Money triumphs over noble ideal
Ostensibly not much will change now that the power grab by India, England and Australia has been ratified at the International Cricket Council (ICC) annual conference in Melbourne. Cricket will still be poorly administered and commercial considerations will still be paramount. The politicking will still be nasty, brutal and ruthless.
But what has been lost is an ideal, even if it was never grounded in any kind of reality. The ideal was that the ICC would govern cricket justly and fairly and in the interests of all its members; that those making decisions would do so in the best interests of the game by allowing the proceeds of international events to be shared equally. It was a noble ideal.
Instead, now, the vast majority of the monies accrued through these global tournaments will go into the pockets of, primarily, India and then England and Australia.
With financial dominance also comes administrative power and dominance, now that Narayanaswami Srinivasan is ICC chairman and the chairmen of the ECB and Cricket Australia are in charge of finance and commerce and ExCo, the new all-powerful five-man sub-committee, respectively.
As with most things, money is at the heart of this power grab. At the moment, any surplus from the US$1.5 billion (NZ$1.7b) deal for ICC events (over an eight-year cycle) is shared equally, 75 per cent to the full members and the rest to the associates and affiliates.
During the next cycle, India will get the lion’s share, with England and Australia receiving the majority of the scraps.
If, for example, revenues total US$2b, the full members will share US$555 million, with a ‘‘distribution cost’’ (compensation, effectively, for playing in these tournaments) of US$550m, of which India will receive US$348m, England US$76m and Australia US$46m.
On revenues of US$2.5b, the distribution cost increases to US$800m, which means that England will get, in total, more than double that of the West Indies, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
Srinivasan’s ascension to the throne is remarkable.
This is a man who has been suspended as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) pending an inquiry by India’s Supreme Court into alleged corruption during the 2013 Indian Premier League.
Srinivasan was full of praise for an organisation that he has been withering about in the past. At no stage, he said, did the BCCI think of walking away from the ICC, despite this being threatened publicly by a number of BCCI officials, and despite this being the reason given in briefings to journalists by officials of England and Australia.
It has been said that England and Australia should have called India’s bluff, but they, of course, are the architects and beneficiaries of this deal as well.