The International Cricket Council (ICC) will no longer be a body that represents the views of all the cricketing nations. On Saturday, the world cricket body surrendered its ethics to three cricketing nations.
If the ICC still continues to announce that their views are the opinions of all the cricketing nations, it will be a joke.
India, Australia and England will rule world cricket, and all decisions by the ICC will be nothing but the views of these three nations which has already been labelled as the ‘Big Three’. It’s a fact that the Big Three has destroyed the democratic means by which the ICC functioned till now. And should the ICC function as a puppet in the hands of these three nations, countries responsible for this would be the nations that endorsed the controversial reforms in Singapore. All that the Big Three did was to hang a few carrots as temporary gains to these countries. Pakistan and Sri Lanka should be lauded for abstaining. If only those nations who voted for the reforms showed some guts to prevent this.
It was the responsibility of every cricketing nation to maintain the decorum of the world cricket body, irrespective of how rich any cricket body is, or whether the major revenue comes from one cricketing nation. By voting for such reforms, very soon many nations will realise how far the Big Three have moved up and how fast they have slid down the ladder.
As an international body for sports, all nations should have had equal powers; only then will a game flourish around the world. Very soon it might reach a stage where the Big Three are unreachable creating a huge gap in cricketing standards. With the clout the Big Three is likely to yield in the ICC, resources and facilities may indirectly flow into their hands, resulting in these countries occupying the top positions in world ranking in all forms of the game too. On paper, ICC decisions may look democratic but in reality it will be autocratic.
The beauty and excitement of world cricket contests lies in the skill that each nation displays. For the sake of the popularity of cricket, standards of all cricketing nations should improve equally. The danger of this not happening can be grave. It was the duty of all cricketing nations to maintain ICC’s authority even if a few nations wanted to grab control. And if in the future cricket loses its popularity, then it would be futile to blame the ICC. As one top ICC official once remarked: “ICC is nothing but all the cricketing nations; blame the nations who tamper with the organisation’s objectives.”