The Indians are coming

Andrew Miller's piece on this website, 'Worse to Follow' about the late Percy Sonn, the president of the ICC who died a few days ago, makes you long for some golden mean between being mealy-mouthed about the dead and being malicious about them. We are told about Sonn's ineptness, the distrust he inspired and the greed-driven system he presided over. In between robust editorial comment, the piece has a couple of Sonn's colleagues say nice things about him in extenuation. It isn't till halfway through the article that you realise that Percy Sonn, so recently dead, is a narrative device, a way of warning cricket's fans that worse is to follow, that 'worse' being the possibility of the BCCI chief, Sharad Pawar, succeeding Sonn.

Why would this be bad? "With Pawar installed at the head of the ICC, the way would be cleared for the takeover of the ICC that has long been threatened by the frustrated Indians, who represent 70% of the game's income and whose early exit from the World Cup conveniently distanced them from most - if not all - of the tournament's myriad failings." This is a remarkable sentence: the first half is unexamined prejudice and the second half is incoherent.

India has held the presidency of the ICC before, when Jagmohan Dalmiya occupied that post, and the end of his tenure saw the ICC become a much richer body without becoming an Indian principality. So 'The Indians are coming' motif is silly. The second half of the sentence seems to be based on the odd proposition that the more successful a team was in the last World Cup, the more responsible it was for the tournament's shortcomings. If India is conveniently distanced from the tournament's failings because it got knocked out so quickly, the Australians who won the World Cup, must, on this argument, be closely associated with its failure. How does that work? (Perhaps the Indians knew, in their sly Oriental way, that the tournament was going to be a disaster and artfully lost early to avoid prolonged association.)

Miller thinks that Pawar's election would be a bad idea because Pawar is a politician with no feeling for the game. By implication, David Morgan, the boss of the ECB, emerges in this piece as the better candidate to succeed Sonn as the ICC's president. Morgan, in this reading, represents 'cricket's old world". There's no description of the content of the old world that Morgan represents, so some questions are in order. Would that old world be be Brian Johnston's world or John Arlott's? Would Morgan's world be the one in which England and Australia ran the ICC and the rest of us?

The genteel, unequal world of the MCC and the Imperial Cricket Conference isn't one that Indians feel nostalgic about. It contributed nothing to the development of the modern game. We have Packer to thank for the modern ODI and Dalmiya to thank for the money that underwrites contemporary cricket. For a discussion of the qualities most needed to manage the contemporary game, the 'old world' is not a good place to begin.

The president of the ICC is a figurehead: it is the ICC's member nations and, most importantly, its Chief Executive who make and shape policy. The responsibility for policy rests equally with the members of the ICC's board. If David Morgan or the ECB's representative on the ICC were on record as having opposed the Super Tests or the idea of the match referee (that absurd sinecure for retired cricketing cronies) or having spoken out against the idiocy of the Super-Sub, the invocation of Morgan's 'old world' attachment to cricket's traditions might have made sense. But no such information is offered. We are given 'frustrated Indians', 'old world' Englishmen and the nightmare of an Indian take-over.

Whether Pawar becomes the president of the ICC or not, the ICC will have to reckon with the BCCI's economic clout in world cricket. It will have to find a way turning Lalit Modi's talent for selling cricket for large sums of money, away from meaningless 'offshore' ODIs and into more constructive channels. If David Morgan is the man to do this, we should know what he brings to the table.

On the face of it, Morgan doesn't seem equipped to handle world cricket, the BCCI or even Pawar. His handling of the English tour to Zimbabwe in 2004 was indecisive and inept: he seemed a creature of cricket's bureaucracy rather than a strong future President. Martin Williamson, Cricinfo's Executive Editor, had this to say of Morgan in 2004:

"When leadership was needed, he was submissive. His position as a credible figurehead for English cricket is in tatters. An increasingly isolated figure, and one with little credibility remaining, his days are surely numbered."

I don't think Sharad Pawar is a good candidate for the presidency of the ICC. But I'd rather have him than someone whose candidacy is premised on thwarting an Indian 'takeover'. Pawar understands power and he controls, via the Indian market for cricket, a great deal of money. If there's someone who is obviously better, who cares for cricket, is a great administrator and has the political skills to defeat Pawar in an election, we should all have his resumé. Being English and 'old world' doesn't cut it. Richard Bevan, the chief executive of the English players' body, the Professional Cricketers' Association lamented the fact that the election of the president had become a political contest: "Our frustration is that we have ten Test-playing countries voting politically on some issues such as who will succeed Sonn." I have news for Richard: elections are political. You canvass voters and the one who gets the most votes, wins.

There's another way of picking the president, of course, that would take horrid politics out of the process. We could use the convention by which the president of the World Bank is appointed. The country that supplies the institution with the most money gets to pick its president, regardless of experience or merit or the reservations of other member countries. In cricket's case, that country would be India. Now I, like most Indians, think that's a really bad idea. In the same way as I think that an ICC president whose agenda was to marginalize the BCCI would be a fool. Because what Andrew Miller doesn't seem to understand is this: the Indians aren't coming…

They're here.