Srinivasan under fire for sacrificing \\\' Asian cricket unity\\\'

One of India's most influential cricket journalist Lokendra Pratap Sahi has attacked the country's cricket board chief N Srinivasan for sacrificing ' Asian cricket unity' to pursue his personal ambitions. "Asian unity in cricket, much celebrated till not long ago, is a thing of the past," said Sahi in a front-page story in the Kolkata Telegraph on Sunday. Three decades after the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) came into being, as a powerful bloc on the world stage and to take bilateral relations to another level, principal movers India and Pakistan are at distinctly opposite ends, the report said. It’s unusual, as the boards of India and Pakistan have generally stayed on the same page even if the non-cricket relations between the neighbours were at an absolute low. Sri Lanka, one of the co-founders of the Asian body, is currently with Pakistan and also didn’t support the massive changes pushed through at the International Cricket Council (ICC) on Saturday, Sahi said in his front-page report. Technically, Pakistan and Sri Lanka abstained when a vote was taken at the ICC’s executive board, in Singapore. Bangladesh, the fourth and youngest Test-playing nation in the region, toed the line largely determined by a muscle-flexing India, the report said. On paper, Australia and England are at par with India, but the shots will be called by Board of Control for Cricket in India president Narayanswamy Srinivasan. That apart, India’s share of the revenue distributed by the ICC is to jump from around 4 per cent to “over 20 per cent”. Issues over son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan notwithstanding, the decks are clear for Srinivasan to become the ICC’s first chairman after restructuring, Sahi said in the report. Srinivasan's son-in-law is implicated in IPL match fixing, according to a news agency.