What Indians need to explain is how can all administrative, technical, legal affairs be handed over to a minority.
MUSCAT, OMAN: This is with reference to the story titled “‘Big Three’ monopoly: India offered PCB quid pro quo” (March 11). The whole debate about whether Pakistan should agree to the Big Three proposals or not is pointless. We should be concentrating on the inherently unjust changes in the International Cricket Council (ICC) instead of discussing the feasibility or otherwise of accepting the Indian bribe to play ball in their nefarious plan. Although there is no comparable precedence in other global sports bodies, the enhanced financial share of the Big Three can be accepted based on lopsided market realities. What Indians need to explain is that how can all administrative, technical and legal affairs be handed over to a minority on a perpetual basis? And how will the Test ranking remain valid in the absence of a Future Tours Programme? We have to remember that all Test-playing nations are more or less required to play home and away series against all other countries in an eight-year cycle. Bilateral agreements will mean that smaller nations (marketing-wise) will get to play much less compared with the bigger nations. Now that would not be a problem if the ICC had 160 full members like Fifa does, in which case, the smaller nations (again only in the marketing sense) can play at the regional level among themselves and remain busy all year.
Unfortunately, the ICC has only 10 full members (whose playing records are officially recognised). Imagine the bottom half of the ICC members sitting idle and seeing the game wither away in their countries just because they are not considered financially worth it to host rich boards in their countries or even be invited to their countries. We also need to remember that India has still not hosted Bangladesh in the last 10 years because of the meagre returns that a series against the latter will fetch. This will soon become a rule instead of an exception. Ultimately, people will get tired of seeing the same few teams battling one another out while the others will get weaker and not worth watching anyway. Remember the Kerry Packer circus? It included the best players in the world but ultimately, it was still not sustainable.
Hasan Mehmood
Published in The Express Tribune, March 13th, 2014.
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