First day, first show
On the eve of the kick-off of the inaugural Indian Premier League in Bangalore on Friday, an event that is set to change the dynamics of world cricket forever and re-emphasise the influence that India wields in the modern sport, a new battle has begun. One aimed at control of the global game.
On Thursday, Indian cricketing circles woke up to a report in the England-based The Guardian, which stated that elite cricketers, backed by the international players’ union, FICA, were on the verge of history’s “biggest ever” cricketing “revolt” and “ready to call for a breakaway from the International Cricket Council”.
The reason? They resent the way the ICC runs the game, have no faith in the competence of cricket’s governing body’s and consider it “paralysed by the dominance of the Board of Control for Cricket in India”. The report said that if action was not immediately taken, they planned a no-confidence vote in the ICC at FICA’s world conference on May 26 in Austin, Texas.
India’s reaction to the report and any plans for a parallel world body was fast and unequivocal. Both Inderjit Singh Bindra, recently appointed Principal Advisor to the ICC and the powerful head of the Punjab Cricket Association and, BCCI vice-president and IPL commissioner Lalit Modi, were upset with what they saw as attempts to undermine what the BCCI had done for the sport, globally.
“There is no doubt that India is the engine of growth that provides most of the money that world cricket is running on,” said Modi. “Every Board wants more tours from the Indian team as there will be more crowds, more money and they can pay their players higher salaries from that revenue generated. Eighty per cent of world cricket’s money is from or because of India. Of the ICC’s own media rights, sold for $1.1 billion last year, the bid for the Indian portion was $885m.”
Bindra said any talk of a revolt was not based on issues, but because, unfortunately, some people were “angry” and “frustrated” by their loss of power in global sport. “It’s a strange kind of legacy of imperialism, when people don’t object to an imperialistic dictatorship in sport but have a problem with a democratic system based on the vote of two-thirds of a majority.”
The ICC, incidentally, was originally called the Imperial Cricket Conference, set up by England, Australia and South Africa, the last was out of the loop during the apartheid years. The ICC, till the late eighties-early nineties, had a peculiar veto system in place, where the founding members alone had a right to veto any proposal.
“The problem now,” said Modi, “Is that in the countries of the self-proclaimed guardians of the game, cricket has lost its pre-eminent position and is only the fourth-fifth most popular sport. In India, it is Numbers 1 to 10, but that doesn’t mean we flex our muscles in the ICC. If we did, we could probably have a president for the next 90 years, like England had one for 80-odd. But we are committed to democracy and every ICC decision is taken by a majority of seven of the 10 Test-playing nations.”
Modi’s final word though, was probably the most potent, given how many players from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and Sri Lanka, FICA members all, are playing in the IPL.
“You can’t make full use of the value addition that India brings to the game and then abuse it,” said Modi. “The worth of many FICA players has increased 10 to 15-fold because of the IPL, and we are committed to ensuring that that growth continues and the game spreads globally and evolves. The FICA should be very happy with the BCCI.”
Crucially, for the FICA’s success, India’s superstar cricketers, who do not have a functional players’ body, are not part of it. That might make all the difference.
Source:http://www.hindustantimes.com
