ICC presidency term to be cut to a year

The ICC's Executive Board has confirmed a constitutional amendment that will alter the role of its president and create a new post of a non-voting Board Chairman. The amendment, if approved by the ICC's general body in June, will convert the presidency of cricket's governing body into a rotational one-year term from 2014, at which time the post of vice-president will cease to exist. The chairman, who will now head the Executive Board, will serve a maximum of three two-year terms.

The nomination of Bangladesh Cricket Board president Mustafa Kamal as the joint candidate from Bangladesh and Pakistan for the vice-president's post, to succeed Alan Isaac in 2014, has been deferred until the ICC's annual conference, to be held in Kuala Lumpur at the end of June.

This will be the fourth time the ICC has made a change in its presidential format since reworking its constitution in 1996. The move to do away with a rotational presidency follows the controversial rejection in June 2010 of the nomination of John Howard as the ICC's vice-presidential candidate to succeed president Sharad Pawar. The constitutional amendment may have retained a rotational presidency, but the actual post has been altered in two different ways. From 2014 onward, the president's term has been cut down from two to one year and the position completely detached from administrative decision-making with the creation of the post of a chairman of the Board.

When the post of president was first created at the ICC, each full member appointed one man for the post on a rotational basis; Jagmohan Dalmiya from India, Malcolm Gray from Australia, Ehsan Mani from Pakistan and Percy Sonn from South Africa were the men appointed under this system. In 2007, the system was tweaked and the post of vice-president was also created. Though rotation stayed as a policy, nominations now came from pairs of countries: Australia-New Zealand, West Indies-England, India-Sri Lanka, Pakistan-Bangladesh and South Africa-Zimbabwe.

Kamal's vice-presidential nomination has now been further delayed. The re-defined president's role and the constitutional amendments would first need to be confirmed before the Board can turn its attention to what is to be done with the vice-president's post over the next two years. Within the next two months, Kamal's ambitions of becoming the ICC vice-president and from there, the president, will rest primarily on the support of the PCB. On Sunday, Bangladesh formally confirmed to the PCB that they will play one ODI and one Twenty20 International there later this month, in what will be the first international series in Pakistan since the attack on the Sri Lanka team in March 2009.

While the ICC Board announced that the post of the new Chairman would be instituted from 2014 onwards, it was not yet established whether the chairman would be appointed or elected. It is also not clear what the new 'ceremonial' post of president would actually involved as well as whether he would have the power to play any part in executive board functioning at all. At the moment the president chairs Board meetings, but has no vote. From 2014, the chairman would now become the head of the Board.

The Board also stated that recommendations made by the Woolf independent governance review needed "further discussion" to build a greater consensus. The directors of the Board - the chiefs of all the Full Member boards and three associate representatives - would "begin discussion among themselves" in order to develop, "a clearer understanding of the role of the ICC." The directors, it was said, would hold "more informal dicussions" among themselves and member boards in order to prepare their ground for the Kuala Lumpur meeting.

Apart from splitting the role of president and chairman of the board - both non-voting positions - the only other recommendation of the Woolf independent governance review that the Board had categorically agreed to was about "creating targeted funding" for members. The ICC has given no further details of the 'targeted funding' that was being considered. Haroon Lorgat, the CEO of the ICC, said it would have been, "unrealistic" to expect immediate decisions to be taken in regard to the Woolf report but said "it is encouraging there is a willingness to engage in difficult and significant governance matters." The Woolf review had called for sweeping changes in the global administration of cricket and the administration of the ICC.

Lorgat is now in his last two months as the CEO and will leave the position at the end of the annual conference in June. The board said it had identified four candidates who will be interviewed for the post. The ICC Executive Board consists of the president or chairman from each of the 10 Full Members plus three Associate Member representatives. The meeting is chaired by the ICC President and and also attended by the ICC Chief Executive, the ICC Vice-President, and by invitation, the ICC Principal Advisor.