The Bermuda Cricket Board took care of one piece of important business at its annual meeting last Thursday night, when the book was officially closed on Allan Douglas, with Paul Ross, of Somerset Bridge Recreation Club, being elected to fill the vacated position of second vice-president for the next three years.

In the blink of an eye last November, Douglas went from well-respected, devoted servant to the national sport to someone more befitting of pariah status — at least in the eyes of his fellow executive members at the BCB. This as a result of his performance off the field while Bermuda were becoming an embarrassment on it at the World Cricket League Division Three tournament in Malaysia.

As a quick recap, it bears recalling that Douglas was in South-East Asia only because Arnold Manders, the national coach, was unavailable because he had walking pneumonia diagnosed and because Irving Romaine, the second choice, turned down the appointment. What the ever-willing and ever-eager Douglas did not anticipate was that he was taking up a poisoned chalice and was effectively a “dead man walking”.

“You start wrong, you end wrong” goes the saying. And the Bermuda team in preparation for what was a last-placed finish that resulted in demotion to Division Four clearly started wrong by virtue of their waning commitment to being available for international cricket in the first place and then to training. It was enough to send Manders to his sickbed — real or imagined.

Amazingly, only one man paid the price when they returned home with heads lowered in shame — Allan Douglas. It is OK to be beaten when you have given your all; it is even acceptable to be second-best when the extent of your skills, or the execution of them, is not enough against an opposition that has your number. But to not try, as was blatantly the case in the last match on tour, the play-off for fifth and sixth against the United States? That is unacceptable and unforgivable.

Had this happened in a match featuring Full Member nations, or even those in the World Cricket League Championship, the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption unit might have been obliged to inquire into possible match-fixing. But a contest being waged in cricket’s backwaters? Barely a flicker.

That was the match that ultimately cost Douglas his position, not so much what had gone before, but he should not have been the only one to fall — and we intentionally make no mention of Lionel Tannock, the discarded tour manager, for his was such an anonymous position that the BCB has yet officially to speak of his expulsion.

There needed to be quite a few players on the hit list as well, with the lame excuse that Bermuda has a minute pool of international-standard players to choose from and thus cannot afford to cull without prejudice simply that — lame.

In the final days of the Malaysia tour, Douglas acknowledged that relegation was likely and gave his opinion of the way forward.

“If we go down, we will have to regroup, set ourselves targets and see where we want to take our cricket,” he told The Royal Gazette. “It’s disappointing but we would have to use relegation as an opportunity to get some young players in and start afresh. We would probably need to give ourselves six years to get up into Division Two.”

It was at this time that he took the decision to effect the way forward by dropping the senior players, including the captain, Janeiro Tucker. Bermuda could have still avoided relegation with a highly unlikely win over Uganda in their final league match, but their net run-rate was so poor, they would have needed a miracle to finish outside the bottom two.

It is not as though Douglas’s last stand was some impulsive act of a man who had lost the plot. He did the very same when previously in charge of a Bermuda team in Malaysia — in the 1997 ICC Trophy, the forerunner to the World Cricket League Championship, which coincidentally gives a clue as to how far we have fallen or how long we have been standing still since the plug was pulled on the treadmill. Then, after Bermuda were ruled out of qualifying for the World Cup, Douglas, with former Australia coach Bobby Simpson as consultant, sat down all the senior players and let the “youngsters” get on with it — one of whom was Tucker. So he knew the drill, or at least should have known.

So, too, the BCB. It is not as though that group is unaware of how this particular vice-president thinks and how he operates, for he was also chairman of the national coaching committee. But now the board has moved on, and it seems apparent that it may just put Manders in its rear-view mirror, too.

In readvertising for the head coach position in September, the request was for a visionary. Four persons applied, including Manders — the others are Herbie Bascome, Clay Smith and Lorenzo Tucker — but none can truly be termed the visionary that Bermuda cricket craves if the term is to be taken literally.

All four have been around for some time in the Bermuda coaching set-up, so unless they have been holding something of their talents back, which is not beyond the realms of possibility, neither fits the bill for having “original ideas about how things might be different in the future, especially about how things might be improved”.

With their long service in domestic cricket, we have already seen what they can bring to the table, with the possible exception of Lorenzo Tucker, a comparative unknown who has been Bermuda’s bowling coach and match analyst for several years without fully being given his head.

The others we know a fair bit about, each having their merit. At the end of the day, their fate now and later rests with the players, the same ones who have buried Bermuda cricket with the same efficiency as might Augustus Funeral Home. Because the board failed to act when it should have, resisting a clean sweep of those who fit the profile for bringing Bermuda’s name into disrepute whether they were in Malaysia or not, we are stuck with having to select “the best players” in the hope they will be more receptive to a new face, although not necessarily new ideas in domestic circles.

With the chance lost to blood youngsters at the Americas T20 Championship in Indianapolis this year, the pressure to go with the tried and trusted — trusted? Easy for you to say — to get out of Division Four in the latter part of 2016 will be immense. No one would want to start a new job, providing Manders is overlooked, with a series of defeats while properly planning for the future with youngsters.

A word to the wise, though. Chest-thumping about escaping Division Four would be met with all the opprobrium it deserves. Bermuda’s opponents will be United States, Italy, Denmark and two from Oman, Jersey, Tanzania, Nigeria, Surinam and Guernsey, to be determined after the Division Five tournament next May. Not exactly your who’s who of international cricket.

It will not be until after 2017, when the next Division Three tournament is held, that the new man, if he is still around, will be viewed to have earned his corn and to have gone some way to making good on the “vision” that delivers Bermuda cricket out of the wilderness.