While England and Australia Relent, the BCCI Digs Its Heels in

Tim Wigmore’s says it’s time the cricket community stood up to India’s bullying.

- Tim Wigmore

The MCC World Cricket Committee met in Mumbai this week. For those interested in cricket expanding, there were two significant developments. The MCC supported the notion of a conference structure in Tests: the ICC’s new plans to introduce context to Test cricket, involving two parallel leagues of six nations played over a two-year cycle, with the top team in each playing off in a final. And, rightly, the MCC reaffirmed its commitment to cricket featuring in the 2024 Olympic Games, declaring that “the single most effective way cricket can grow around the world is being introduced to the Olympics”.

Yet the most revealing part of the press conference was when John Stephenson, the MCC’s head of cricket, suggested that Anurag Thakur, the BCCI President who attended the meeting, has an “open mind” about the Olympics. The Indian journalists just laughed. The BCCI’s staunch opposition to cricket joining the Games – essentially because it does not want to give up any power to the Indian Olympic Committee, is loathe to give up the image rights of its players for two weeks – shows how the organisation is narrow-minded enough to put its parochial concerns above the best interests of the sport.

We have seen the BCCI’s selfishness again and again. Most egregiously, the BCCI colluded with Cricket Australia and the ECB in 2014 to railroad through appalling changes to the ICC’s governance and distribution of cash, concentrating money and power in a way that was so flagrantly unjust that even Transparency International was moved to condemn the triumvirate’s actions. The so-called small seven – the seven poorer Full Member boards – knew that the changes were iniquitous, yet voted them through anyway.