Cricket's governing body, the International Cricket Council, needs to keep up with the times in its handling of issues like matchfixing.

New Zealand Cricket's chairman and ICC board member Sir John Anderson said today the issues of past illegal activities were, in some ways, something of a distraction and cricket needed to ensure such matters were handled in keeping with the times.

"The world we live in today is different to the world of a decade ago. Television is different, finance is different, and now we have to handle issues in a different way," he told CricInfo.

Anderson likened the matchfixing situation to the banking industry he is involved in as chief executive of the National Bank of New Zealand.

"We have 25,000 employees who have had to change and understand security matters, and we have to do the same in cricket.

"We are looking at the security and safety of players as recommended in the Condon Report," he said.

An awareness programme was needed so that players knew the requirements of them. Problems of the match-fixing kind did not happen in the United States, the archetypal market for professional sport.

Instituting such a programme would be a major step forward and New Zealand's method of introducing that would be discussed at Friday's board meeting of NZC.

If the Indian bookmaker, Mukesh Gupta, failed to meet the ACU's Sir Paul Condon's July 1 deadline and agree to give evidence then he would be regarded as a hostile witness and boards would be left to await the result of their own enquiries of his allegations against individual players.

Anderson did say that if Gupta didn't front then NZC would want to have the allegations against Martin Crowe tidied up.

Awareness was something that would also extend to the requirements of players in relation to drug abuse.

In his report, Condon highlighted examples of drugs being carried across national borders by secretive means and Anderson said that drug testing would become "very much a part of the game" in the future.

Players could expect that random drug testing could be applied. New Zealand has had its own system in place for at least five or six years and a number of tests were carried out at various levels of the game each year.

Anderson also confirmed that he has continued to work on the restructuring of the ICC's internal make-up.

He had already rewritten the Council's articles and he has rewritten the committee manual for the body and was awaiting Malcolm Speed taking up his position as chief executive officer next month to determine what his requirements would be for his internal structures.

The cricket committee management is made up of the CEO's of the Test-playing nations with three associate members representatives who are responsible for running cricket matters.

The cricket committee playing is made up of mainly past players who are responsible for looking after playing matters while the executive board was responsible for governance matters.

Other committees are also involved in the likes of development, finance and marketing, a medical committee and a members' disputes committee.

Having them in place under an overall structure allowed management the power to be able to act on their own initiative and to respond to the needs of the game quicker than had happened in the past.

© 2001 CricInfo Ltd