ICC clarifies, says no threat to BCCI’s financial muscle
The BCCI’s fear of giving up a sizeable chunk of its share to fund the International Cricket Council (ICC) has been allayed by the international body’s Strategic Working Group (SWG) in a meeting here on Thursday.
The Committee of Administrators (CoA) and BCCI officebearers’ meeting with the SWG focused mainly on how to get other boards to increase the revenue and contribute to the ICC coffers while not sipping into BCCI’s revenue.
The meeting was held after SWG had put forward a SWOT analysis, enunciating 72 points for discussion --- 18 each of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The primary among these was whether ICC is too dependent on BCCI due to it providing the maximum revenue.
The BCCI had been worried that these analyses could lead to insistence on BCCI giving up more of its share to fund ICC and therefore other countries. However, an official privy to the happenings said that those worries subsided once the Indian board was told that by reducing reliance on BCCI, the ICC meant it wants other boards to increase their share of revenues while not touching BCCI revenues. “The SWG’s concern was about other boards’ failure to do enough and bleed ICC,” said the official.
Still, BCCI officials expressed concern with the ‘wording’ of the
NEWDELHI:
Not a truly global sport with heavy dependence on revenues and fans from India. 10-team ODI World Cup not ‘global’. Shortening attention spans of fans coupled with events like T10 cricket
Lack of aggressive expansion and growth strategy to counter overreliance on India
Lack of depth of competition beyond top few nations
presentation and have relayed that to the ICC who have promised to change it.
NO COIN TOSS?
The ICC is also set to debate and take a call over another traditional aspect of the game: the coin toss. ICC is mulling over Lack of clarity around role of each of the three formats
Lack of real accessibility to stars Uncontrolled private investment into the sport by commercial operators whose interests are aligned with short-term financial gain rather than the long-term health and growth of the sport
Breakaway world governing body – rebel group
scrapping the coin toss altogether for matches contested as a part of the Test Championship, which will commence in 2019 with Australia’s Ashes tour to England. The reason for doing away with the toss would be to reduce the advantage of the home team.