The ICC: A members’ club with a very small number of members

Writing in the Wisden, Gideon Haigh characterised the International Cricket Council (ICC) as “an unloved beast that is ostensibly a global governing body but too often looks like a forum in which the representatives of national monopolies come to split the spoils of cricket’s commercial exploitation.”

In one of his more mellow moods, an ICC official once said that “if we sold the television rights to ICC board meetings, we would make a fortune…” Another thought meetings of the ICC Executive Board are almost pointless, since “Everything has been decided by the time they take place, on the basis who owes a favour to whom.”

How did cricket get to where it is today? The glib answer is, the greatness of its players, from W.G. Grace to Virat Kohli, guided by a benevolent international governing body which has had only the game’s interests at heart. If only. But while there are numerous biographies of Grace and Kohli, we haven’t had someone getting into the nitty gritty of how the ICC ran the sport.

Until now that is, when an Australian, Rod Lyall has, after deep research into primary sources published The Club: Empire, Power and the Governance of World Cricket. This is what the ICC has always been, “a members’ club, with a very small number of members”, says the author. Today it is seen as merely an events management company, the real power being in the hands of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

Changing times

From colonial power to money power, from exclusivity to inclusion, from being a Commonwealth preserve to welcoming the wider world, from being seen as the MCC’s Foreign Desk to an extension of the ruling BJP, and the possible take-over of the game by corporates, the journey of the ICC has been unique. No single country has the kind of clout India has in cricket in any other sport. Brazil might be football to many, but they don’t rule it.

The skewed position was built into the ICC from the start. As Lyall writes, the central objective (of the ICC) had been to “concentrate power in a small number of hands, and to protect the interests of that small group at the expense of anyone else….the administrators had been consistent in their exploitation of race and class to maintain their grasp on power.”

The eagerness with which the ICC is wooing the United States is ironical considering they were kept out for not being in the Commonwealth. “The US might have been invited to join in 1909 but had been kept out by that unfortunate War of Independence back in the 1770s,” comments Lyall drily.

The ICC has been chary about dealing with the big issues: corruption, politics, on-field changes, but has defended its turf keenly. By the 1930s, when the original three members had expanded to six with the inclusion of New Zealand, West Indies and India, it proposed that the founding members would have two votes and the newcomers just one each. It was only in 1947 that a First-Class match was defined. ICC meetings were “the usual mixture of platitudes and procrastinations.”

India’s attempts to shake the grip on the game and its administration from England and Australia began with the shifting of the World Cup to the subcontinent in 1986-87 after the first three had been held in England. A few years later, the founding members lost the power of veto, and Jagmohan Dalmiya, speeded up the eastward shift.

When the ICC shifted its headquarters from London to Dubai, one newspaper headline said simply, ‘ICC Moves Closer to Money’. Dalmiya’s membership drive not only gave India greater influence thanks to the votes the new countries had, it also hastened the acceptance of cricket into the Olympic fold.

India’s argument has been, since the time of N. Srinivasan, that when England and Australia were calling the shots, no one else had a say in matters but now it was India’s turn. Srinivasan became the ICC’s first chairman in 2014, and set about establishing India’s suzerainty in the sport.

Is the ICC a necessary evil or an unnecessary do-gooder or a mix of the two depending on the situation? The Club gives us the background to decide for ourselves.