One of the most revealing aspects of the attempt by the boards of Australia, England and India to take over the administration of the game has been the surreptitious manner in which a key report was drafted – “as if in a smokey, dark, back room somewhere,” one official said.
Cricket Australia, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and India’s Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) worked on the report for six months, unbeknownst to any other board or the ICC, officials said.
It was only after a full meeting of the ICC’s Finance & Commercial Affairs (F&CA) committee in Perth during the Ashes Test in December that the three key players behind the report decided to ask the ICC to send out invites to all full-member boards for a January 9 meeting in Dubai.
The invite was unusual and without much precedent. Such meetings usually are initiated by the ICC president.
In this case, Alan Isaac, the incumbent, was sent an invite himself. Tellingly, given the implications in the report for them, no member from the associate boards was invited. Very little was revealed in the invites about an agenda, as is generally the process.
There was, according to one board, a vague reference to financial discussions. One attendee said that between the invites being sent and the meeting date, board members had begun to suss out something big was up.
Some felt the meeting was an ambush. Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, reportedly started proceedings before the BCCI’s N Srinivasan took over.
Clarke has since reiterated that this report is merely a draft and thus not worth commenting on yet because it could change shape, but that was not the impression left upon attendees.
“They are overturning the entire formula of equity but they are saying take it or leave it,” one official said. “If you don’t want to take it, lump it, we are going ahead anyway. That was the way.”
There was not much protest at the meeting, though some of the smaller boards asked basic questions about how the calculations had been arrived at, and why others were not consulted. They were summarily turned away.
One official eventually turned to one of the “big three”: “Are you asking us to take it or leave it, here? Are you doing a [UN] Security Council veto on us? He said, ‘Well, I guess you could say that’.”
The management of the governing body was present at the January 9 meeting, but they were not officially provided with copies of the report. The ICC’s members on the F&CA committee include David Richardson, the ICC chief executive, and Faisal Hasnain, the chief financial officer, but nobody on that committee, outside the big three authors, knew of the existence of the report.
The proposals will now be discussed during a three-day ICC meeting in Dubai from January 27. They could be voted upon during that time.
“The recommendations, which have been put together by a working group of ICC’s Finance and Commercial Affairs Committee (F&CA), are to be discussed by the full F&CA and ICC Board when it meets in Dubai from 27-29 January,” the ICC said in a statement.
“The ICC will only make a comment on this matter once the Board has had the opportunity to meet and properly consider the proposals.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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