Big Three power grab marks end of an ideal

THIS is a return to the days when Bradman and Allen ran cricket between them.

OF the all the words spoken last week, as I talked to various administrators and decision-makers, the most memorable were those that cautioned me not to be too idealistic. No one doubts that the status quo, as far as the ICC is concerned, is unacceptable: two full-member countries are thought to be corrupt; four are essentially broke; most rely on India's largesse to keep going, while the BCCI is disgruntled that the distribution of revenues does not reflect its provenance.

Politics, race and personalities interfere with decision-making at every turn. Incompetence is a given; at a recent ICC meeting, I was told of one director who took to snoring through an anti-corruption presentation.

The idealistic - impractical, the BCCI and ECB says - solution was suggested two years ago by the Woolf report, an independent governance review produced at the behest of Haroon Lorgat, the BCCI chief executive at the time. It recommended that decision-making be taken away from interested parties and placed in the hands of independent - as far as that is possible - directors and executives and the interests of cricket would be placed above politics, race and finances. The ICC would become a governing body for world cricket in the true sense of the word. Instead, the proposal of a working group of the financial and commercial affairs committee deals in hard realities: faced with the threat, explicitly made, that India would walk away from ICC events unless it was given a greater share of revenues and power, it turned away from an enlightened ideal and entrenched money and power in an autocratic cabal of three countries, based on the friendship and camaraderie between, principally, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, of India, and Giles Clarke, of England, with Australia's Wally Edwards hanging on to their coat-tails.

It is a return to the days when Don Bradman and Gubby Allen ran cricket between them, a return to decisions based on friendship and loyalty and self-interest, with the risk that where India is concerned these things can change quickly. Between them they may do a better job than the ICC as it stands - they could hardly do worse. The best that can be said for this deal, indeed the only thing that can be said for this deal, is that India becomes a fully engaged and interested party to world cricket. Inside the tent and happy for the moment, rather than prowling outside and angry.

The restructuring of the distribution of the money, which is at the heart of the proposal (according to the BCCI, this is the non-negotiable), is based on an unfair view of ICC events, which enshrines the principle that the monies belong to the countries from which they emanate. Essentially, it says that the money generated by India for these international events belongs to India (and Australia's to Australia, etc) and that the value of these events without India's participation is, essentially, worthless.

Philosophically this is highly debatable, nor would it stand up to hard scrutiny. ICC events have a long history. The 1975 World Cup was the first - under the banner at this stage of the International Cricket Conference, before the name was changed to International Cricket Council in 1989 - and it was lit up by a team that was to dominate world cricket for the next 20 years or so, the West Indies.

The beauty of this inaugural event was its international flavour, as was the next World Cup four years later, also won by the West Indies. The irony that West Indies have won four global ICC tournaments to England's one should not be lost on those in the Caribbean, as they read that "distributions" will be partly based on what each country has provided on the field as well as off it.

There is irony, too, in the fact that India was fundamentally uninterested in one-day cricket until it won the 1983 World Cup, celebrations from which resulted in the awakening of great interest in a game hitherto regarded as philistine. Now, 50-over cricket is the great cash cow, and its ultimate expression, the World Cup, is the one to which India lays financial claim.

The value of these events is precisely their international flavour: the more exotic the brew, the more value is unlocked; the better the competition, the more the value also - hence the big three ought to have a vested interest not in weakening the competition but strengthening it. India fans embraced the most recent World Cup in its entirety, not just because their team was winning. When India was knocked out early from the 2007 World Cup, television executives took fright, advertising revenues fell, but people did not stop watching. Hundreds of millions watched the final between Australia and Sri Lanka.

The advantages generated by fate and by circumstance, that of population and economic might, play out already in the monies generated by each country in their bilateral arrangements, and domestic markets. The ICC events are supposed to be about levelling the playing field, producing benefit for all and for the wider development of the game.

There are so many objections to this paper it is difficult to know where to start. With Test cricket, which may wither as a true international competition as the weaker nations are financially enfeebled (in a relative sense). With the World Test Championship, promised and now abandoned without a ball being bowled.

With the associates, who will lose out to the tune of more than $US300 million ($344m) on an assumption the revenues for the next eight-year cycle will be in the region of $US2.5 billion. With the tone of the proposal, which is so arrogant and high-handed as to recall an earlier age when the organisation began as the Imperial Cricket Conference.

As noted by Ehsan Mani and Malcolm Gray, former presidents of the ICC who, along with Malcolm Speed, former chief executive, and Clive Lloyd, former West Indies captain, sent a last-minute plea to the ICC executive to pause before voting, this is the end of an ideal, of the notion a fair, principled and just body can govern cricket in the interests of all.

It is an ideal that has never been grounded in any kind of reality under the guise of the ICC, but if you cannot be idealistic about sport, what can you be idealistic about?

THE TIMES