Apparently, Giles Clarke sat silently through most of the International Cricket Council (ICC) board meetings in Dubai last week.
That, one official who attended the meetings could not help but remark with a smirk on his face, was an appropriate legacy for the Big Three.
Imagine it – Clarke, the ceremonial president of the England and Wales Cricket Board, with aspirations for the ICC chairmanship, whose pomposity and sense of entitlement make Martin Shkreli, the pharma bad boy, look humble. Imagine him sitting helpless through meetings that resolve to undo everything he created two years ago.
Are there not little balloons of joy bursting inside your heart right now? Enjoy it, for a little while at least.
It has not yet been a week since the ICC announced that it would carry out a complete and comprehensive review of the coup that Clarke, N Srinivasan and Wally Edwards undertook in 2014.
Already significant changes have been agreed upon.
Read more: Osman Samiuddin on Mohammed Amir looking a man apart in the resumption of his international career
The ICC chairman will not be allowed to hold any position with a Full Member board, previously such a glaring conflict of interest embedded within the position.
Additionally, permanent positions of the Indian, English and Australian boards on the key committees that effectively run world cricket have been scrapped. All Full and Associate members will be allowed access to a place on the committee.
According to one account of the meetings, Shashank Manohar, currently the Indian board (BCCI) president as well as ICC chairman, was very keen nobody makes reference to a “Big Three” anymore.
From now, he is thought to have said, every member has equal rights. Is the swiftness of this development more surprising, or the scale of it?
One official, strongly opposed to the changes at the time, said he knew the current structure could not survive but did not expect the speed with which it has changed.
By the next board meeting, in April, a five-man steering committee will have presented a first report of the review, with inputs – a complaints box essentially – from all members.
By June, at the ICC’s AGM, expect most of the review’s findings to be formally approved. Except – and this is an important one – do not yet hold your breath on a massive upheaval of the revenue-sharing model. That model, designed to exacerbate cricket’s economic inequality, underpinned the arbitrariness of the 2014 power grab.
Nobody was ever told why and how the Big Three came up with what were incredibly precise revenue-sharing figures, so precise they gave the illusion that there was a solid methodology behind them. There was not.
On Saturday, Nazmul Hasan, the Bangladesh Cricket Board president revealed that Manohar made reference to giving away six per cent of the BCCI’s share, but whether that was a formal offer, or if indeed was offered at all, is not yet clear.
But ask yourself this: how often, in any sphere of life, do we hear of any person or institution agreeing to take a cut in the amount of money they make? Manohar is said to have added the caveat that he would have to get approval for any such cut from his board.
How easy do you think that might be? Already murmurs from within the BCCI suggest it will not be. How easy will it be for David Peever to tell Cricket Australia to expect a dip in their ICC revenues? And most of all, what will Clarke’s attitude be to the negotiations that ensue over these changes?
Indeed, one account of the meetings suggests that there was little urgency or depth to the discussions over the financial models. The feeling was that the changes that are being made should be pushed through first, before everybody gets down to the serious business of the money.
That does not mean it will not happen. Nothing drives cricket boards as much their own self-interest and it is in the self-interests of seven Full Members and almost all Associates to push for a fairer revenue-sharing model.
But when will it happen, and what might a new model look like? For all the progress made last week, it is the answers to these questions that will form the foundations of any new, supposedly more equal order.
And before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it is not as if cricket is returning to a promised land. That the way cricket was governed needed changing was never in dispute in 2014, only the nature of the change that was being imposed.
When the outcomes of the review are finally approved and implemented, it will mean a second major constitutional overhaul in just over two years for a sport that likes to imagine itself in the running for the world’s second most popular.
What does it say about a sport that U-turns upon itself quickly? It says there is still need for serious reform, of a kind that it has once outright rejected before – namely, reform engineered independently and from outside.
SPORTING READ
TALKING POINTS THIS WEEK
Flower relishes Zalmi role
Andy Flower established himself as one of the leading international coaches this decade, widely and rightly credited as a big factor in England’s rise to the top of the Test rankings.
The end, when it came, was fractious and toxic. His stint as assistant coach with Peshawar Zalmi in the Pakistan Super League (PSL) marks a return to the role and, judging by both his team’s results and his general demeanour, it has been a happy return thus far.
“The assistant coach position is a nice one to have,” he said on Saturday, after a second successive win. “You don’t have some of the other responsibilities the head coach has.
“You can develop a different type of relationship with the players. I’ve really loved my first few days here and it’s a really enjoyable position for me to hold,” the Zimbabwean added.
Buttler raising the bar
Two-hundred-and-sixty-nine runs, 156 balls, 25 boundaries and 16 sixes, strike rate 172.44: these are the past three innings combined that Jos Buttler has played for England’s ODI side.
That run includes two centuries against strong Pakistani and South African bowling attacks on their home grounds. An unbeaten, match-winning 50-ball 49 in the game just before the sequence was played out on a square turner in Sharjah.
Already he has the three fastest ODI hundreds of all time for England and it is he who now sits squarely at the centre of this England ODI resurgence. He has added an entirely new dimension to the side, capable of finishing games or blasting them open entirely.
In fact, just at this moment it is difficult to think of a more destructive batsman anywhere in the world.
Yasir news good for Pakistan
When it emerged last month that Yasir Shah had failed a dope test, you could almost hear the groans of Pakistan supporters, and leg-spin fans, around the world.
Pakistanis especially have become used to losing their strike bowlers to a variety of afflictions: injury, corruption or suspect actions.
But the news yesterday that Yasir, 29, has been handed a three-month backdated ban by the ICC amounts to good news for Pakistan.
It means he will be available to play by as early as the end of March.
More importantly, given his Test form, he will be available for the tours to England and Australia later this year.
Pakistan have not been very good tourists in recent years, and they have never won a series in Australia.
But with Yasir in the side they are a far more potent prospect in both countries.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport
