Like with most things about cricket, playing a fast short-pitched ball for example, everything seems easier from a distance. A lot of us who write about the game have two things in our favour; we often sit in comfortable rooms and let the mind wander and more important, we are rarely accountable for our writing. So it is with most comments about the ICC, everybody’s favourite whipping boy. It is a broad spectrum victim, anything is game for an attack. But the ICC isn’t really an independent entity, it is made up of sharply polarised nations who respect it depending on how convenient it is to do so and is only as powerful as the nations that constitute it, allow it to be.

The fact that the ICC is made up of a very small number of nations makes the job more complex. I can see people within the ICC bristling at this suggestion but the truth is that for all the associate and other members, it is really made up of three or four countries with five or six others deriving importance from who they vote for. Even those are really satellite nations merely making up the numbers, like minority parties in a coalition. If the ICC was made up of a hundred countries, life might have been easier since no one country would have counted for much. And the game would have moved on without one or two members. And so, being head of the ICC is now a bit like heading a warring joint family.

... contd.