Bat-and-ball Photo: Getty Images.

Between the Ashes turnaround and terrific triumph in South Africa, Australian cricket enjoyed its “comeback” summer. But the action emanating from the field has somewhat obscured a rather significant story brewing behind the scenes – the overhaul of the International Cricket Council’s structure, which will lead to a consolidation of power with India, England and Australia.

The ICC revamp will see larger shares of revenue from its events, estimated to be almost $3 billion in the next round of media rights, go to what is now being called “the Big Three”. This troika will also have enhanced decision-making powers with its permanent seats on a new, five-strong executive committee, which will be the main advisory body to the ICC board.

For what looked like a blatant power-grab, the process was conducted with a disheartening slyness. If not for the leaking last January of an ICC position paper outlining the changes, it might not have received a proper public airing at all. The other Test-playing nations made their objections known quickly, understanding how much they had to lose – the proposal also called for a new tier system for Test cricket, with the proviso that India, England and Australia could never be relegated out of the top division.

There was no small irony that this debate was playing out just as the tour of South Africa was getting under way. The Proteas, the undisputed no.1 Test nation of recent time, could easily be marginalised under such a system. At the same time, the unsatisfying brevity of the three-match series, hard up against the T20 Worlds, underlined a larger point – that the international cricket schedule is not organised in an optimal manner.

After further negotiation, the tier system was dispensed with, the objectors were eventually persuaded (there was a very curious change of heart from the South Africans) and the financial and governance changes passed. That the ICC is now a lot less democratic hasn’t been lost on anybody; defenders of the new deal have argued that the old structure hadn’t exactly prevented members from periods of financial strife.

Bottom line, the “new” ICC is an attempt to address cricket’s most fundamental issue: the importance, but also the threat, of India’s economic power within the sport. The redistribution to the Big Three has an unassailable commercial logic – these are the places, after all, that generate income for the game. In India’s case, it accounts for 80 percent of cricket revenue, yet gets 20 percent back from the ICC.

Indian cricket’s governing body, the BCCI, has not been shy about flouting rules that don’t suit them – witness its disregard for the ICC’s Future Tours Program when it comes to Test series it deems not enough of a money-spinner. The spectre of India walking out on the ICC’s competitions, with all the money that would follow them, looms over cricket officialdom. As writer Gideon Haigh noted, this latest arrangement of world cricket “gets India inside the tent pissing out, rather than inside pissing on everybody else”.

As Haigh and a few other observers noted, though, the changes to the ICC merely kept the uneasy peace among the full members – it did little to address the problems of cricket governance to be found around the world. The cost of keeping it all together could be the death of a fuller, more global cricket. The relative deterioration of the smaller Test nations seems inevitable; the idea that another competitive one might emerge from the minnow pool, like Sri Lanka did only 32 years ago, seems utterly fanciful. Like in one of Europe’s football leagues, on-field success will totally align with economic might. International cricket could soon be in need of a lot more comeback summers ...