'However much we pound our fists and rightly rail against the brazen conspiracy between Australia, England and India to effectively hijack international cricket, the West Indies Cricket Board is obliged to accept a galling reality. As with most things, it has to do with money. The triumvirate's aim is to become the ICC's supreme rulers. As such, they will make the crucial decisions. The Future Tours Programme (FTP) will be scrapped in favour of bilateral arrangements for tours, and two-division Test cricket introduced, with promotion and demotion - from which last those three teams will be exempt. They will redistribute, on a more proportionate basis, the ICC's annual revenue, to which India currently contributes 80%. The rich getting richer, the poor poorer....There is undeniably substance to such concerns, but it would be a courageous president to tell the superpowers, especially India, that the WICB rejects their intended takeover; such preference for principle over practicality carries potentially damaging repercussions. The financial value of relations with India was never more obvious to West Indies than during India's involvement in the triangular ODI tournament in the Caribbean last year. The teams contested the Celkon Mobile Cup, presented by a Hyderabad-based manufacturer of mobile phones. It, and a host of other Indian products and services, household names in the subcontinent but unheard of on this side of the planet, filled the ground perimeter advertising boards. They were there because live coverage of the matches was transmitted back to India by Ten Sports, the Dubai-based Indian production company that won the rights to international cricket in the Caribbean in 2012....For West Indies, perhaps the most ominous point in the proposals is that "no member should be forced to host uneconomic tours". "Uneconomic" is a term that has come to be associated with a team consistently languishing in the bottom half of the ICC's Test and ODI standings for nearly 20 years....Former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe's take on two-tiered Test cricket in regard to West Indies and New Zealand is that it is "disrespectful and ignores the great history that has built up over a century or more". Such sentimentality is foreign to the businessmen, bankers and assorted types who now manage the game strictly on the dictates of the financial bottom line. The upshot is that, come Tuesday and Wednesday in Dubai, the WICB, even against its principles, will support the radical makeover put forward by Australia, England and India. It couldn't have happened 30 years ago.'
http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/co ... 13019.html
Nobody has a stance quite like the mighty Shivnarine....
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