At the meeting of the ICC's management board in Calcutta today and tomorrow, a decision to scrap the plan or move it to a different country appears inevitable. The grandiose idea, intended to raise badly needed funds for the development of the game in Europe, Asia and North America, has been delayed by a wasteful political wrangle in the United States and the threat of legal action against the world's governing body.
An extraordinary saga began with a meeting in October 1995 in Orlando between David Richards, the ICC's chief executive, and Mike Millay, the director of Sports Development at Disney World. The Barbados consul-general in New York was present at the meeting and so was Richard Craig, a vice-president of the USA Cricket Association. Ambitious plans were discussed, including not just international tournaments but such matches as the US v Canada, the US v Barbados, pre-season training camps for English counties and use of the proposed new centre as one of the venues for a future World Cup in the Caribbean region.
Richards was unaware at the time how unrepresentative the USACA were of the cricket clubs scattered throughout North America. The game there faded during the Civil War though it has never died. The US v Canada match, although lapsed between 1912 and 1962, was first played in New York in 1844, pre-dating England v Australia. There has been a renaissance in the last 10 years, with festivals, tours and new leagues, but although the USACA claimed to represent 160 clubs, examination of their accounts shows the truer figure to be around 50.
In February last year, a group of concerned Americans met at Haverford College in Philadelphia, a place with historic cricketing links, and set up the US Cricket Federation (USCF) to promote the game throughout the States, develop a proper youth development programme and ensure that national teams were properly selected and genuinely representative. In a submission to the ICC in July 1996, the USCF claimed more than 170 paid-up clubs as members and asked to be the de facto representative body in the US.
Their case, thoroughly documenting the failure of the USACA, not least in financial matters, appears unanswerable now, but the ICC's reaction was to try to get the two bodies together, using Julian Hunte, the vice-president of the West Indies Cricket Board, as the main arbitrator. Apparent breakthroughs since have proved a delusion. The USCF accuse representatives of the rival body of ignoring properly constituted agreements, the last of which was agreed in writing at a meeting in New Jersey in June, brokered by Hunte. In the meantime, the performance of the US team in the ICC Trophy in Malaysia was an expensive failure.
They finished 12th out of 22 and 12 players recommended for possible selection by the USCF were rejected ``for dubious reasons'' by the USACA, who had obtained a loan from World Tel, run by the Indian businessman Mark Mascarenhas, the major figure in the hugely profitable televising of the last World Cup.
IN a second submission to the ICC in May this year, the USCF accuse the USACA of ``deliberately deceiving the ICC and the West Indies Cricket Board as to their intentions to make any meaningful agreement with the USCF''. They added that their rivals had gambled heavily on a good showing in Malaysia, and spent profligately to impress and win supporters while doing nothing for grass-roots cricket or promotion of the game.
A single US cricket authority became an urgent requirement this year as the Disney plan began to take shape, with both the ICC and the USCF blissfully unaware of the legal threat about to hit them as a result of a commercial agreement relating to cricket at Orlando between the USACA, Mascarenhas and the American Billy Packer, principal of a company called Time Out.
The ICC pressed on with the Disney idea through discussions with Ali Bacher, chairman of the development committee, and Reggie Williams, vice-president of Walt Disney World Sports. By July, Bacher was confident that a fabulous new cricket stadium would be up and running in time for a major tournament involving Test nations next September. ICC would run the show and the development fund would take the proceeds but the quid pro quo for Disney would be enormous publicity and a big audience both in Orlando and on television.
For once, Bacher's optimism was not justified. Only a month after the meeting at Lord's last June, Richards received a letter from the president of the USACA, Akhtar 'Masood' Syed, politely demanding an explanation for an article in The Daily Telegraph reporting the ICC-Disney discussions ``which has now appeared through Reuters all over the world''. On July 9, a much sharper letter followed, expressing ``deep concern with respect to the failure to properly observe USACA's legitimate role in the Disney negotiations'' and ``further concern, of a very serious nature, regarding the position these discussions create for us with regard to contractual obligations we have to our designated representative, Time Out Inc''.
The legal threat followed. ``If immediate steps are not taken to right the matter and properly include the USACA and its representatives in all negotiations with Disney, Time Out's feeling will be that it is left with little choice but to commence legal action against those involved for breach of and/or interference with its contractual rights.''
ON the same day, July 9, a letter was received by Williams at Disney from Time Out's lawyers, Kornstein, Veisz and Wexler of New York, mentioning The Daily Telegraph report of June 18 (my report of the ICC's handshake deal with Disney) and claiming that the seed of 'cricket's field of dreams' had been sown by Packer and Mascarenhas at a meeting with Williams in August 1995, before the ICC became involved. The threat of legal action against the ICC was extended to Disney ``if the reported agreement is concluded on the current basis, i.e. without the due participation of the USACA and Time Out, its ``exclusive media and marketing representative''.
Richards responded quickly. Writing to Syed on July 11, he pointed out that at the ICC meeting the previous month, he had explained the plan for a special series of matches at Disney World in 1998 during a meeting with Syed and two other USACA officials in the Long Room. He reassured Syed in the letter that ``it is not the intention of ICC to proceed with cricket development in the USA without an appropriate involvement of the governing body . . . once the process of establishing a proper constitution has been finalised and elections held''.
Richards stressed that the ICC were not party to the contract between the USACA and Time Out, that the threat of legal action was extremely unhelpful and that it should be withdrawn if the Disney cricket centre was to get off the ground. He added that the rights to the international matches planned there would be owned and controlled by ICC Development (International) Ltd, the company set up to raise funds for the development programme in which both Richards and Bacher have set such store.
Richards flew to New York that week with a lawyer to meet Hunte and two other USACA officials, Gladstone Dainty and Rick Craig. He had a separate meeting with Packer of Time Out, but failed to persuade Packer to withdraw his legal threat. Mascarenhas was in India at the time. On July 18, Richards wrote to Williams, trying to keep the negotiations going but in a memorandum three days later to the USA Interim Management Committee, the body now supposed to be properly representative of US cricket, he admitted: ``The Disney negotiations are in suspense. Unless they can be reactivated soon, the 1998 window will close.'' He added: ``We all have an obligation to the game of cricket not to miss this opportunity.''
There, apparently, the matter rests. The ICC's director of administration, Clive Hitchcock, confirmed yesterday that as far as he was aware, the legal action had not been lifted and no further progress had been made. He added: ``Our prime concern is to establish once and for all a single body representative of cricket in the USA so we can move the game forward there.''
The Calcutta meeting is likely to advance the idea of a rolling world championship for Test cricket, with a league table updated after each series, but nothing will be finally decided on this until summer's annual conference at Lord's. Greater hope for the development of the game in new areas had been invested in the exciting plan for the purpose-built stadium at Disney World but for the forseeable future, it seems destined to remain only a Technicolor dream.