A confidential “position paper” by a committee at the ICC has generated plenty of comment among cricket nuts (professional and otherwise) on the internet. The existence of the document was reported by Osman Samiuddin at The National and Cricinfo (see Sharda Ugra’s detailed report). It appears that the Guardian had the report but according to Mike Selvey wanted to wait and see what happened.
The crux of the paper is as follows. Basically, there is a massive imbalance in the revenues generated by the individual boards that constitute the ICC (not surprising, the three richest nations have the 6th, 10th and 12th largest GDP in the world). The three boards which make the highest revenue want to have total say as to how this revenue should be distributed and used. Yes. I mean total say. Not just substantially greater say, but total say. To justify this, the three boards have presented an argument in the paper using concepts like “contribution cost” (a measure which accounts for what each board puts in to the pot) and advocated “meritocracy, not just membership”. The bottom line is, that the three boards which make most of the money would like to share less of it and appropriate for themselves the power to decide how they should share it in the future.
Test Cricket is the straw man that is being preserved, defended, but ultimately, in my view, destroyed. You see, if we take the three big boards – India, England and Australia – at their word, then playing Tests is prohibitively expensive for the smaller boards. “Let them decide for themselves if they ought to play Tests” is the big three’s way of saying if they can’t afford it, they should stop playing. I fail to see how Test Cricket is preserved if fewer teams play it.
Based on the argument in the position paper, it is palpably disingenuous of the three big boards to say they are for Test Cricket. What they obviously want (this is a matter of simple arithmetic) is for the international calendar to be freed up to they can have their Tests and also enough windows for their burgeoning T20 leagues. The rest of the cricketing world can then provide landless labor for these leagues, in return for which, they will be granted the right to play cricket amongst themselves if they can afford it.
None of this is new. If you follow the extreme right wing like I do, the idea that all Test cricket should have “local economies” is not a new one. Lets leave aside the for the moment the horrible morality the underlies this “each is on his own” approach. Lets look at it purely as a matter of costs and benefits. The T20 windfall that Cricket has enjoyed (disproportionately in India, England and Australia) owes a debt to Test Cricket. It would not have been possible without 135 years of Test Cricket. This is simply a matter of fact at this point. It is not for nothing that BCCI made VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid “icon” players in the inaugural IPL.
What is the dollar value of this debt? Here is a rough way to calculate some of it. It is not convenient to the right wing argument, but by itself, tell me if it isn’t reasonable.
1. Take the median annual contract an IPL player on a per over basis.
2. Take the median income of a cricketer in the pre-T20 era, since 1877, on a per over basis.
3. Subtract 2 from 1. This would be the debt that today’s players owe to their predecessors over the previous 14 decades for creating the history, the legacy, which makes T20 cricket possible. (Note that for much of this period, cricket was played by amateurs for expenses, umpired by umpires for fees which did not even cover their taxi fare).
This is, as I said, partial. We applaud the BCCI for producing pension schemes for former cricketers. This is not some favor the BCCI is doing to former players. It is at best miniscule compensation for the labors of those cricketers.
So as a matter of pure cost and benefit, it is ludicrous to say that a Test Match is too expensive to play simply based on the income generated by the Test Match alone. It would be fairly easy to apply some mathematical system to develop a measure of the debt that T20 owes Test Cricket (based on the simple calculation i have suggested), and use it in the profit and loss calculation for each T20 game. Even if you don’t care about Test Cricket, but you care about paying debts and staying solvent (as the right wing likes to say, only the bean counters matter), is it not reasonable to ask that those debts be measured properly, and not merely conveniently?
But this, as I said, is at issue only if you ignore the abysmally shriveled morality behind the proposal. That India, England and Australia are the three richest boards is atleast as much an accident of history and demography as it is due to any genius on the part of these three. One only has to look at the regularity with which members of the BCCI drag each other to court to realize that competence is not uniquely the preserve of the BCCI. South Africa have consistently produced one of the top teams in the world since their return in 1992, despite going through a massive national transition at the same time.
