The International Cricket Council had deliberated on the issue at its board meeting in Harare in April and conveyed its decision to members in attendance at the Annual Conference in Singapore last month.
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The International Cricket Council (ICC) has decided to approach players directly through their respective boards rather than consult the World Cricketers Association (WCA) in its bid to create a mobile gaming platform. The ICC had deliberated on the issue at a board meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe in April and had confirmed the same at its Annual Conference in Singapore recently.
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“A clear direction from the April (ICC Board meeting in Harare) meeting was that all players’ rights for this project would be secured through the members. The ICC was not to contract player rights through a third party such as the World Cricketers Association,” Cricbuzz quoted an ICC note to its members who had attended the Annual Conference on Saturday.
ICC faces a tricky scenario over retired greats
Securing players’ rights is crucial for ICC’s gaming project. However, the Dubai-based governing body faces a tricky situation when it comes to securing the rights for retired legends such as Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni – who are no longer contracted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) – and other former cricketers from other nations.
A game without Tendulkar and Dhoni, after all, will feel incomplete even if the two had retired from international cricket long back – 12 years in the former’s case.
The ICC has asked its board to form a working group to address these issues and try and achieve a solution before its next meeting, which is scheduled to take place in October.
“The aim is to have a preferred partner identified for approval at the October board meetings. (The ICC) management will be in touch with members shortly to formalise the licence of rights required for the mobile game. These agreements will need to be completed by October,” the note added.
The ICC has high hopes from the upcoming mobile game, for which it had initiated an expression of interest process at the Harare meeting in April in which it had issued an Invitation to Tender to shortlisted organisations.
“It will be bigger than the movies,” newly-appointed ICC CEO Sanjog Gupta had said at the ICC meeting, referring to mobile gaming in cricket.
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