The BCCI’s almost instantaneous rejection of the main recommendations of Lord Woolf’s governance review may have led many to fear the worst, but there are indications in the outcome of this week’s meeting of the Chief Executives’ Committee that lessons may already have been learned from Woolf’s severe strictures on the way the ICC does its business.

Five aspects of the ICC statement following the meeting should give much-needed encouragement to the 95 Associate and Affiliate members who have formed the impression over the past eighteen months that scant regard was being paid to their interests.

First and foremost as an indication of change comes the recommendation that the men’s competition in the 2014 World Twenty20 tournament should revert to 16 teams.

Both this year’s event and that in 2014, it will be recalled, were originally intended to be 16-team tournaments, but were cut back to 12 as a consequence of (some would say in revenge for) the Board’s reluctant acceptance of a 14-team World Cup in 2015.

It made nonsense of the ICC’s avowed strategy for the development of the game, and it has turned this month’s World Twenty20 qualifier, where only two places in the main event in Sri Lanka in September will be on offer for the 16 participants, into a very tough competition indeed.

So the reversal of the policy for the 2014 World T20 can only be given an enthusiastic thumbs-up, not least because it suggests that some of the Full members have taken note of Lord Woolf’s criticisms of the way in which qualification for major global tournaments is currently managed.

Even more significantly, the CEC is reported to have agreed that ‘the Associate and Affiliate Members should consider submitting a detailed proposition to host a future ICC World Twnty20 event in a developing country or region’.

This is good news indeed: what better way could there be to promote the popularity of the sport outside its traditional areas of strength than to bring the best teams in the world to one or more of the best-appointed Associate countries?

Imagine the impact such a tournament could have in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, or in Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands!

Another indication that Woolf’s recommendations have not gone unheeded is the floating of the idea of a Future Tour Schedule (what’s the difference, one wonders, between a Schedule and a Programme?), ‘to investigate whether a programme of matches can be designed for Associates/Affiliates and the Full Member National or “A” teams’.

The near-impossibility for most of the top Associates and Affiliates of organising regular fixtures against the Full members has long tended to restrict the effectiveness of the High Performance Program, and this is a point which emerges clearly from the Woolf report. So such an investigation represents a significant change of heart . . . or at least it will if it actually leads to a modification of the Full members’ behaviour.

No less important is the indication that the CEOs are at least willing to consider an invitation for cricket to participate in the 2018 Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast, an issue which is inevitably linked to the continuing discussion of cricket’s possible return as an Olympic sport.

In fact cricket was one of the sports in the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, and it would be a real step forward were it to return twenty years on - and perhaps emulate Rugby sevens by becoming one of the Games' 'core' sports.

It is encouraging, too, to see the CEC’s reaffirmation of the ambition to recruit a million new players across the Associate and Affiliate world by 2015, although the big question is naturally whether the Full members are willing to commit the additional resources which such a drive will undoubtedly require.

And behind all of this lies the most massive question of all: whether the Executive Board will be ready to acknowledge the force of Lord Woolf’s argument that his recommendations are an unbreakable package, and that without fundamental, structural change the ICC will be incapable of becoming the global leader among governing bodies that it claims it aspires to be.

Some may be thinking that by throwing a few sweeteners to the leading Associates and Affiliates more radical measures can be averted, and that the Board will be able to put up a ‘Business as Usual’ sign as it consigns Woolf to the dustbin.

The sweeteners are welcome in themselves, of course, but they are no more than part of what a proper governance system would be generating in any case.

We can only hope that the ICC’s current directors are capable of seeing that the ground shifted when Woolf’s report was published, and that this is their opportunity – probably their last-ever opportunity – to challenge the BCCI’s hegemony, underpinned as it is by a combination of bullying, bribery and blackmail.

The truth is that the BCCI needs the other Full members, and even perhaps the growing cohort of Associates and Affiliates, no less than they need the BCCI. It would be a disaster for everyone if cricket were to go the way of baseball, with the IPL as its ‘World Series’.

So now is the time for the other Full members to stand tall, and to hammer out a constitution which does justice to India’s position at the heart of the game but which also ensures that cricket is governed fairly, transparently and with due regard to the needs and interests of all the ICC’s hundred-plus members.

If that happens, this week’s decisions of the Chief Executives’ Committee will be seen by future historians as the beginning of a real change in cricket’s global governance.