Canterbury Cricket Association chairman Maurice Ryan has resigned his position and is leaving to live and work in Australia at the end of the month.

Ryan, who played for Canterbury from 1965/66-1978/79 and who scored 2041 runs, including two centuries for the province, also led the side.

Working in the medical and surgical business, he built up extensive international business skills and will work in the same industry in Sydney.

He served a year as Canterbury's chairman and was responsible for initiating several challenges for local administrators to improve the profile and participation levels of the sport.

He was especially keen to see innovations which kept in mind the less time people have nowadays to put into their cricket.

The introduction of a midweek twilight cricket competition was one response that has been made.

But Ryan, who came back into cricket after many years away from the game, believed he offered a perspective which allowed him to call on his own experience in the game, but with the detachment that resulted from not being so closely involved.

He doesn't believe the health of cricket is all that it could be, for a variety of reasons.

Techniques of players are in decline, captaincy skills are lacking and there was too much emphasis on coaching and support for players.

Ryan believes players, and especially captains, must take greater ownership of the game and their actions.

He referred to a comment made by Australian golfing legend Peter Thomson when he was recently in Christchurch. Thomson looked at all the coaching and support that young players were offered nowadays in golf and said: "Once you rely on someone else's brain, you're doomed."

Teams had to be able to deal with matters themselves. If a particular player in the opposition was causing a side problems, there should be a mechanism in place for the side to work out how to deal with it.

"If you take control of that in the team everyone buys into it," he said.

Ryan said he preferred the Australian situation where captains like Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh took control and the coaches were in the background.

"I am absolutely adamant the captain is the man. You hardly hear about the coach in Australia. And if support is needed then the captain can revert to the others for support," he said.

While the marketing of cricket had been very good, Ryan wondered if it had out-stripped the actual performances on the field.

This resulted in the public having a greater expectation of winning.

"The whole question of winning needs some maturity.

"I don't believe we can win all the time," he said.

Ryan referred to American baseball where the greatest season record any team had was to win something like 110 of the 160 games they played in a year.

"There needs to be another measure, and I think people like to see some character being shown by a team."

There were encouraging signs for cricket with good young batsmen emerging who could hit the ball hard, bowlers who could bowl fast and spinners who could turn the ball sharply.

Ryan wonders also if captains back their bowlers enough and support them with attacking field placings.

"I believe bowlers win matches and there are all sorts of ways of achieving that. But captains have got to get the basics right and I don't know if they are," he said.

From an administration point of view he said it was clear all associations were struggling financially and as far as business concerns go they were sub-optimal.

"I set Canterbury the goal of doubling its income so it could do things a small business needs to operate," he said.

© CricInfo