Howard stabbed as India takes control of cricket

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 1 Jul 2010 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Former Prime Minister John Howard presents the trophy to his team captain Cameron White

Former Prime Minister John Howard presents the trophy to his team captain Cameron White. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

The ICC has become a puppet for the Indian politicians and money men, some of them deeply corrupt, with the unprecedented opposition from the Afro-Asian bloc to the nomination of John Howard as its vice-president.

The vice-president serves two years in this office before taking over as president.

The objection of the Afro-Asian bloc was stated to be based around an objection to former politicians coming into the world of cricket politics, without having done previous work on their local and national committees.

Howard was otherwise engaged for over 30 years with a political career that saw him become a long-serving Prime Minister of Australia. Throughout that time he maintained a more than keen interest in the game and its controversies.

He spoke out again Murali’s controversial bowling action and even more strongly against the corruption of cricket and political life in Zimbabwe.

The fear of the Afro-Asia bloc is that Howard would try to impose some decent governance into the game by challenging the bunch of political thugs – there are no other words for them – who are currently running things right now.

The Roar was opposed to Howard’s nomination by the Australian and New Zealand cricket authorities on the grounds that it was New Zealand’s turn to provide the candidate. The New Zealand nominee, Sir John Anderson, a banker with a long history of cricket administration behind him, should have been accepted by Cricket Australia. But it was also accepted that Howard was a strong candidate who deserved to be accepted once his nomination was put forward.

Presumably, Sir John will be re-nominated, although I was told in New Zealand some months ago that he has a bad back and is reluctant to do much travelling.

He faces the prospect, too, of the black ball because of his courageous efforts in the past to rein in the disgraceful financial rorting of Zimbabwe cricket by the Mugabe-backed thugs running the game there.

Two years, Malcolm Speed, an Australian who was the chief executive of the ICC, set up an audit committee investigation into the financial dealings of Zimbabwe cricket. Sir John Anderson was on this committee. The audit was never released. Speed was sacked and Sir John resigned from the committee.

No one can be in much doubt that until the last 40 years or so that cricket was a white game. Read the analysis of the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James and this truth becomes very obvious.

The game was run from London. England and Australian dominated the councils of the game. Even the playing colours used in Test cricket reflected this dominance.

The Packer revolt changed all this, even to the colouring of the clothes used by players. Power in the game flowed to where the money was, which was in television. This is still true but with the difference that instead of the money being in Australia, it now resides in India.

Indian television money, with the rotten addition from the gambling syndicates, now totally dominates the game.

New Zealand cricketers, to take an example, are now paid more than their rugby counterparts because of the money provided by ICC contracts which in turn are stoked up from the Indian game.

The advent of the commercialisation of Twenty20 cricket, taken to a height or commercial depth that even Kerry Packer could not even dream of achieving, has further entrenched the control of the game world wide by the Indian powerbrokers.

Where will this all end?

We have seen the pollution of the Olympic ideals with the politicisation of the IOC. FIFA is another example of how a commercially lucrative sport, in this case football, can be corrupted when third world politicians and wide boys move in and grab control.

Now cricket is plunging rapidly down the same vortex.

Jack Clarke, the outspoken chairman of Cricket Australia, is in no doubt that the insult to Australasian cricket and to John Howard, is going to take world cricket into dangerous waters: ‘I think it’s part of India’s power grab for world cricket. It’s important for them that the ICC does not have a powerful chairman and in my view the ICC will be diminished and based in Mumbai within two years.’

Hopefully, Sir John Anderson can be prevailed upon to be Australasia’s new candidate for the vice-presidency of the ICC.

Even if this happens it will be a struggle to bring some decent governance back into the game. These are trying times for world cricket as the black and white divide in the game is increasingly becoming a chasm.

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