Sports
Srinivasan hands over World Cup trophy to Australia
Melbourne, March 29
Former BCCI president and
current ICC chairman N. Srinivasan handed over the cricket World Cup
trophy to captain Michael Clarke on Sunday after Australia defeated New
Zealand in a one-sided final by seven wickets at the Melbourne Cricket
Ground.
Srinivasan did the trophy honours in a departure from the
International Cricket Council's (ICC) rules which empower the president
to hand over the trophy to the winning captain.
According to
reports, Srinivasan went ahead with the presentation ceremony apparently
unhappy with president Mustafa Kamal's outrage against controversial
umpiring decisions following India's quarter-final victory against
Bangladesh.
Kamal, who hails from Bangladesh, accused the umpires
of favouritism, saying it could have been a deliberate attempt to throw
out his country from the quadrennial event.
"It could be
deliberate. Though I can't say it absolutely but it looks like that. I
know in cricket, human errors are quite possible, but how can a dozen
decisions go against Bangladesh? It was very, very poor umpiring," Kamal
said after Bangladesh's loss.
But both the Board of Control for
Cricket in India (BCCI) and the ICC chief executive David Richardson
rubbished the accusations.
Srinivasan took over as the chairman of the ICC in 2014.
In
previous editions of the World Cup, the ICC president has always handed
the trophy to the winning captain. In 2011, it was then president
Sharad Pawar who presented the trophy to the victorious Indian team's
captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.