Reports: BCCI at fragile spot of being isolated in ICC meeting

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has been at a point of disagreement with the International Cricket Council (ICC) for quite some time now. The Indian board wants the existing revenue model of the ICC to be at place the way it is at the moment. However, the ICC wishes to revamp the setup in order to make it a more equally distributed model.

At the moment, the majority of the revenues of the ICC is shared by the ‘big three’ board of England, Australia, and India. India has the major share owing to the fact that the highest revenue generating board is the BCCI. In the recent times, the ICC has been planning to even out this distribution so that the other countries benefit as well. Needless to say, this has not gone down well with the Indian board.

Amidst this scenario, the ICC meeting went underway on the day. As per the sources in the India Today, the BCCI has found no support in their bid to continue with the existing model. The Indian board outrightly rejected the idea of equal distribution but had no other cricket board standing by their side. The current chairman of the ICC, Shashank Manohar, had earlier noted that the issue itself was non-debatable.

As per the present revenue distribution model, the Indian cricket board receives USD 579 million from the ICC. However, if the proposal made by Shashank Manohar is accepted, the share of the Indian board will go down to USD 290 million. Earlier, there were reports that if the demands of the BCCI are not met at the ICC meeting, India will pull out of the Champions Trophy 2017. However, the board chief Vinod Rai ruled out this option in a conversation with India Today.

He quoted, “We have to build consensus and create a enabling environment for us to show our cricketing capability which is at its peak now. We can’t afford to be rigid and taciturn and have other country boards begin to hate us.”

The board has already missed the deadline to submit their squad for the mega ICC event. However, there is a provision to submit late entries in some cases such as this.