The ICC's latest executive meeting will take place in Dubai next week and on the agenda will be who replaces Malcolm Speed as chief executive. The frontrunner appears to be Inder Singh Bindra, a powerful figure on the subcontinent, and in The Times Christopher Martin-Jenkins says there is a real risk of the already strong influence of India become too great.

If Bindra were to be appointed, he would be joined in Dubai within two years by Sharad Pawar, the Indian cabinet minister who chairs the BCCI and will succeed David Morgan as ICC chairman in June 2010. Such a stranglehold by the country that generates almost two thirds of the world's income from cricket through its massive worldwide television audience could not be in the sport's best interests.