Cricket’s hard-pressed governing body, the ICC, was facing another problem last night when doctors in Cape Town offered little hope that Percy Sonn, the president, will survive a critical illness after an operation on his colon on Monday.

Sonn, an outstanding lawyer who worked to establish non-white cricket during the apartheid era in South Africa, recently had his term as president extended until 2009 because the ICC’s executive committee had been unable to decide on his successor. After a split vote among the ten full members, there was no decision between David Morgan, the ECB chairman, and Sharad Pawar, a busy Indian politician who gained favour with the Asian bloc despite a total of only 80 minutes’ attendance at ICC meetings since taking over last year as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

The problem was uppermost in the mind of Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive, who spoke to me in London yesterday between meetings and a mission to recruit another in-house lawyer for its headquarters in Dubai. He will also have travelled to India, Singapore and South Africa before returning to London for the annual meeting at Lord’s next month. A temporary president would chair the meeting in Sonn’s place if necessary and the question of his permanent successor would go to the top of the agenda.

Speed and his organisation could have done without this sad turn of events. After a World Cup widely criticised for its excessive length, its small crowds and its embarrassing final overs in darkness, the secretary of the BCCI said that he had not ruled out a vote of no confidence in the chief executive next month. It has come to nothing, so what, I asked Speed, are the main items on the agenda?
MS “Apart from the procedure for appointing presidents, the chief issues are: ICC events, including the first Twenty20 event; a review of the World Cup; Zimbabwe – both the Australian Government’s position and Zimbabwe’s Test status; and a progress report on commercial contracts.”
CMJ “On Zimbabwe, I know you have steadfastly held the line that a cricket organisation cannot make rules or take decisions for reasons of Politics – with a capital P – but surely it is obscene that you should just have handed over £5 million that will not go to cricketers in Zimbabwe but to boost President Robert Mugabe’s foreign exchange reserves?”
MS “The ICC has adopted a consistent policy in relation to Zimbabwe and all of its 97 member countries. The ten full members have entered into a binding agreement to play each other home and away over a six-year cycle, with a minimum of two Test matches and three ODIs in each series. If it is unsafe to undertake such a tour, or if a country’s government imposes a prohibition on the team, then a tour will not take place. Otherwise the teams are obviously expected to fulfil this commitment.

“We have said consistently that governments should make political decisions rather than cricket boards and if a government refuses its team permission to tour another country, we respect that.”
CMJ “Should this not be an issue about people rather than rules? Does there not come a time, as with apartheid in South Africa, when the whole of the rest of the cricket community decides that one generation of cricketers in Zimbabwe has to be sacrificed in the interests of future ones?”
MS “Sporting and economic sanctions are in the province of governments. If sanctions are to be applied, they must apply to all sports. Zimbabwe’s leading sports person at the moment is the swimmer Kirsty Coventry, who won three medals at the Athens Olympics [in 2004] and two more at the recent World Championships in Australia. She is one of many Zimbabwean athletes competing on the world stage.

“If sporting sanctions are to apply, they must apply to all sports. I do not believe that they would solve any of the problems that the people of Zimbabwe face. South Africa was quite different – close to the best nation in the world in both cricket and rugby. So sporting sanctions had a far greater impact on South Africa then than they would on Zimbabwe today.”
CMJ “Zimbabwe no longer has a team capable of competing in Test cricket. Can you not agree to downgrade them from full membership and to postpone their return to Test cricket until they have qualified through your now well-established system of grading the ‘minor’ cricket nations?”
MS “Zimbabwe’s participation in Test cricket will be discussed next month. As things stand, West Indies are scheduled to send an A side to Zimbabwe for three four-day matches in July.”
CMJ “The performances of Bangladesh and Ireland in the World Cup vindicated the money spent on their development, but in the case of a nation such as Ireland, where does it lead when their best players go to county cricket with ambitions to play instead for England?”
MS “When I was in Bangladesh in 2004 for the Under19 World Cup, the ICC was heavily criticised because Bangladesh had been given full-member status. I said then that the other countries were happy to give Bangladesh more time and that we expected significant improvement within the next two years. I reflected on this as I watched them defeat India and South Africa last month.

“And we are all delighted with Ireland’s performance. It would be great if one or two more emerging nations could move up to the top table in 2011 and another couple in 2015 so that we could have 14 or 15 countries playing excellent limited-overs cricket in less than a decade.

“We should never lose sight of the fact that in the 1970s there were only six Test-playing countries. Sri Lanka won only four matches from 25 World Cup appearances between 1975 and the start of the 1996 World Cup, but they won it then and they were clearly the second-best team in 2007.”
CMJ “How many teams will take part on the subcontinent in 2011?”
MS “We will thoroughly review the 2007 tournament, learn from any mistakes and do our best to ensure they are not repeated. I think 16 teams is a good number, but there is scope to knock at least a week off the duration by playing through Easter and scheduling more than one game a day. The popularity of day/night matches in the four host countries could enable us to have day games and day/night games running on the same dates. We could take a chance on not having reserve days for rain, but I am against that.”
CMJ “Do we really need an ICC tournament every year?”
MS “I think the ICC events provide an important focal point in the international calendar. We have moved the ICC Champions Trophy to ensure it is farther away from the World Cup and shortened the format again so that it involves only the top eight teams to make it more intense. The only addition we have made to the calendar is a short Twenty20 event that we hope will appeal to a wide audience while ensuring the growth of this format is managed for the benefit of the global game.

“The revenue from these events is also the major income stream for the majority of our members, including some of the leading full members. But I have said before that some of our members need to be very careful with the amount of additional international cricket they schedule and I think this is still the case.”

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