MICHAEL FINCH, Johannesburg | Saturday 5.00pm.
ALI Bacher will step down from his position as managing director of the United Cricket Board (UCB) next year to concentrate on organising the 2003 World Cup in South Africa.
Bacher, who has been at the helm of the unified board since its inception in 1991, was asked by the UCB last weekend to take the position and accepted it on Friday.
”The board’s feeling was that the tournament was going to be of such great importance to South Africa, with so much at stake, that there would have to be someone whose sole responsibility it was to look after it,” UCB president Raymond White said.
”The board felt that there was only one person in South Africa that we could confidently entrust (with) such a task and that was Dr Bacher.”
Bacher will take up his position next year though the exact date has yet to be finalised.
The UCB will look at selecting a successor to Bacher as managing director after this year’s World Cup in England in May and June.
Bacher said the decision to take the new post had been a difficult one.
”It’s been a tough week for me,” Bacher said. ”For so long I have put my whole life and soul into the running of cricket.”
Bacher said he had spent most of the week visiting sponsors, speaking to South Africa’s national controlling body for sport, the National Sports Council and to Olympic chief Sam Ramsamy and sports minister Steve Tshwete.
He said that the World Cup organising committee would be a separate entity from the UCB and said he hoped to exceed the expected 11-million-pound surplus that the England World Cup organising committee were expecting.
”I don’t want to make projections but I am reasonably confident that we can exceed that and that would be good news for South Africa,” Bacher said. — Reuters