Australia should leave the ICC

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Oct 15, 2008

By Scott last year, mid-May Leave a comment on this post

In the wake of the latest mess with the issue of Australia touring Zimbabwe, I’ve written a post calling for Australia to leave ICC.

It is not a step to be taken lightly, and there are many permutations to be reckoned with. But now is as good as any time to reckon with them. It is clear that ICC can not give cricket the clear and decisive leadership that it needs. Cricket is NOT about dollars and deals, but about cover-drives, spectators, and playing the game. ICC fails to recognise this, and therefor it is up to Australia to help put things right.

What about England? Should Australia go it alone or should England and Australia set up on their own again like in 1877 (or to be fair 1912 when the then Imperial Cricket Conference was founded.)

Tags: australia, england, ICC |

Comments to “Australia should leave the ICC” malcolm wrote:
May 14th, 2007 at 7.08 am

Let us be clear. The ICC has lost the credibility to represent the game. In an age of powerful sporting governing bodies with multi millions to spend, the ICC has consistently hired second rate people to do second rate jobs. Instead of being run by professional media and sponsorship experts, they have enthusiastic amateurs being blown by the winds of opinion.

On the cricketing side, they lack strong voices to stand up for what is good in the game, governed by compromise and second rate minds.

The quality people - like event managers Warren Deutrom and Chris Nockles, lawyer Richard Verow - are leading the current exodus. Only those that can’t find a job are staying. The shambles over the ESPN-Star 1.1 billion dollar contract that still isn’t signed 6 months after the negotiations started, the shambles over the lack of any sponsors for the upcoming 20-20 event in South Africa despite 2 years of negotiations, the shambles over a temporary office building in Dubai where there is no room to hire any more staff, the CFO saying that they can’t handle the money(http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2170445/cricket-body-fields-erp-handle). It all just adds to an air of professional incompetence. Malcolm Speed needs to go - and the new man - who should have experience of running an international sporting body - needs a completely new team running the commercial and sponsor arrangements, which should be only agreed if supported by the cricket experts, rather than the other way round.

Harry R wrote:
May 14th, 2007 at 8.57 am

Because there’s no possible way that that decision could end badly. Certainly it couldn’t end up as a festering sore that poisons the relationship between cricket-playing nations for decades.

Rusty wrote:
May 14th, 2007 at 11.02 am

I disagree with the idea of Australia leaving the ICC. IT’s only because It’s currently the no. 1 team that I think you could even suggest that - Go it alone? And do what? If we’re not in it, we’re not at the party. You think India and the other sub-continental countries would really upset? No, rather they would cry racism and arrogance, and you couldn’t really blame them.

It would be more to the point to try to bring about change from within, than thumbing your nose, which may only result in cutting it off to spite your face.

James wrote:
May 15th, 2007 at 2.17 am

I think we should face up to our own lack of moral prudence in signing up for this system. Politics is involved in cricket and many other team sports in a way that it isn’t for individual sports. That’s just a fact of life. A team represents a country in a way that an individual ordinarily doesn’t. And in team sports you get involved in complicit host and guest relationships with the dodgy country much more. You can see how a runner might refuse to go to meets in China, and still race against Chinese runners in a meet in Sweden, say, with a clear conscience. In Test cricket, your *every* game with the team funded by the nasties is as host or (worse) guest of Nastyland. The upshot is that there’s something seriously wrong with going in for a cricket league featuring non-democracies, de jure (Bangla), de facto (Zim) or both (Pak), and pretending that every country involved is a worthy host or guest.

None of this is rocket science, and we’ve all had the South African precedent to concentrate our minds on this. So I think we have a genuine moral dilemma of our own making. As a result, I wish the Oz government hadn’t stepped in, because it’s allowing our cricket authorities to keep shucking off their responsibilities. I think the only honourable course would have been to pull out of the tour and pay the fine.

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Australia should leave the ICC