Comment

When cricket lovers feel frustrated with the lack of accountability of our selectors and administrators even after the team that purports to represent India suffers whitewash after whitewash, all we can do is to let off steam. When we see avarice and mismanagement gnawing away at the sinews of the game we love most in the country, we can only make jokes about it. The Indian team’s sponsor and IPL franchisee Sahara, however, was in a position to do a little more than wring their hands in despair. They said enough is enough and virtually pulled the rug from under BCCI’s feet by withdrawing from their sponsorship as well as the IPL.

BCCI’s refusal to accommodate Sahara’s request — that the $1.8 m earmarked for Yuvraj Singh, who is under treatment for a tumour, be added to their IPL auction kitty — was simply the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back. Time and again the playing field has been tilted in favour of a few franchises, and this is hardly surprising when you have a top board administrator as well as the chief selector playing parallel roles in an IPL franchise — a glaring conflict of interest.

We have seen in previous years how the sequencing of players for the auction has worked to the advantage of one franchise, how an additional foreign player was accommodated in the playing eleven for the sake of another franchise, how the home team in Jaipur was forced to change the pitch they had prepared to suit Shane Warne.

The real issue here is the ad-hoc manner in which cricket is run in the country. We have documented in our paper how the cricket bodies under the BCCI have become the fiefdoms of powerful politicians and businessmen whose only interest in cricket is the money they can make from it. Through proxy voting and bogus membership, they ensure they cannot be dislodged from their posts. The roots of BCCI’s lack of accountability lie there.Little wonder that the sports minister Ajay Maken’s attempts to bring the BCCI under the National Sports Bill have been opposed tooth and nail. In fact, Team India is a misnomer because the BCCI is nothing more than a consortium of private clubs which claims to field a ‘national’ team.

What is sad about all this is that cricket is a game that so many people in the country love to watch and play. In no other sport do we have such a huge pool of talent. This ensures we get a few good results here and there, which attracts sufficient TV audiences to keep the lucre flowing into the BCCI’s coffers. But now matters have come to such a pass that the so-called national Test team has become a joke in the cricketing world, and the IPL seems headed the same way. There is no doubt that India is the natural habitat for an international cricket league, but instead of surging forward, each year brings one crash after another.

It may well be that Sahara is pulling out because it no longer finds the IPL viable. But by challenging the arbitrary and feudal administration of cricket in India, Sahara has also raised more fundamental issues. Cricket is not just a huge sport in the country, it’s also a vehicle to project India’s image - can this be left to the BCCI to manage? Not on the evidence of how the ‘national’ team and the IPL are being handled.