As UAE are offered Asia Cup branch, a reminder of the ACC’s failed mission

As the Asia Cup announces plans to include one Associate nation in 2016, Osman Samiuddin looks at the Asian Cricket Council's original plans to integrate Associates with Full-member nations.

The UAE have the opportunity to qualify for the 2016 Asia Cup through a four-team qualifying tournament. Ross Setford / AP Photo

In 1983, as he was preparing to bid for the right to host the fourth World Cup in the subcontinent, NKP Salve happened upon a strategy. The president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) knew that England and Australia, in particular, might be resistant to any such bid.

As England wanted to continue hosting a tournament it had already staged the first three editions of, Salve knew that the decision may come to a vote.

Salve studied ICC rules and looked over the minutes of previous meetings and understood that there was no pattern to how members voted on issues. They did as they liked.

Eighteen Associate members had a vote (Full members had two votes each) so Salve determined that “the Associate members held the key to opening the door of World Cup for India and Pakistan”.

It further struck him, he wrote in his memoirs, that the Asian members of the ICC — Full and Associate — should come together on a common platform: “… a more cohesive and purposeful power block [sic] would be established in the politics” of the ICC.

Later that year, in September 1983, the first Asian Cricket Conference was held in Delhi, attended by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and four Associates: Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

Abdul Rehman Bukhatir, as a representative of the UAE, was a special invitee and the UAE became an Associate member of the body. One of the decisions they took was to arrange an Asia Cup, to be held at regular intervals and to be played by Full members as well as the best team from the Associate sides.

Osman Samiuddin: 'Are you going to play us or not?': Pakistan v India cricket series in UAE increasingly in doubt

Just over 30 years later, we have come full circle with the emergence on Saturday of a report that four Associate sides will battle it out for a spot at the next Asia Cup, in 2016 (In a press release back in April, the ACC had said it would hold a qualifying leg for the tournament, without more detail).

The UAE will be one of the teams and is likely to be the hosts as well. Like the Asia Cup itself it will be a Twenty20 event.

The Asian bloc is no more of course; the Asian Cricket Council has all but shut down operations and will be subsumed within the ICC. Partly it is its own fault that it was never able to become the cohesive force Salve and his accomplices imagined.

Partly it is because the political equation of cricket has changed: money is the binder, not geography. And partly, cricket is geographically so limited at Full-member level that a regional body within it was never destined to blossom.

But this news is a reminder of the failures of one of the original missions of the body. Salve wanted at least one Associate to play in every Asia Cup. None played in the very first event, here in the UAE, in 1984.

In the next three, Bangladesh, then not a Full member, played but only because politics meant that one of India and Pakistan did not play. Bangladesh also hosted an edition in between.

Bangladesh continued to play, standing on the cusp of becoming a Full member, but it was only in 2004 that the ACC bothered to invite the best Associate sides. In that case, it was Hong Kong and, for the first time, the UAE. It only took them 20 years to act on what was a founding principle.

It did not take them long to revert back either. Having invited the UAE and Hong Kong again in 2008, they scrapped the idea for 2010 and 2012 and went back to how it began: only the continent’s Full members contesting.

In 2014 when they invited Afghanistan, it was seen as some kind of great, benevolent concession, a step forward for Associates. In fact, it should have been that way from the start.

In truth, the ACC did what any body with limited scope could do with development in the continent. It has played a role in the rise of Afghanistan and Nepal for instance. The bigger members, such as India and Pakistan, have certainly not done enough.

Ultimately it is difficult to rid the impression drawn from Salve’s original motives, that this was to be a transactional relationship — for votes in power battles — than a developmental one. ​

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @NatSportUAE