Former Pakistan off-spinner Saeed Ajmal has launched a broadside at the International Cricket Council (ICC), alleging that the game’s global body has become “helpless in the face of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and warning that the ICC’s purpose is at stake.
Speaking to the reporters at a function in Karachi, Ajmal alleged that due to the BCCI, the richest cricketing board in the world, the ICC is unable to take “unbiased and principled decisions in the overall interest of world cricket,” and said that the global body should shut down its operations.
“If the ICC can’t enforce its decisions on the Indian board, then its very existence is unnecessary,” he said.
Ajmal’s comments come amid a long-running debate around money and governance in international cricket, and more sharply around the India-Pakistan relationship that has pushed bilateral cricket off the calendar and forced ICC events into complicated venue situations.
“There is no logical reason for India not to play in Pakistan but the ICC is helpless because it is dominated by Indians now,” he alleged.
Ajmal also claimed that several Test-playing nations privately share his frustration but are unwilling to say it publicly, suggesting that economic dependence on India’s market has created an unspoked hierarchy inside the sport’s corridor of power.
India’s stance on travelling to Pakistan has largely been framed around security concerns and the requirement of government clearances for bilateral sport between the two neighbours. The practical outcome has been that India-Pakistan cricket has been confined to ICC tournaments, with matches often shifted to neutral venues to ensure participation and broadcast certainty.
That dynamic, Ajmal argued, is evidence of a wider imbalance: the ICC, in his view, is unable to enforce decisions uniformly when a board with outsized commercial weight is involved – a situation he believes undermines the principle of equal treatment that a governing body must protect.
The ICC’s leadership structure has also become a talking point, the global body is currently led by former BCCI secretary Jay Shah. For Ajmal, the issue is less about any one administrator and more about what he says is a system in which financial power translates into institutional sway.
For Pakistan cricket, the stakes are obvious. Hosting rights, home advantage, fan access and gate revenues are all affected when marquee fixtures cannot be played at home – even when a country is officially hosting a tournament cycle.
Saeed Ajmal, never shy of controversy in his post-playing life, has now put the provocation in stark terms: if the ICC cannot act independently “in the overall interest of world cricket” then it should not pretend to be the sport’s true referee at all.
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