The WCA report, Part Three: Leadership

The WCA working party which has recommended a root-and-branch reform of international cricket has trodden carefully across the minefield which passes for governance at the ICC.

They were, indeed, initially warned off by the sub-committee which appointed them, which had clearly learned the bitter lesson of the Woolf review’s fate: ‘The sensitivities associated with focussing on governance,’ they write, ‘are well understood and it was not seen as desirable to get politically sidetracked from focussing on scheduling and game structure…

But their interviews with stakeholders quickly persuaded them that issues of governance were too central to be avoided, leading them to conclude that ‘there is currently no independent or benevolent global leadership body setting global direction and providing clarity’.

Pause for a moment over those two words: ‘independent’ and ‘benevolent’.

We know that Lord Woolf highlighted the fiduciary duty of ICC Board members to act in the interest of the game as a whole, and that in the intervening decade-plus the naked pursuit of self-interest by the most influential Full members has if anything become a greater scandal than it was in 2012.

The appointment of one notionally-independent Board member has proved no more than window-dressing, and the effects of the coup by the Gang of Three in 2014 still echo through world cricket today.

More damaging than the Board’s lack of independence, however, is the absence of benevolence, of the goodwill towards the game they control which ought to be the hallmark of any governing body worthy of the name.

Woolf talked a lot about ethics, and the blatant lack of any moral compass informing its decision-making is one of the most striking and appalling features of the ICC’s present grip on the world game.

So there is much to be said for the WCA’s diagnosis of the problem, and for the objectives it sets for a reformed ICC, embarking with a new global mandate, marked by ‘shared ownership, independence and fairer representation’, and fostering collective progress towards ‘global cricket growth and development’.

But how is this to be achieved, given the likely intransigence of those who hold the levers of power?

The working party’s idea is the establishment of a Global Game Leadership Committee, with equal representation of national Boards, the franchise leagues, players and independents, as an interim step towards the goals it attempts to set.

This is ingenious, although at first glance it does have something of the fox being put in charge of the hen-house: giving such a strong voice to the franchise league owners and the players whose interests in many respects coincide with them could risk an acceleration of the sidelining of traditional international cricket.

Then, too, there is the thorny question of the appointment of the independent members: who would have the power of nomination and election/selection, and how could it be ensured that they were truly independent, rather than being chosen to support existing vested interests?

There are, one might think, already hints of this in the report’s proposed schedule, confining international cricket to a mere 84 days in a programme otherwise dominated by what its calls the ‘free market’.

There is, certainly, a great deal of work to be done before we reach such a point, refining the WCA proposals until we are sure that we have a system which strikes the necessary balance between traditional international cricket and the forces which have disrupted and threaten to destroy it, and between the players who make the game possible, the employers who give them their platform, and the millions of cricket-lovers who are too often exploited as outrageously as the players used to be.

But in the end we face the question which Woolf and his team were unable to answer: what do you do if those in power simply say that they are not prepared to agree to change?

And here is may be significant that the initiative this time has been taken by the players, or at least by their representatives.

Because it is after all the players who make it all possible, whose skills are the raw material without which the administrators would be nothing.

So would the players, in the face of intransigence from the BCCI and its allies, be prepared to make a stand for the change they believe to be necessary?

We have seen such defiance in the past: one thinks of Andy Flower and Henry Olonga’s demonstration at the 2003 World Cup and, less altruistically, the actions of the leading Indian players over endorsements before the previous year’s Champions Trophy.

Pat Cummins, one of the principal interviewees whose thinking contributed to the WCA report, has been prepared to take a stand on climate issues, standing firm against the ‘Captain Woke’ label thrown at him by the Murdoch press and other right-wing media, and his teammate Usman Khawaja has also made clear his position on political issues despite pressure from the cricket authorities.

If it is, as the report claims, ‘essential to act now’, then we must hope that the players demonstrate what administrators have until now mostly lacked, a willingness to take on the oligarchs who increasingly control the game.

And if they do, it will fall to all of us to give them our wholehearted support.

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