India to push for lion’s share of revenue at ICC board meet

Dubai, Jan 27:
The BCCI will have its task cut as the richest cricket board in the world pushes for lion’s share of revenue from ICC’s earnings along with two cricket boards from England and Australia at the two-day executive board meeting of the governing body here tomorrow.
It will be a ‘three versus seven’ fight at the meeting with BCCI, England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) having prepared a ‘Position Paper’ which will allow these three boards to control the parent body’s functioning.
In fact BCCI has already made it clear that their participation in the future ICC events (50 and 20 over World Cups) would be decided subject to approval of the ‘Position Paper’.
As per ICC rules, seven of the 10 Board members (Test-playing nations) need to approve the controversial proposal but the Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) and Vricket South Africa (CSA) have already publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with the contents of the ‘Position Paper’.
It has been learnt that BCCI also wants an OCC event every two years in India and also wants to overrule the ICC’s FTP (Future Tours & Programme) by engaging into direct discussions with respective cricket boards for bilateral series.
Also there would be discussions on creating a post of ICC Chairman, which would rotate between the BCCI, CA and ECB with N Srinivasan being the hot favourite to become the first chairman. It would also effectively turn the ICC president into a virtual ‘rubber-stamp’.
According to BCCI sources, their president Srinivasan has already promised the members of his affiliated units, a bigger grant if BCCI happens to get the lion’s share.
Till today there have been series of meetings — Chief Executives’ Committee meeting that included meeting of Working Groups on DRS and Anti-Corruption, followed by the meeting of both the Finance and Commercial Affairs Committee and Governance Review Committee — at the ICC Headquarters in Dubai Sports City.
But come tomorrow, the focus will solely be on the proposal of the “Big Three” — India (BCCI), Australia (CA) and England (ECB) — when they officially table their bid to take over world cricket.
This plan of overhaul would effectively shrink the power of the world body significantly. (PTI)

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