In a no-holds-barred column in The Daily Telegraph, Mark Nicholas has launched a stinging broadside at the ICC and the way it handles the world game, which, he says, is based on greed overruling good sense.

“It is a cliche to say that the ICC are toothless. Often this is so because, as a deeply political body, they choose to be. The list of unanswered questions is an embarrassment. Corruption, throwing, ball-tampering, doping, cheating and the use of technology, Zimbabwe, Darrell Hair and the Oval Test, are all issues over which the ICC have come to no firm conclusion.”

And as for the terrible murder of Bob Woolmer, Nicholas is not even sure that will be satisfactorily sorted.

“Cricket and cricketers live in their own vacuum. Visitors are amazed by the size and breadth of the clique. Sometimes this makes us blind. Already there is a view that the case will be swept beneath the veil of the clique, perhaps even that "murder" will become "accident" in some form or another. Certainly, commentators already feel that a scapegoat will be found elsewhere.”