The Australian
By Malcolm Conn
1 July 2010
The Asian bloc flexed it muscles and the former PM missed out.
FOR all the misty-eyed nostalgia surrounding the Ashes, cricket is now very much a south Asian game, as John Howard has found to his detriment.
The former prime minister’s bid to become president of the International Cricket Council failed on purely racial lines, much to the embarrassment of a sport which continues to shred its scant credibility on an all too regular basis.
“The ICC usually descends into racism and nationalism over matters of substance. This time they’ve descended into racism and nationalism,” one former cricket official told me with a weary laugh.
The ICC is run by the executive board, made up of the presidents and chairmen of the so-called 10 Test-playing nations: Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, West Indies and Zimbabwe.
It is a disparate bunch divided by cultural chasms and deep-seated mistrust and mired by politics.
In the end, Howard solicited the support of only the three “white” nations, Australia, New Zealand and England. He needed seven votes to be sure of the top job, which due process and convention said should have been his for the taking months ago once he was jointly nominated by Australia and New Zealand.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India now generates up to 80 per cent of cricket’s wealth so, by and large, what India says goes. If the BCCI had supported Howard, he would have been elected, probably without objection.
In the end BCCI president Shashank Manohar, 52, was willing to embarrass his one-time mentor Sharad Pawar, the incoming ICC president, to ensure the Afro-Asia bloc held firm.
Pawar, minister for agriculture in the Indian government, publicly supported Howard last month, but the reclusive Manohar showed loyalty to the anti-colonial forces following strenuous objections from South Africa and a duplicitous Zimbabwe.
Howard’s political past caught up with him. His opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa, believing they would do more harm than good, and support for selected sanctions and travel bans against Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime, which included Zimbabwe Cricket president Peter Chingoka, were held against him.
Australia’s central aim for nominating Howard was to bring good governance to the ICC and give cricket a broader standing on the world stage.
The ICC is not interested in good governance, as it showed by sacking its previous chief executive, Malcolm Speed, for attempting to bring Zimbabwe to account.
Zimbabwe, supported by South Africa, led the charge against Speed and have done the same against Howard.
The ICC seems more interested in centralising power in India than expanding the game.
Led by objections from India, the ICC has refused the opportunity to take the game truly global by making it an Olympic sport via the hugely popular Twenty20 format.
Regardless of what impression will be generated during this summer’s highly anticipated Ashes series, the biggest and most important cricket contest in the world is not Australia versus England but India versus Pakistan, when their governments let them play each other. Greg Chappell, who spent a fraught time as India coach a few years ago, described India-Pakistan as the Ashes multiplied by 10.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have 1.5 billion people, almost a quarter of the world’s population and unlike Australia and England, where football codes are the dominant sports, cricket on the subcontinent is somewhere between a religion and a national obsession.
It is fitting that this week’s series of ICC meetings, which finishes today with the largely ceremonial annual meeting, is being held in the Raffles City Convention Centre adjacent to Raffles Hotel, a bastion of colonialism. The resentment of colonialism hangs thickly in the air at ICC meetings.
The convention centre is where London won its 2012 Olympic bid after days of high-powered wheeling and dealing. ICC cocktail parties and dinners have ensured the same is taking place this week on a smaller but no less frantic scale.
Have a late night drink in a hotel bar with ICC delegates and the resentment against Australia and England eventually begins to ooze out from the non-white countries which now dominate cricket.
The very white Imperial Cricket Council was formed in 1909 by Australia, England and South Africa. Even when South Africa was eventually kicked out in the early 1970s for its apartheid selection policies, Australia and England ran what was by then called the International Cricket Conference as a fiefdom with a condescending and elitist view towards all other cricketing nations.
How the world has changed with the rise and rise of India’s now overwhelming economic power over the past decade.
Zimbabwe’s stance has frustrated attempts by its sports minister, impressive human rights lawyer and long-time Mugabe opponent David Coltart, to rebuild cricket ties. “One can hardly normalise relations with New Zealand Cricket and Cricket Australia if our first act is going to be to stand in the way of their preferred choice. Zimbabwe Cricket understand that,” Coltart told The Australian after a recent visit to both countries.
Given the way the fractious ICC has behaved over Howard suggests that sadly, this is normal cricket relations.