The ICC still hasn't acknowledged that Bangladesh's government dissolved a democratically elected cricket board in April. Two months of silence on a textbook constitutional breach.
Two months ago, the Bangladesh government unilaterally dissolved a democratically elected cricket board. The ICC said nothing. No statement, no reaction, no acknowledgement that the elected board of a full ICC member had been removed. It simply did not happen, as far as the ICC was concerned.
Now the ICC board has issued a statement about a two-member delegation visiting Bangladesh. It is, as you might expect, very official, very procedural, and very short on substance. The delegation will report back to the board. Media speculation does not represent the ICC's position. All very orderly on paper. And perhaps this gets followed by some version of "let's forget the past and look forward," at which point everyone is supposed to move on.
That framing is the problem.
What happened in April was not a grey area. A government stepping in to dissolve an elected cricket board is a textbook case of government interference under the ICC's own constitution. It is a breach of a very important rule, not a procedural footnote to be managed quietly through a delegation visit.
Cricket governance isn't just about having rules, it's about applying and enforcing them consistently and with courage, especially when it requires courage.
The ICC constitution exists precisely for moments like this. If dissolving an elected board does not trigger an immediate response from the ICC board, then the constitution's purpose becomes genuinely unclear. Rules that are selectively enforced, or enforced only when politically comfortable, are not really rules at all.
The latest ICC communication focuses entirely on what happens next. It says nothing about what happened in April. That is a deliberate choice, and it is worth naming it as one.
No statement, no reaction. No acknowledgement that the elected board of an ICC full member was removed. As if it never happened.
The ICC board may well produce sensible recommendations for Bangladesh cricket's future structure. But recommendations about the future do not retroactively address a constitutional breach in the past. The two things are separate, and the ICC's current approach treats only one of them as worth discussing.
The question that remains open is simple: does the ICC board believe that what happened in April constituted government interference under its own rules, or does it not? That is not a media speculation. That is the core governance question, and it has now gone unanswered for two months.
Applying rules consistently means applying them when it is uncomfortable, not just when it is easy.
Until the ICC board addresses what occurred in April directly, its procedural response to Bangladesh is incomplete. The delegation visit and the future recommendations are the easier part. Acknowledging the breach is the harder part, and that is exactly where the institution has gone quiet.
