With all the fuss being made over Eastern Counties cricket and over issues of good governance, there is an overriding concern of who is answerable to whom?

Who are the players answerable to? Who are the umpires answerable to? Who is the Eastern Counties Cricket Association answerable to?

What the answer should be is the Bermuda Cricket Board, but that is not necessarily so.

Hence, the governing body of cricket in this country has no apparent say in the summer’s greatest pastimes: Eastern Counties and Cup Match.

The BCB is meant to set the tone for everything to do with cricket in this country and not allow splinter bodies to go off willy-nilly to redefine what is right and what is wrong.

It is clear that there was so much more wrong than right that took place at St David’s County Cricket Club last Saturday: from the state of the pitch that was “prepared”, to the quality of the cricket on display on said pitch, to the players’ deportment, and to the officials’ handling of what admittedly became a toxic situation.

It is right for the Eastern Counties authorities and the Cup Match clubs to have a significant say in their products: providing the teams, providing the venues and providing the rules of engagement for their respective matches.

But they should not be providing the umpires; that should be determined by a combination of the board and the Bermuda Cricket Umpires Association.

Nor should they have an overall mandate on disciplinary matters to come out of their matches, for a misbehaving player is a misbehaving player, no matter the time or the occasion, and he should be disciplined as such — to cover all forms of cricket, not those that take place as infrequently as the Eastern Counties Cup and Cup Match do.

Nor should their “rules of engagement” flout the Laws of the Game, which are sacrosanct and which the BCB is duty-bound to enforce.

The BCB does not get it right all the time but when eyes from outside Bermuda want to know about cricket on this Island, it is to that body that they look. It is that body that is expected to have overall responsibility; to be in charge. Right. Not by half.

The board should be living by the colloquial saying: “We run tings; tings don’t run we.” But, to look at the Eastern Counties and to look at Cup Match in recent times — discount 2014, which was outstanding on and off the field — it is hard to get away from the conclusion that the tail is wagging the dog.

How can we have a BCB executive member who sits on a committee that determines how the world game is run, yet not have a serious board presence for Eastern Counties and Cup Match, which are behemoths domestically but are of far lesser importance in a broader universal sense? It all makes no sense.

When the tail is allowed to wag the dog, while the dog has taken leave of its senses, it is then a bit rich for the dog to have a pop at the tail for impropriety. So the BCB, until it acts as a true “governing” body, has to sit idly by and hope “all the kids play nice”.

The Fiqre Crockwell conundrum is the most bleedingly obvious case in point. In any right-thinking country, there is no way that Crockwell could get anywhere close to selection for Cup Match 2015. But who can blame St George’s if they select him? The BCB definitely cannot.

Heads have been buried in the sand since he was foolhardily selected for national team duty in April while awaiting an imminent trial for possession of heroin — you know, the drug that kills? (Christopher Spencer inquest, RG, 20/02/15)

Despite adverse media reaction, the BCB decided that he was innocent until proven guilty and should be taken on a preliminary tour to Jamaica in advance of the main event to be played in the United States, of all places. History shows that, after the Jamaica engagement, common sense prevailed and Crockwell stood down, or was stood down, from the ICC Americas World T20 Qualifiers to be held in Indianapolis in the first week of May.

Then came the trial at the end of that month, when he maintained his innocence, was found guilty and was fined $800 while being effectively branded a liar by Archibald Warner. The senior magistrate said: “He has given an explanation of how he came to have the drugs. I do not accept what he says.”

Cup Match players are put on a pedestal and portrayed as role models, whether they want to be or not. As much can be seen in how they are revered among the young boys and girls who crowd the field during the intervals or when a milestone has been reached in the match. As such, there is an onus on the clubs to present “fit and proper” persons before the public — the sort whom a family would be only too happy for their daughter to bring home to meet the parents.

That is not to say that Fiqre Crockwell is “unfit” — far from it. But putting him in the display window two months after having just avoided a custodial sentence (by half a gram, to be precise) is an unenviable judgment call.

Still, St George’s are well within their rights to select him tomorrow night. The precedent has been set.

After the guilty verdict was delivered, what did the BCB do, having earlier used “innocent until proven guilty” as a defence for the national team selection? Nothing.

He was allowed to play in the domestic league at the earliest opportunity, the inference that can be drawn from which is that the BCB tacitly agrees with his club, St David’s: that he did nothing wrong and that the drugs charge and conviction were figments of the court and the media’s active imaginations.

Either that or, despite so many warnings before from any number of sports stars who have fallen foul of what society considers acceptable behaviour, it has failed to put in place anything that dissuades those who would be miscreant.

St David’s players have taken the “always the victim, never your fault” approach a step farther by refusing to speak to this newspaper as payback for reporting a court story about someone whose profile has been augmented significantly by Cup Match and Bermuda selection, thus making him a public figure. But, given the monosyllabic history of exchanges in the recent past, the jury is out on who really gets the shorter end of that stick.

Like Treadwell Gibbons Jr, whom St George’s effectively banished after his actions in the 2013 match, it would be right for Crockwell to remain out of the spotlight for the time being. Then, like Gibbons, whom some would have back in contention this year, there would be nothing to prevent him returning in 2016 on the assumption that he stayed clear of trouble.

The common denominator here is that the BCB dreadfully dropped the ball on Gibbons as well, leaving football to deliver a massively unfair sentence when he misbehaved months later in a cup final.

Football has yet to fully explain why he was banned for five years — may require a PATI request, but that’s for another day.

For now, we expect much more from the BCB. We want it to have the fortitude to take total control of this game, so that it is not led a merry dance by Eastern Counties and Cup Match.

Maybe then there could be strenuous justification for the more than $300,000 of the public purse that has been handed to cricket in the past two budgets combined.