The restructuring approved at the Int'l Cricket Council board meeting in Singapore on Feb. 8 "made it abundantly clear who is in charge of world cricket: the England and Wales Cricket Board, Cricket Australia and the Board of Control for Cricket in India," according to Richard Lord of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. The plan, "which is almost certain to be rubber-stamped at a full board meeting in June, hands over wide-reaching powers to two subcommittees, the Executive Committee and the Financial and Commercial Affairs Committee, which include representatives of the Big Three." Each one will also feature two other representatives from the remaining seven national associations, "and their decisions still have to be ratified by the main ICC board." But two, of course, "is not enough to vote down three." The new rules "also give the Big Three a larger slice of the game's global revenues." On the face of it, "that sounds fair enough: they, in particular India, are the game's most lucrative markets, contributing its big-spending audiences." Getting the power to decide almost everything about the game based on any financial metric, however, "isn't fair enough at all." The intangibles with a sport like cricket "are bigger and more important than with almost any other product, but ruthless and single-minded pursuit of short-term financial gain could accidentally strangle the goose that lays the golden egg" (WSJ, 2/26).
