It is the time to push cricket as an Olympic sport

Mumbai: N Srinivasan’s appointment last week as the first chairman of the restructured International Cricket Conference, which should otherwise have been welcomed with great cheer, has created a fair amount of controversy in the cricket world.

While the mandate in favour of Srinivasan has been unanimous, there are reportedly still some rumblings among Boards other than England and Australia, who form the ‘Big 3 Club’ along with the BCCI. This trio, as is well-known, benefits the most in terms of power and revenue in the new structure.

While it is true that the Supreme Court asked him step aside from functioning as BCCI chief pending the investigations into the IPL-6 scandal, it is also true that the apex court did not prevent him from becoming ICC chairman so he is certainly not in violation of the law.

The concern, however, is what happens if the Justice Mukul Mudgal panel, appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the scam, finds Gurunath Meiyappan and Chennai Super Kings (IPL team owned by India Cements of which Srinivasan is chairman) in breach of the law? His moral position will become infinitely weaker.

How Srinivasan’s two-year tenure as ICC chairman pans out from here remains to be seen, but it will be followed with great interest surely. More so, when one considers that weeding out corruption from the sport is perhaps the biggest challenge confronting the administration. In my opinion there are two other major challenges that Srinivasan has to address: the first is resuscitating Test cricket, and the second providing a new thrust to make cricket a truly global sport.

While limited overs cricket, especially T20, has massive appeal and is also lucrative, administrators need to ensure that this does not blight Test cricket. I believe the five-day format needs imaginative and robust rebranding as a niche, product with great aesthetic and legacy value. In this context, Srinivasan’s announcement that India will resume Test cricket ties with Pakistan is to be lauded.

While this may well have been done to thank the Pakistan Cricket Board for its support in his nomination to the ICC, there are long term gains for the sport given the appeal of Indo-Pak matches – subject of course to political relations between the two countries. Making cricket global on the other hand shifts focus essentially to T20. This is the only format through which the sport can be introduced in countries like China, Brazil, Japan et al that the ICC is attempting.

Moot question then is why not then push for T20 to become part of the Olympics too?Cricket has flirted with the Olympic movement in 1998 but has since stayed away, largely because of objections from the BCCI though countries like Australia and New Zealand were all in favour. In my opinjon, there is no threat to the primacy of the ICC if cricket becomes an Olympic sport, as we have seen in the case of football, hockey, tennis and basketball. With an Indian administrator at the helm this might be a good time to reconsider that position.