Sports Minister Glenn Blakeney has defended the massive amount of public money that Government pumped into cricket and football but said the ‘jury was still out’ on whether it had been used correctly.The Minister launched his long-awaited inquiry into the finances of Bermuda Cricket Board and Bermuda Football Association and named a seven-man commission that he said would ‘peel back the layers’ to discover where things had gone wrong.Blakeney also suggested yesterday that the level of any future funding for the two sports could depend on the inquiry’s recommendations and might come with a caveat as to how it should be spent.While the inquiry will not be held in public, and members of the commission are banned from speaking to anyone about their inquiry, Blakeney said he would publish any findings and said the commission would have the power to speak to anybody connected to either sport.The commission will also be tasked with investigating the national teams’ performances on the field and discovering if the BFA and BCB have done enough to combat anti-social behaviour within their sports, both on and off the field.“I think whenever we make a commitment to publicly fund anything that involves the people of our country, it’s a good investment,” said Blakeney. “Where the value for money comes in, let me say, the jury would be out on that because there are different levels, standards, and mechanisms to measure outcomes regarding what one’s opinion would be on success.“I don’t know if we were very clear in what we expected. We felt that under the auspices of those governing bodies that the money would be used the way that it was proposed it would be used and in which for the most part it was used.“How it was applied a priority basis is another thing all together, and that’s what we might get more intelligence about. Can it be done better, should it have been done better? Well.Twenty20 hindsight is great but I think it was well intended. The Government’s intention was warranted because of the numbers involved in those two sports.”William Madeiros will chair the commission, and will be joined by ex-BFA presidents Donald Dane and Charlie Marshall, Sean Tucker, the chairman of the National Sports Centre trustees, Shelia Brown, Clyde Best and Jeffrey Richardson. The commission have been given an eight-week time frame to complete their report and are expected to present their findings to the Minister shortly after their November 21 deadline.According to the terms of reference of the commission outlined by the Minister yesterday, the inquiry is expected to focus on the ‘financial standing of Bermuda Football Association and the Bermuda Cricket Board during the period 2005/06 to 2011/12’, while the commission have also been granted powers to request ‘pertinent reports and information held by the BFA and BCB’.“Whilst it is expected that these funds have been well spent based on annual reports received by the Department of Youth, Sport and Recreation, it is still important to have an independent commission assess and review how the funds were spent and to report back to the Minister,” said Blakeney.“Hopefuly we will be able to see what may have/could have/should have been done rather differently with funds appropriately prioritised in areas where there was evidence that attention should be given to certain areas as opposed to areas where the attention actually was given.“I would imagine from peeling the layers (back) with the kinds of questions, and the investigative process just for information’s sake, the commission would be able to go below the surface in hopefully determining where some of this started to go way off the path of what would be considered conducive to improving sports, period.”While not making the inquiry public might have come as something of a surprise, Blakeney was keen to avoid the process descending into a witch hunt. However, he is confident that it will still uncover the reasons for some of the sports’ failings in recent years.“They (the commission) can talk to anyone that they would like to that is associated with the sports,” he said. “That can be from spectator level all the way through to the regulators, or the umpires, the executive members of the respective national sports, players . . . I think because of the wide scope that the commission will have to do a very thorough job that we should get to the bottom of some of the things that plague us, and also how we might appropriately address them going forward.”Anti-social behaviour, especially at club level, and the performance of the senior national teams will also come under the commission’s remit and the Minister said any questions asked about results would be ‘fair comment’, because, ‘a lot of people will measure the success of our improvement over time on the win-loss column’.Ultimately any recommendations that the commission makes could have a long-term effect on the amount of funding that either sport receives in the future. Even then, how that money is spent is likely to be subjected to far stricter controls than it has been in the past.“This is a platform for the good, bad and indifferent,” said Blakeney. “It (the commission) gives us a measure of flexibility to take the intelligence gathered out of that report. It’s not going to be an arbitary, autonomous decision by me as a Minister to decide on the kind of substantial funding going forward. If indeed we felt, either way, that there should be some adjustments.“And of course we could look at, based on the reports and findings, whether we need to put into place some caveats.”