The Indian Cricket League’s (ICL) bid to get official recognition with the consent of the Board of Control For Cricket in India (BCCI) with a talk between ICL’s Business Head Himanshu Mody & Chairman Kapil Dev with The BCCI President – Shashank Manohar & BCCI Secretary – N.Srinivasan had Failed.
ICL players are barred from official matches by national boards and it had been hoped an agreement could be reached to lift this ban.
But a resolution could not be reached.
“There was a meeting at Delhi between officials of BCCI and ICL to see if there was any common ground,” board secretary N. Srinivasan said in a statement. “The talks failed and there are no plans for any further meeting.”
According to Cricinfo – ICL sources said the meeting between Kapil, Himanshu Mody, its business head, Shashank Manohar, the BCCI president, and Srinivasan took place at the coffee shop of the Taj Hotel in New Delhi and lasted barely 15-20 minutes. “It was ridiculous, the way the BCCI went about this meeting.”
ICL officials, meanwhile, described the meeting as a “farce”, and said the BCCI came up with “an offer during the meeting that was simply not acceptable”. “It didn’t look like the BCCI was ever serious to resolve the issue,” an ICL official told Cricinfo. “We will now have to look at other options, including the legal route, as the way forward.”
Kapil Dev, the ICL chairman, expressed his unhappiness at the Indian board’s attitude. “I understand the BCCI wants the ICL to be a closed chapter,” he told AFP. “That, let me reiterate, is not possible.”
Manohar met officials of the ICL for the first time since the league was set up in April 2007 after its request for recognition came up for discussion at the ICC board meeting in Dubai earlier this week. It was decided at that meeting that Manohar would provide a written report to the ICC board “in due course” after discussions with the ICL. Dave Richardson, the ICC’s manager for cricket operations, told reporters on Thursday that the BCCI wanted to meet ICL officials and hadn’t been asked to do so by the ICC.
The ICL believes that it has a strong case for recognition under Rule 32 of the ICC operating manual that deals with authorised unofficial cricket such as the Hong Kong Sixes event and the Stanford 20/20 in the West Indies. However, two senior BCCI officials – Manohar and Lalit Modi, the IPL chairman – are on a five-man ICC sub-committee that has worked on modifying the rules for official and unofficial cricket.
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