Not as unsightly as W.G.’s beard but infinitely more impenetrable
We can’t say this object is our favourite, and while it’s not as unsightly as W.G.’s beard it’s a darned sight denser and infinitely more impenetrable.
The International Cricket Council celebrated its centenary in 2009, and Wisden marked the occasion by commissioning Australian author and broadcaster Gideon Haigh to write an essay on cricket’s governing body. Entitling the essay ‘Imperial… International… Independent?’, Haigh mercilessly flailed the ICC to all four corners of the ground.
He began the essay as he meant to go on: ‘Weak, ineffectual, a sham democracy, a rubber stamp for the powerful…’ If the ICC had been an opening bowler it would have been taken off there and then.
But strident as Haigh was in his attack he was also fair, reminding readers that when South African Abe Bailey had proposed the establishment of an ‘Imperial Board of Control’ in June 1909, he envisioned a ‘shop for talk not action’.
And that was very much how the ICC was run for its first fifty years. The name the founders settled on was the Imperial Cricket Council, and in the first few years of its existence membership comprised England, South Africa and Australia, the latter pair coming to Lord’s for ‘an annual beano… putting on their best suits for a day of hospitality’.
Even after India, New Zealand and the West Indies were admitted to the ICC in 1926 there was scant distinction between it and the MCC, with the chairman and secretary of the latter also fulfilling the same roles within the Imperial Cricket Council.
After the Second World War the Council remained at the crease, ineffective but immovable, like an ageing village-green batsman who just won’t give a chance. During England’s Ashes tour to Australia in 1958/59 a controversy erupted over the action of Victorian fast bowler Ian Meckiff. There were calls in some quarters for Meckiff to be banned for throwing, and England tour manager Freddie Brown met with Syd Webb of the Australian Cricket Board. Shouldn’t the matter be left in the hands of the ICC? asked Webb. ‘The Council has no power,’ replied Brown. ‘It is the place where opinions can be ventilated.’
What ultimately blocked the ICC’s ventilation system was South Africa. In 1965 the West Indies and India both made clear their disapproval of England’s plan to host a South African touring party given that the Republic had lost its ICC status having left the Commonwealth four years earlier. New Zealand and Australia sided with England, but that same year the ICC welcomed its first intake of what have become known as ‘associate members’, non-Test-playing nations that included Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Fiji and the United States. In 1966 Bermuda, Denmark, East Africa and Holland were admitted to the ICC, which had now rebranded itself the International Cricket Conference.
Not as unsightly as W.G.’s beard but infinitely more impenetrable
An attempt to readmit South Africa to the ICC in 1981 – proposed by New Zealand and seconded by England – was voted down, and in 1983 it was India’s turn to win the World Cup. Emboldened by their success on the pitch, the Indian Board in the summer 1984 tabled a proposal that Haigh described as ‘unforeseeably momentous’.
At the ICC meeting Indian Board president N.K.P. Salve proposed that the 1987 World Cup be held in India and Pakistan, breaking with the tradition of staging the tournament in England. The English weren’t happy, but cold hard cash won out, the Indian bid being twice as lucrative as their adversaries’. As Salve noted later: ‘For the first time a battle had been successfully fought in ICC… India and Pakistan and their friends had shown England and her allies that they were no longer supreme in the matters of cricket administration.’
Thirty years later cricket’s administrative power lies squarely in the hands of India, with their giant financial clout, and the ICC remains – in the eyes of many – as impotent as ever. On the question of that great blight on the modern game – match-fixing – the ICC has been reactive rather than proactive. The first scandal, which broke in 2000 and brought down Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin, led to former Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner Lord Condon overseeing a cricket Anti-Corruption Unit. He wasn’t impressed with the sport’s leadership, saying the ICC lacked ‘an infrastructure to meet the financial and governance requirements of the modern game’.
Cricket’s administrative power now lies squarely in the hands of India
More recently it took the now defunct News of the World to expose Pakistan’s spot-fixing ring in 2010 and an Indian TV station to break allegations of corruption among umpires two years later.
Gideon Haigh concluded his excellent essay in the 2009 Wisden by caustically noting that ‘where the I in ICC once stood for Imperial, and now for International, there seems no danger it will ever stand for Independent’.
Indian, maybe, but definitely not Independent.