Will Test cricket survive the Age of India?

For the past three months the cricket press has concentrated on the destruction of the England cricket team at the hands of Australia. It now emerges that correspondents were missing a bigger story.

While Mitchell Johnson was carving up the England batting order, the England, Australia and India cricket authorities were doing the same to international cricket. In a carefully planned ‘bear-hug style’ take-over bid, tabled in Dubai this week, India, England and Australia have seized effective control of world cricket. South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, the West Indies and Sri Lanka, not to mention minnows like Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, have been reduced to second-class citizenship.

If implemented, this would be a victory for the raw economic power of India, aided and abetted by England and Australia. According to an agreement thrashed out late on Tuesday night at the headquarters of the International Cricket Council in Dubai, India has been granted a ‘central leadership responsibility’. It will chair the ICC for two years from June 2014 during ‘a transitional period that includes a new governance structure and media rights cycle’. Since the ‘media rights cycle’ is shorthand for the bulk of revenues of world cricket from 2015–2023, cricket has entered, de facto and now de jure, the Age of India.

To understand the nature of this Indian coup, it is essential to have some grasp of the recent governance of world cricket. In 1965 the then Imperial Cricket Conference (originally founded in 1909 by England, Australia and South Africa) changed its name to the International Cricket Conference. It has 106 members: ten full members who play its official Test matches, 37 associate members and 59 affiliate members.

But while it had lost the term ‘Imperial’ in its name, the two dominant forces in world cricket, England and Australia, still had the power of veto.