Cricket: Join 21st century, ICC chief tells India

International Cricket Council president Ehsan Mani has pulled no punches with India's new board of control, telling them it's high time they dragged their outdated administrative model into the 21st century.

Mani and ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed met Indian officials last week in an attempt to clear the air over a series of bold statements from the new board, including threatened boycotts of the Champions Trophy and the Future Tours Programme.

While those controversies have mostly died down since Mani's intervention, the ICC president was yesterday outspoken in his criticism of India's governance model, which is structured along similar lines to that of an amateur cricket club.

"They have no permanent administrative office, an honorary secretary and no chief executive, yet they run the biggest cricket country in the world. I fail to understand how they can do that," Mani told The Times.

"They badly need to set up a professional management and we've told them that. I said the same to [former BCCI president] Jagmohan Dalmiya, but now there is a board with a completely different mandate and I think that they are beginning to understand better how the ICC works."

Mani described the new personnel on the BCCI as "a group of well-meaning people", and confirmed that the threat to the Champions Trophy had largely been averted, despite some dramatic initial statements from vice-president Lalit Modi.

The more diplomatic sounds will come as something of a relief for New Zealand Cricket, which at one stage appeared in danger of being relegated to a second tier of competition.

India have committed to hosting Australia for each of the next three years, and plan an Ashes-like series against England every second year.

However, Mani effectively dispelled New Zealand's concerns of isolation, noting that a meeting between all chief executives next month was likely to expand the present five-year playing programme to six years, creating more space for the sort of bilateral contests that India was seeking.

"I'm hopeful that in a six-year cycle we can easily accommodate India's plan to play Pakistan, England and Australia every two years."

As for India's bold statements about boycotting the Champions Trophy, Mani said: "We had to tell board officials that Asian countries took 50 per cent of the $13 million profit from the [previous] tournament in England, that the development of smaller cricket nations depends on income from ICC events, and that they, in any case, signed up only last October to play in the Champions Trophy for the next eight years."