Frank Keating
Power inside the International Cricket Council (ICC) may have been rudely wrested from the fuddy dominion’s base at Lord’s, but this week it at least managed a traditional British answer to a thorny problem – set up a committee to report back in the fullness of time.
Tell you what, no betting man would have got odds from his bookmaker on the ICC not setting up a committee of investigation. Well, what else could they do?
Quite a lot, in fact. To be sure, it would be appalling if the inquiry limped along toothlessly and secretively before looking for a chance to fob off the mountains of cynical doubts and rumours.
Lord Griffiths, already chair of the ICC’s code of conduct committee, must play a blinder here as he has never remotely been seen to do before. Procrastination of the sort that he and his dozy ICC peers have been used to would have a brutally ruinous effect on a game already riddled with self-doubt and lack of leadership.
When, as well, is Lord MacLaurin actually going to show what he’s made of? There is more to leadership than pronouncing sombre sentences to Radio 5 Live presenters.
One’s confidence in this new committee of inquiry in sorting out the criminals – or even distancing cricket from them – took a dive with the further announcement that everyone concerned will be asked to sign a statement of integrity promising he is ”clean”.
Here’s a piece of paper asking ”Are you a crook?”. Tick box ”yes” or ”no”.
”No? Good boy. That’s all right then.”
Or: ”Hansie, just put a tick in either of the boxes. No? Fine, you can captain South Africa this morning.”
Such a bizarre and naive propo-sal makes one wonder if the 18 men around the table knew exactly why they had been summoned to sit there in the first place. Well, cricket is obviously a very honest game – see, we’ve got a host of signatures to prove it.
There was no announcement of any immediate reform of the one-day international fixture lists.
A radical culling of all those worthless one-dayers, mostly played on the subcontinent, would have been my first act. In these corruption is a cinch -they are so meaningless and ubiquitous that nobody, even the morning after, can say who won or lost, or could care less. The players have no remote pride in playing them, and are careless about scoring a duck or a century.
Had this week’s meeting come clean and admitted it, and announced a universal ongoing one-day world championship played for international kudos and prize money, the grubby barrage of meaningless fixtures would vanish like a shot. Is this the sort of thing Lord Griffiths has been charged to provide? I doubt it somehow.
The ICC’s outgoing president, Jagmohan Dalmiya, will probably see this as a triumph for negotiation and diplomacy.
His three-year stewardship has been a disaster. High moral leadership, so desperately needed, has been non- existent.
Dalmiya seems to have survived seemingly wild allegations that he took kickbacks from TV rights with ease, but he cannot escape the sober charge of complicity in the fatuous devaluation of cricket as a whole.
You desperately yearn for the days only a decade ago when the ICC was an almost unheard of adjunct of dear old MCC and its buffers at St John’s Wood, who would hold amiable meetings over a couple of pink gins about the value of leg-byes or tinkering with the lbw law to allow leg- spinners a chance.
Dalmiya burst that all asunder when he saw his chance after the 1996 World Cup bidding had been put in the bag for England – when the chair, Colin Cowdrey, languidly allowed South Africa to put in a bid simply to show their future intent. Dalmiya pounced – ”what about us?” – and the 1996 tournament went east. Doubtless to the joy of its bookmakers.
The game – and for sure the certainty of its morals and ethics and innate goodness – has never been the same since. And this week seems to have done very little to alter that appalling indictment.