USA national body’s ICC membership suspended

(REUTERS) – The USA Cricket Association’s (USACA) membership of the International Cricket Council (ICC) has been suspended with immediate effect, the sport’s governing body said yesterday.The decision to suspend USACA was made after findings set out in an ICC review group report expressed “significant concerns about the governance, finance, reputation and cricketing activities of USACA.
“The ICC Board has made this difficult decision in the best interest of the game and all cricketers in the USA,” ICC chairman Narayanaswami Srinivasan said in a statement.
“The country has tremendous potential but because of governance, financial and cricketing challenges, the opportunity to grow the game is not being properly nurtured.”
The suspension means USACA will not get ICC funding but the sport’s governing body said the U.S. will be able to play in next month’s ICC World Twenty20 qualifiers in Ireland and Scotland.
The ICC Board had put USACA on notice in January hoping it would urgently address and improve areas identified as weaknesses but the ICC believes the response has been inadequate.
To have its suspension lifted and membership reinstated, the ICC said USACA must demonstrate that conditions relating to governance, finance and its cricket activities have been addressed and remedied in full.

It may have been jarring to hear the words as they were spoken in a Barbados hotel by ICC chief executive David Richardson, to read the words in print in the ICC's official press release. But like a defendant on trial who holds out hope - no matter how farfetched, misguided or delusional - of escaping with an acquittal before hearing a verdict of "guilty", the sobering truth of USACA's accumulation of administrative failures became real with the uttering of "suspension".

In the two months leading up to Friday's decision, Richardson and several of his lieutenants - including ICC head of global development Tim Anderson and ICC Americas regional development manager Ben Kavanagh - spent considerable resources reaching out to more than 100 stakeholders currently engaged or recently involved in US cricket affairs.