Incoming chief executive for New Zealand Cricket Martin Snedden heads to London this week and into the biggest issue facing the world game, match-fixing.

Not that he will be involved in any of the decision-making on the recommendations in Sir Paul Condon's report. That is being left to the executive committee of the International Cricket Council where New Zealand will be represented by Sir John Anderson.

Snedden will be meeting with other chief executives from around the cricket world on the first occasion he will have had to rub shoulders with them. Clearly, an early contact will be with Australia's newly-appointed CEO James Sutherland.

Snedden did say that he expected the Executive Board would decide on Condon's recommendations and how many of them they could support.

Condon provided a list of 24 but Snedden said that from what he understood the practical application of the recommendations had to be considered.

And the Board would have to consider what could be put in place to prevent the same sort of thing happening in the future.

"New Zealand Cricket will have to do something fairly promptly afterwards and implementing that will have to be one of my first priorities," he said.

Snedden, while not officially starting in his new role until July 30, said he is already spending half of his day on cricket matters which had two benefits. It allowed him time for the winding down of his role in his legal firm while it also allowed him to build up for his new role.

On his immediate agenda in London will be matters relating to New Zealand's staging of the Under-19 World Cup this summer and the full World Cup to be held in South Africa in February-March 2003.

He also expected some discussion on the new one-day laws approved by the cricket committee although any disagreement would be largely irrelevant as the decisions of the committee were binding.

Snedden may also be making some inquiries about the international players' association that is slowly developing.

He is an advocate of player representation, being a players' advocate himself when playing in the 1980s, and he believes it would be a good idea if New Zealand's players got something up and running in the same way as is done in other countries, most notably Australia.

"I do believe in strong players' representation. Any way that makes it easier to communicate the players' point of view has got to be good.

"It is good for the players to be organised. There are a lot of things that might be raised by players that would not be thought of by administrators," he said.

Snedden added that the Employment Relations Act favoured that sort of approach and there were different times when issues could be resolved when working sensibly with people.

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