The process of drawing up rules and regulations for a particular system has always been a tedious and tiresome task. Inevitably, a rule maker has to make sure that he is acting just and fair because rule making is actually a godly act.
Talking about the game of cricket, we never bother to worry about making new rules because we know that there is an organisation fully responsible and capable of managing the game of cricket. It is none other than the International Cricket Council. Indeed,
ICC is the international governing body of the game of cricket.
The International Cricket Council was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in the year 1909. It was renamed as International Cricket Conference in 1965, and the year 1969 it got its current name. Currently, the headquarters of ICC are located in Dubai,
UAE and the organisation has 104 member countries.
International cricket is the only major source of income for the ICC. According to one estimate, sponsorship and television rights of the Cricket World Cup brought in about 1.6 billion dollars to the ICC and this happens to be ICC’s major source of income.
And keeping this fact in mind, ICC has sought to create new events in order to augment the revenue generated from the cricket world cup. The new events include The ICC Champions Trophy and ICC Super Series.
The international umpires and the match referees that ICC employs are all sponsored by Emirates Airline. The three umpire panels that ICC operates include: Elite Panel, International Panel and Associates and Affiliates Panel. The Elite Panel consists of
eleven umpires two of which officiate at every Test match. The members of the Elite panel are full employees of the ICC and they may even umpire in the First Class Cricket in their country.
The international panel consists of officials who are elected from ten Test playing cricket boards of the world. The international panel members may take overseas umpiring assignments in order to augment their experience in the field of umpiring. It is very
interesting to note that all of the official third umpires that ICC hires are first class umpires in their own country. This shows that ICC lays special emphasis over decision making and making the game of cricket as transparent as possible.
A big challenge that ICC has to face from time to time is the corruption in the game of cricket. Being the sport’s governing body, ICC has to make sure that the corruption is kept to a minimum. From time to time ICC has to deal with drugs and bribery scandals
often involving some of the top cricketers. ICC set up an Anti-Corruption and Security Unit in the year 2000.
The retired commissioner of London Metropolitan Police, Lord Cordon was made the head of this security unit. The ACSU continues to monitor the corruption taking place in the international cricket. It is responsible for creating certain laws like prohibiting
the use of mobile phones in the dressing in order to minimise the disease of corruption.
Inevitably ICC has an iron-clad rule of being relentless with those involved in corruption. The organisation is quite vigilant and intolerant towards corruption and that’s the reason we see that most of the international goes on smoothly.
ICC has always maintained an excellent public policy. It makes sure that it has access to a common man so that cricket education may be available to all. In order to achieve this goal, ICC telecasts a weekly 30 minute program on television called ICC Cricket
World. The program is produced by a sports brand and provides all the latest cricket news including all the recent Test and one day matches.
So far so good! ICC has always strived for excellence and it has done it well so far. It seems that the organisation has been able to uphold the traditions of the glorious game of cricket. One of the prime games of the organisation is to keep the many cricketing
powers united on a single plat form. So far it has been able to achieve this goal and let’s hope that ICC succeeds in keeping up the traditions of the glorious game of cricket.
Tags: