ECB chief Giles Clarke to be grilled by Parliament panel over ‘Big 3’ takeover
Tough questions will be asked of Clarke (L) says MP Damian Collins.
“The days of Giles Clarke as ECB chief are numbered. I am sure of it.”
There is an easy conviction in the smooth voice of 42-year old Damian Collins, a member of parliament in United Kingdom from the Conservative party. The issue of corruption in cricket, in particular questions over the way it’s run by the administrators, has moved from Supreme Court of India to the House of Commons in Westminster in central London. And this time it’s the England cricket chief Clarke who is in the dock.
In the coming weeks, Clarke will sit at the witness table in a committee room inside the democratically elected house of UK government, facing a grilling from members of the select committee seated around a horseshoe table. The select committee hearings are sombre affairs, can run for 40 to 90 minutes, and could, at times, stretch to couple of hours as Sebastian Coe, the head of athletics’ world governing body, found out recently.
The hearing in House of Commons is a logical step in cleaning up cricket, says Collins, who is demanding why Clarke, and ECB, shelved the 2012 Lord Woolf-led committee report which had recommended complete overhaul of ICC’s administrative structure, its voting rights and re-alignment of its powerful executive board. Incidentally, the Woolf document was one of the papers studied carefully by Justice Lodha committee before they tabled their own report on Indian cricket.
British lawmaker, spectators protest against 'Big Three' takeover outside The Oval- Lalit Modi planned £1.2 bn 'Project Victoria' in England: ECB
- PCB chief withdraws remarks against English players
- Modi meeting only a fact-finding mission,claim counties
- ECB pulls out of all deals with Stanford
- ECB chief prostituted cricket with Stanford
“Tough questions will be asked of Clarke,” Collins told The Indian Express. “There has been some movement in the ICC in recent times after the Indian Supreme Court stepped in, but not much has taken place beyond a few remarks. More importantly, the select committee will ask Clarke why he didn’t do anything about the Woolf report, and why was he such an integral part to the back-room power grab and takeover of world cricket by just three Test playing nations.”
A bit of backstory to catch up. In the Indian context, after the Supreme Court-appointed Lodha committee tabled a reforms-seeking report, there has been some rumble in the cricket board and the various associations and affiliates it comprises of. In an ICC meeting in Dubai in February, where Clarke reportedly sat silent, Shashank Manohar, who heads both BCCI and ICC, recommended rolling back the ICC’s revenue-sharing model that favoured the Big Three to a more equitable distribution. In 2014, a restructure carried out by N Srinivasan, then ECB chairman Clarke and former CA chairman Wally Edwards ensured India, England and Australia took the lions share of the revenue.
The UK’s case, in particular the select committee meeting, might seem to come on the back of that recent change of heart mulled by Manohar, but it has its own time-line — where Collins, the Conservative MP from Folkestone and Hythe, has played a key part. A few months back, Collins, who started his career handling clients in the advertising agency M&C Saatchi before shifting to politics, was approached by Sam Collins (no relation to Damian) and Jarred Kimber, the journalists behind a #ChangeCricket petition and the cricket documentary ‘Death of Gentleman’. A review in Financial Times called it a documentary about the death of international cricket. “The film frisks the facts, fingers the Fifa-ish villians and cues us all to shout, and mean it: ‘It’s not cricket’”.
By that time Damian Collins was already in battles with administrators of athletics, tennis and football, and as an associate member of Lord’s, he had a personal liking for cricket. Last August, after watching a special screening of the documentary, Collins, along with a few dozen petitioners, held a silent protest at the Hobbs gate of The Oval before the start of the fifth Ashes Test.
Things have rapidly progressed from then on and Collins says he wants England to lead the clean-up of sport. “I want England to clean up sport and not part of the mess and Clarke in my opinion has a lot to answer. As I said, his days as ECB chief are numbered.”
After the hearing, the select committee will produce a report tabling its findings and recommendations to the government. According to the protocol, the UK government must respond to each of the report’s recommendations within two months of publication. The date of the Clarke hearing is yet to be fixed but is expected to be in the coming weeks, and Collins is confident of an appropriate response from the government. In June, UK Prime minister David Cameron will host a summit on anti-corruption in sport, and Clarke says everyone is serious about cleaning up sport.
In the hearing, that will be conducted in a room in the corridor past the upper waiting hall in the House of Commons, Clarke is likely to face a lot of heated questions. During the meeting, he can have water if he desires; Collins laughs at the comment that Clarke might well need more than a few sips. An exuberant and unrestrained laugh of a man who seems pretty confident of nailing Clarke and changing the way cricket is run in England.
