The Club: Class, Power and the Governance of World Cricket

The fascinating story of cricket’s world governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), and how it grew into a multi-billion-dollar business.

From cricket journalist, historian and academic Rod Lyall.

This meticulously researched and authoritative history reveals how:

• Privileged aristocrats and mining magnates turned cricket into a ’civilising’ force of empire, promoting the politics and prejudices of their class
• Cricket’s world governing body evolved - from its early days in St John’s Wood, London as the Imperial Cricket Conference into the International Cricket Council, a multi-billion-dollar sporting business, based in Dubai and increasingly dominated by a financially and politically ambitious Indian elite
• The ICC failed to deal effectively with such challenges as the Bodyline controversy, apartheid in South Africa and Kerry Packer’s commercialisation of the game
• Media rights deals and global events sponsorship have created new problems: match-fixing, administrative corruption and the threat from franchise leagues

This is the first full account of the ICC’s origins and its roots in imperialist ideology, charting its rise from a talking-shop into a multi-billion-dollar global business driven by massive worldwide TV audiences.

A cultural historian and retired academic, Australian-born Rod Lyall has been writing about cricket, especially for the ICC’s Associate members, since 2005, producing hundreds of online articles, ranging from match reports to analysis of the politics of the game at national and international level. Between 2012 and 2016 he served on the board of the KNCB, the governing body of Dutch cricket, for the first two and a half years as its vice-chairman.