Speed slams Wisden

Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of the International Cricket Council (ICC), criticised the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack during the course of a hard-hitting speech at today's ICC Cricket Business Forum at Lord's.

Reacting to criticism of the ICC's performance over the past year in the 2003 Wisden, Speed said: "This year in the self-professed cricket bible, the ICC is criticised for commercialising the sport. The angst-ridden prose bemoaning the fact that the ICC was, at last, capturing the true value of the sport was a source of some bemusement.

"The irony of this criticism being made at a time when Wisden is seeking to boost its profits by snapping up magazines and websites was not lost on most inside the sport."

Finally, he said: "Further it is disappointing that our game's self-appointed holy book has, for the first time, omitted the Laws of Cricket - the equivalent perhaps of a revised edition of the real Bible omitting the Ten Commandments. It is hard not to concur with Peter Roebuck when he wrote in Australia `The time has come to stop taking this little book seriously'."

Speed concluded: "The reality is that too often cricket has failed to realise its full commercial potential. The objective of the administrator is to balance the commercial imperatives with the values and the spirit of the game."

In the 2003 Wisden, the editor Tim de Lisle had written: "What the fans couldn't do [at the World Cup] was drink Coke, because Pepsi was a sponsor, or express opinions, because they might offend [Robert] Mugabe ... The organisers were so anxious to quash ambush marketing, they even persuaded the South African government to pass a law banning spectators from carrying the wrong brand of mineral water. At the gate, fans found themselves being frisked by the soft-drink police ... A couple of years ago, the gravest threat to the game's fabric was corruption; now, it is corporatisation."

He also observed: "Their Champions Trophy did not produce a champion. Their Test Championship produced the wrong one. Their new One-Day Championship was so arcane it went virtually unnoticed. Their World Cup consisted of more than 50 matches but hardly any real contests. And they adopted a stance on Zimbabwe that shamed the game."

Steven Lynch, the editor of Wisden CricInfo, said today: "Mr Speed is wide of the mark on a couple of counts. First Wisden has never called itself the Bible of Cricket - other people do that, so it's neither self-professed nor self-appointed. But it has been going for 140 years and has been known almost throughout that time for its independent views, which are often not to administrators' tastes. People almost certainly would start ignoring it if it lost that independence.

"And actually the Laws were left out once before - in 1987. The main reason they were left out again this time was because the mushrooming amount of international cricket took up so much space. Even so it had more pages than any previous edition."

Lynch concluded: "He is entitled to his opinion - you might call it the right of reply, as the Editor's Notes this year were critical of him and his organisation. But I'm sure Wisden will stand by the main planks of that criticism."