There has been a lot of wonderful writing on the secret position paper. Gideon Haigh has been stellar, as have David Mutton, Sambit Bal, Dileep Premachandran, Jarrod Kimber and many others. It is a mediocre document with palpable internal inconsistencies. Yet, the extreme right wing thinks that it is “cleverly drafted”.
I hope, if nothing else, this paper knocks the self-styled “establishment” of Serious People who allegedly care about the solvency of the sport, and their backers, off their comfortable perch. I hope cricket fans see them for what they are – myopic mediocrities whose methods involve thuggery, not thoughtfulness, convenient arithmetic, not considered measurement of worth – radical profiteers, not responsible governors of a sport. The “Test Cricket Fund” described in that position paper is designed to be inadequate and as a consequence, to shrink Test Cricket.
South Africa offers a close analogy here. That is, if you can imagine yourself to be a South African in 1947 listening with 1947 ears, seeing with 1947 eyes, to the arguments about “apartness” put forth by the National Party at the time. It is an incendiary analogy, I admit, but an accurate and necessary one.
Finally, I hope that some there will be some reflection on the ethical mayhem this report has caused within the ICC. Here is why.
David Richardson is the Chief Executive Officer of the ICC. Alan Isaac is President. Richardson and Isaac are also members of the ICC’s Finance and Commercial Affairs Committee which has produced this report. Osman Samiuddin reports on how the position paper was presented to the committee. It was prepared in secret, without most of the full members knowing what was afoot. It was offered to the members at a meeting called in an unusual way, without explanation of how the calculations were produced.
David Richardson is responsible to the all the members of the ICC Board. Yet, he, and Alan Isaac are co-authors of a paper which has blindsided the majority of his members. He is responsible for its contents, and must be deemed to have known of the contents. Yet, he contributed to keeping members in the dark about it. He played along with a small handful of board officials against the interests of the majority of the other board officials. The only conclusion possible, based on Richardson’s silence since the Perth Test when the committee met and the report was worked out (based on Osman’s reporting), is that David Richardson not only agree entirely with the contents of this report, but that he also agrees entirely with the manner of its creation.
How can Richardson continue to function as the CEO of the ICC in such circumstances? If Sri Lanka or South Africa or Pakistan call for Richardson’s resignation, does he have a reasonable defense?
At the very least, Richardson’s conduct ought to be examined by the ICC Governance Committee. Hopefully, he and Isaac will find it a reasonable expectation that they recuse themselves from participating in such an investigation (they are both ex-officio members of this committee).
I could go in speculative conspiracies here. I’ve been curious as to why England and Australia were so conspicuously silent (as was the ICC’s executive leadership) when N Srinivasan’s son-in-law and top official of the IPL franchise owned by Srinivasan’s India Cements was caught placing illegal bets on IPL games. I suppose the contents of this report explain this a bit. But maybe this alliance, and that alliance of silence have nothing to do with each other.
But this speculation is unnecessary. What has been reported is damning. Cricket’s establishment owes the game answers to simple questions:
1. Why is the redistribution of wealth not at its most aggressive at a time when Cricket is seeing more revenue than ever before? Why does the ICC wish to proceed in the opposite direction today?
2. Why are details of the financial calculations that underlie much of the ICC’s policy making not public as a matter of course? What is the ICC afraid of?
3. Why does the ICC think that playing Test Cricket more sporadically will make Test Cricket stronger?
The ICC’s top officials, its CEO and its President, should resign. If they are not prepared to stand up for the organization that they run, then they have no business running it. Their successors must be prepared to answer not just polite questions, but difficult ones.
Update: Here is a view from the right by Harsha Bhogle. Its not clear what “inclusion” or “benevolence” he’s talking about after granting nearly every basic premise in the position paper.
