I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that last week’s ICC audio interview with newly-elected Vice-President Alan Isaac was deeply disappointing. He’s the man who’s just been elected to this office after a reported revolt by the dominant Asian-African bloc against the nomination of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. It means he’ll be with us until 2014, for two years as Vice-President and then two more in the President’s chair.

I bow to no-one in my personal dislike of Howard, although the supposed issues on which he was black-balled, his very public stance against the regime of Robert Mugabe and his criticism of Murathitharan’s action, are probably the only ones on which I think he has ever been right. As distinct from Right, which he is on almost everything. Isaac, by contrast, was presumably seen as a Safe Pair of Hands who hadn’t offended anyone, but that doesn’t mean that what he has to say isn’t important.

What, he was asked by a predictably sycophantic interviewer, were the main challenges and priorities for the ICC in the coming four years? And he immediately identified the Future Tours Program as Issue No. 1.

It was, in fact, the ICC’s media release on this subject which led me to listen to the interview in the first place. The release states:

‘Talking of the immediate challenges, Mr Isaac says: “The most significant ongoing project at the moment is to get an agreement on the Future Tours Programme. It is vitally important to the ICC and the Full Members to understand and know what their future commitments are so that they can sell their television and commercial rights [my emphasis].”’

When you listen to the interview itself, he says it twice, first of the ICC, and then of the Full Members. And the awful truth is that that is what the ICC has become: a machine for making money out of its television and commercial rights. Nothing else matters. The trumpery and largely spurious individual rankings with which we are constantly bombarded are little more than a way of keeping commercial partners happy. The pettifogging rules and regulations which operate at tournaments are purely designed to protect the interests of commercial partners. The absurd prioritisation of the USA (for years a near-terminal basket-case) and China over the needs of other Associates and Affiliates is driven purely by institutional greed and the pursuit of new ‘markets’.

There are lots of good reasons for looking hard at the Future Tours Programme. One is the overload on players which results from the Full Members’ relentless pursuit of profit. Another is the need to ensure the future of Test cricket over the relentless march of Twenty20, now threatening to invade even ODIs. And yet another is the way in which the Full Members are largely blind and deaf to the needs of their less privileged fellows, handing them crumbs from their table and largely ignoring the pleas of the High Performance countries for more challenging fixtures.

That is a subject on which Mr Isaac has a few words to say towards the conclusion of his interview. His big dream for cricket, he reveals, is to ‘close some of the gap’ on football, the leading global sport. But their great advantage, he adds, is that they have many countries which can compete at the top level, and cricket has only ten, with big gaps in performance even among them. There’s barely a mention of the ICC’s other 95 members, except a vague suggestion that it would be nice if a few of them could compete more effectively.

But that, of course, is the million-dollar question. Welcome as the ICC’s spending on its High Performance and Global Development programmes is, it is nowhere near enough, its distribution is disgracefully inequitable, and it is far from clear that it is being spent in the right areas, or on the right things. Furthermore, there are rumours and reports of changes in the structures of global competition which seem to be driven in part by the desire for ever-greater profit and which, if not handled correctly, could make things worse rather than better.

No-one questions the fact that it is the ten Full Members, and especially half-a-dozen or so of them, who are the ICC’s big earners, generating the income which keeps the whole show on the road, and it would obviously be stupid to prejudice that. But that doesn’t mean that they have a right to anything they want, or that they should be allowed to undermine the great globalisation project which has been one of the cornerstones of ICC policy over the past decade.

If Mr Isaac and his colleagues on the ICC Board are serious about closing the gap on football by taking the globalisation of cricket forward, they will give these issues serious thought, starting with the recognition that those 95 member-countries, too, are ‘stakeholders’ in the future of the game. And that means stepping for a moment outside the charmed circle of the Full Members and their self-interested style of governance. It would be reassuring to see some sign that they are interested in or capable of doing so.