With a friend like the ICC, who needs enemies?
The ICC is not a world cricket governing body. It is a cosy front for the national boards. They can use it to appear to be doing the right thing by cricket whilst they sit about playing power games or congratulating each other on how much money they are raking in.
This much can be seen by examining the draft proposal for the next Future Tours Program (FTP) currently being drawn up for 2012 to 2020. Whilst all the talk amongst those outside of this inner-sanctum is of limiting the amount of international cricket to sensible levels, the national boards are trying to arrange an orgy of cricket that is utterly unsustainable.
England will be playing 97 Tests over those eight years, compared to 105 over the last eight. However, consider that when that schedule begun in 2001, Twenty20 hadn’t even begun domestically, let alone internationally, and the IPL was not even a twinkle in Lalit Modi’s wallet.
There will be no IPL window, and regular Tests scheduled for England in May, so expect plenty of conflict between ECB and players, and plenty of tours cancelled in the same way Sri Lanka’s was (West Indies replaced them) because their players would rather earn $$$ in the IPL. In the previous post I mentioned the possibility of legal action between boards and players, and it is difficult to see how this can be avoided in the long run.
There will, however, be a window for the T20 Champions League every September, thus guaranteeing the removal of two County teams from the climax of the English domestic season. More conflict.
Lesser Test nations will play less cricket, thus ensuring that their development is stymied. Bangladesh, the smallest of the small, will play just 42 Tests and 81 ODIs. That’s less Tests and almost half the number of ODIs than the last eight years.
There is no effort to implement the MCC recommended world Test championship. Surely the least they could aim for is for all nations to play an equal amount of cricket, give or take the odd match, with each team playing every other team home and away, over a period of eight years. But no…
Ian Chappell highlighted these, and other problems, in a recent piece at Cricinfo. He is also pragmatic enough to recognise that there is no chance of the ICC acting in the best interests of cricket in its current form.
The hidden agenda behind all of this is as transparent as a Shane Warne sledge. It is simply to ensure that the revenue and the power remain shared amongst the big boys – India, England etc – and not spread around to other nations.
Considering that the ICC act in the interests of the national boards, or indeed are the national boards, there is little prospect of any change barring a radical coup. Cricket is not known for a history of radical coups.
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