ICC must cleanse game, not brush dirt under the carpet

By Scyld Berry

LONDON, JUNE 18. The next eight days will be the most important cricket has known. At the end of them, when the International Cricket Council (ICC) has concluded its annual meeting, we will know if the game is going to be cleansed or corruption institutionalised within it.

As Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, said on Friday: ``We applaud the way South Africa is treating the Cronje affair and we must root out corruption whether by player or administrator. If it happens in the English game we will root it out as the South Africans have done. We must ask the Pakistan Cricket Board to take further action over the Qayyum Report. If not, the ICC must do so.''

But the initial signs are not promising. Looking at the ICC's agenda for its meeting you wouldn't think anything untoward has happened in the game, let alone its biggest crisis: ``Thursday 22 June, Development Committee meeting. Friday 23 June, Cricket Committee meeting'' and so on, as if Hansie Cronje, Salim Malik and their evil work had never existed.

Left to its own devices, the ICC will approve Bangladesh's application for full membership and make it the 10th Test country with immediate effect (and perhaps inaugurate a world Test championship based on a five-year cycle). At another meeting shortly afterwards it will sell the TV and Internet rights for the next two World Cups. And if this happens, we will know who has won the battle for the game's future.

Take the TV bids first. It is fine to decide now who is to get the rights for the 2003 World Cup in South Africa as member countries need the advance money for good reasons, but to sell them now for the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies is either madness or worse. How can the value of that tournament be judged seven years in advance, when you don't know how many countries or matches will be involved? You would only sell those rights now if you were in a hurry.

Besides, there might be another World Cup before then, in 2005, if one proposal is considered. If the ICC wants to clean up cricket, one obvious step is to eliminate, or at least reduce, those one-day tournaments which do a lot for bookmakers and their accomplices but nothing for cricket, and replace them with a World Cup every two years which everyone will want to win.

Not racism, simply a fact

If Bangladesh is granted immediate Test status, as seems to be the foregone conclusion, it will be a scandal, and it will be done not for playing reasons but political ones: to increase the size of the Asian power bloc from three out of nine to four out of 10, almost breakaway proportions.

Bangladesh has every prerequisite for Test status - crowds, sponsors, money - except one: a team anywhere near international standard.

In 1997-98 Bangladesh played three first-class matches in New Zealand against regional sides lacking their Test players. It lost all three massively, two by an innings, never scoring 300 itself and never bowling out its opponents for less. New Zealand's convenor of selectors, Ross Dykes, commented that Bangladesh played to district association (second-class) standard.

Since then Bangladesh has been invited to tour Australia to play state teams and it has refused, knowing full well what damage would be done to its - or rather its officials' - application for Test status. What it needs is help, funding and a five-year programme of first-class tours to raise its standard to Test. It is not racism to say so, simply fact.

Before making such highly premature decisions the ICC has far more urgent business to attend to: its own recent past. Like, for example, the ICC knockout tournament in Dhaka in 1998. Why, for a start, has the ICC president, Jagmohan Dalmiya, suddenly admitted that he was involved in the bidding for the TV rights for that tournament, having categorically denied it at the emergency meeting last month?

Asif Iqbal, the former Pakistan captain, has been exposed as the middleman in the tapes made by the News of the World's undercover team and been the subject of serious allegations in Pakistan's Qayyum Report. What was he doing as the event organiser in Dhaka, and who appointed him?

Before making future decisions, the ICC has to cleanse the past, over which it has have presided so ineffectually that the game is faced with losing the public's trust. Or maybe it has not been ineffectual at all but utterly deliberate in what it has done, or rather has not done, just as it has turned a blind eye to the King Commission of Inquiry in South Africa by not sending an employee.

One round of strip poker has taken place. Before anything else, there has to be a second round in which every country bares more of its secrets, however embarrassing and distressing - and everything points to there being many more to come, from almost every quarter. Otherwise the international game in future is going to be as respectable, and rigged, as American wrestling.

- Copyright Telegraph Group of Newspapers, London.

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