CEO David Richardson unveils 2019 cricket world cup trophy
Harpal Singh Bedi / Gurugram
The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Thursday made it clear that 2023 World Cup will be held in India as scheduled, rubbish all the speculations regarding shifting of the venue.
ICC CEO David Richardson told media persons that though the issue of tax exemption is still to be solved, but the 2023 World Cup will be hosted by India.
“Getting tax exemptions is very important for world cricket because every cent that is made by the ICC revenue wise is put back into the game. This helps countries like the West Indies who don’t generate as much revenue,” he said at an event to announce the ICC’s five-year partnership with Coco-Cola.
The union finance ministry did not give tax exemptions to the ICC when the country hosted the 2016 World T20 following which the ICC asked the BCCI to either pay $23 million (Rs 161 crore) as compensation or lose the 2023 World Cup rights.
“But having said that there are no plans of shifting the venue (from India) and I’m sure we will get it (exemption) in the end, we’ve still got a lot of time,” he said.
He admitted that the ICC is facing is the ever-increasing threat of corruption in the game saying “It’s not just about anti-corruption but also about player conduct. In recent times, we have had several unruly incidents around the world and we have taken really firm steps there to make sure that everybody understands we need to protect the spirit of cricket.”
The ICC has taken a more proactive approach to take strict actions against certain frivolous individuals who move around trying to fix cricket matches. We continuously are trying to disrupt them as much as possible and the players are doing the right thing by reporting any incident.”
Asked about the schedule for the 2020 T20 World Cup in which India and Pakistan won’t meet in the group stages for the first time since 2011.
“We have arranged the groups in a way that has credibility and is based on the ranking system. The teams are placed according to their ranks. In this case, Pakistan were number one in the rankings in their group and India number two,” replied Richardson.
“…we found no credible way of putting them in the same group. Hopefully from a world perspective they will meet each other in the semi finals or final.”
Richardson, who will step down after the World Cup in July, said convincing India to use DRS was a memorable achievement for him.
“Some things took a little longer than we’d like to implement. One of them was to convince India that DRS was a good thing. It probably took so long because, in the first trial that we conducted, all the decisions seemed to go against India. So we had to convince Anil Kumble that it could work,”