It is painfully obvious, not just to me but to anybody who has spent an extended period of time playing cricket beyond our narrow shores, that our system is embarrassingly archaic and deeply flawed.

The ideas and initiatives that other cricket nations have been putting into place over the last 20 years have passed Bermuda by. We have become enslaved by inertia. Any prospect of progress has been scuppered time and time again by the reluctance of the Board and its affiliates to grab the game by the scruff of the neck and embrace radical change.

Few seem to want to take responsibility or work together towards a common goal. When anybody attempts to analyse the reasons for the Island's cricketing malaise, the Board blame the cricket clubs and the cricket clubs blame the Board. Yet the truth is both have been equally at fault.

Whatever others might think, I believe the Board does try to do the right thing. Treasurer Neil Speight has done an enormous amount of work establishing a trust fund to help send the Island's best young cricketers abroad to develop. St. David's' 14-year-old medium pacer Steffan Kelly has been the first to benefit from this funding and long may it continue.

Also, although much maligned of late for his supposed failure to motivate national team players, Mark Harper, through his recommendations for the future development of the game in this country, is clearly a man who truly understands the modern game. Moreso, I would suggest, than many of his recent critics.

But the Board does have its shortcomings.

For a national sporting body, they have been guilty in the past of being far too sensitive to any sort of criticism and have often retreated so far into their shell that constructive dialogue with the media and most cricket clubs has almost completely broken down.

Few people outside the Board's inner circle really know what the Board plans, both in the short and long term.

A classic example of the Board's pitiful public relations expertise occurred recently when president Reggie Pearman left the Island to attend a meeting in St. Lucia at which it was to be determined which Caribbean islands would be given the honour of hosting matches in the next World Cup.

This is potentially significant news but nobody at the Board thought to make the media aware of Pearman's representation and this newspaper only found out by chance. All this lack of communication does is breed an unhealthy atmosphere of confusion and ultimately, resentment.

Yet Bermuda's cricket clubs must also accept a significant proportion of the blame.

In all but a few cases, the lack of ambition and long term vision at club level is appalling. Practice facilities at the majority of club grounds are still laughably poor while many do not do anywhere near enough to ensure that their wickets are properly looked after. The excuse that clubs cannot afford improvements simply doesn't wash.

As Somerset recently proved in organising the Barbados tour, which was funded entirely through sponsorship, the money is always available in Bermuda if one is organised enough to go out and get it.

Pearman was quite right when he stated earlier this summer that our club system had stagnated. It is because the administrative organisation at many clubs over the last two decades has become shambolic and apathetic and once proud sporting institutions are now, in some cases, little more than seedy watering holes.

Any sort of progress does, unfortunately, rely on Bermuda's cricket clubs getting themselves organised and demonstrating a semblance of ambition.

There are further issues.

Although the Board are trying, it is still fairly obvious that cricket's endless fascinations have lost their grip on Bermuda's youth. I find it sad and indicative of what has happened to cricket in local schools that the AstroTurf strip at Saltus Junior School, on which I first learnt to play the game, is now nothing more than a redundant scrap of barren turf.

Harper made it clear on his arrival from Guyana that he would do all that he could to give cricket a forceful presence in our schools once again, but it is obvious that he is fighting an uphill battle, struggling with the unenviable difficulties of a lack of local qualified coaches and horrendous facilities. That is why I have always believed that locating the funding for a national cricket academy, with modern indoor and outdoor facilities, from which to launch a more meaningful schools programme, as well as providing a central base for junior and senior national squads, should be the Board's top priority.

In 1999 I spent four months training at the excellent Zimbabwe Cricket Academy which had recently been constructed in Harare. Now if the Zimbabwe Cricket Union, which perennially flirts with financial ruin, can achieve something like this, surely we can too?

In addition, what struck me almost immediately on my return was that the format of club cricket in Bermuda leaves a lot to be desired. What we have at present, at both Premier and and First Division level, is a monotonous succession of 50-over competitions which as the season goes on blends into one another and becomes meaningless and uninspiring to play in.

The cricket, for the most part, is dull, unimaginative and one dimensional - a breeding ground for bored, limited cricketers. The whole set-up desperately needs to be overhauled. I recently submitted a report to the Board which detailed plans for a complete restructuring of the format, drawing on a number of examples from around the world.

It is undeniably radical and would perhaps take time for players and administrators to adjust to. But there are all sorts of problems and inconsistencies which have, somehow, to be remedied.

Here are just a few of them:

No other cricketing nation in the world plays purely limited overs cricket because it is common knowledge that this is extremely narrow minded and hinders cricketing development. Why on earth do we? Why do we pick teams for Cup Match purely on the back of limited overs performances? Why do we play the Counties competitions at completely different times and with different formats, which then feeds into a Champion of Champions draw played over 50 overs?

What is the point of having a Premier Knockout Cup, a Combined Knockout Cup and a Belco Cup, all played over 50 overs? It is a farce. The whole system is convoluted and old-fashioned.

My message is therefore a simple one. It is time to bury personal differences and petty club rivalries and come together for the good of the local game. There is no doubt talent exists on the Island. It is just a question of harnessing it properly. The Board has got to become more transparent with the media and the public and where better to start than publishing a detailed mission statement for the next five years?

What are their goals?

I also call on those underachieving clubs to get their houses in order and develop effective fund-raising strategies.

Finally, it is clear that the format, as it stands, has no place in the modern game and must be adjusted to suit the changing times.

I only hope that we in Bermuda's cricketing fraternity have the courage and the wisdom to drag Bermudian cricket out of the dark ages and ensure that the changes that so desperately need to be made take place without the all to typical bout of hesitancy and procrastination.

Above all, we need to stamp out the dreaded "it has always been this way" mentality which I have heard with depressing regularity since I returned home. If we do not, Bermuda's cricketers will be continually humbled on the international stage, having first been nurtured by a system which is hopelessly mediocre.