By IANS,
London : The global cricketers’ union has threatened “the Indian-dominated” International Cricket Council (ICC) to drastically reform its way of functioning or face a no-confidence motion and lose top stars to a players-run competition.
The Federation of International Cricketers’ Association (FICA), showing its resentment over the way the ICC has handled some key issues like the Harbhajan Singh-Andrew Symonds racial allegations controversy in Australia recently, will decide at its meeting at Austin, Texas, starting May 26 whether to break away from the 100-year-old body.
FICA’s international legal adviser Ian Smith told the Guardian newspaper that the two Indian Twenty20 leagues have helped players re-assess their worth and this has encouraged them to think about playing a breakaway tournament of top cricketers.
“The two days (of the conference) will be dominated by Indian cricket, what to do about the IPL (Indian Premier League), Twenty20 and Stanford (Challenge in West Indies),” he said.
“People are increasingly seriously asking why aren’t we walking away. The competence of the administrators is being called into question at a policy level. We believe that because the players are better organised and that talent has been radically revalued by the Indian leagues it’s time to look at whether the players can do a better job than the current policy makers.”
Smith hoped the resolution at the meeting would demand for more accountability from what he termed as the “Indian-dominated governing board” of the ICC.
“There is no loyalty at all [from the players] towards the ICC at the top level. We know that if someone came along and said let’s do a 10-year, £1billion deal and create a world circus of cricket, we could take the top 200 players in the world into that circus if there is a guaranteed good income, good competition and good standard of living. All it would take is one broadcast deal,” he said.
“So there’s no trust between the top level of cricket administrators and the guys who play it. It’s not the fault of the executive of the ICC – people like Malcolm Speed [ICC CEO] are good guys who do their best for the game. It’s that the decisions of the ICC are governed by the board and the structure of the ICC is wrong for world cricket. They’ve cocked up on every single policy issue.”
Smith further said: “You can’t have 10 people on the ICC board voting on every single issue out of self-interest. We want an independent executive answerable to its shareholders once a year at an AGM.”
The issues that have annoyed FICA are:
* The shambles of the World Cup in the West Indies, which was played to half-empty stadiums.
* The Darrell Hair affair, when his handling of the forfeited England-Pakistan Test match led to his dismissal as an elite umpire before being reinstated.
* The mismanagement of Harbhajan Singh’s alleged racist slurs against Australia’s Andrew Symonds.
* The decision not to make public the KPMG audit of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union’s finances, which the ICC admitted exposed “serious financial irregularities”.