Delink Srinivasan from India's global takeover

While ICC chairman N Srinivasan certainly has a lot to answer for, much of the recent media coverage conflated his personality, or perceptions about his personality, with the new order in the ICC, writes Ashok Malik in the Asian Age. He says that it is important to delink Srinivasan from the larger opportunism behind the BCCI's decisions, and points to football and the Olympics as examples of economics trumping egalitarianism in the enterprise of modern sport.

Even if Mr Srinivasan is in the eye of the storm, he has not forced these decisions on Indian and international cricket. There is a larger institutional buy-in. Even when Lalit Modi, now Mr Srinivasan's foe, was riding high in the BCCI establishment five years ago, he was openly suggesting that cricket's hierarchy needed to be reorganised and that the ICC Future Tours Programme required a re-visit. It was becoming inevitable over the past few years that the BCCI's commercial clout in cricket needed to be formalised. Any BCCI leadership would have urged it.