Are things coming to a head in Indian cricket administration? It is difficult to tell, although all the elements are laid out before us.
The Supreme Court may (or may not) decide today that it has had enough, and that decisions have to be made in the cause of Indian cricket. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, which has decided to hold its much-postponed annual general body meeting on December 11, will be only too happy to continue doing what it has been doing — resist, delay, defer, procrastinate, confuse.
The anniversary of the sacking of the president and the secretary of the BCCI by the Supreme Court is around the corner, but in that period nothing has changed. If it was meant to shake up the BCCI, it didn’t; the individuals may have changed, but the intransigence has remained.
The Committee of Administrators, the third arm of the administration, has been a committee of two since two of the original members resigned. The CoA, unsure whether it has to provide the big picture or handle the nitty gritty of everyday administration, has been doing both when it was supposed to do neither. Its task was to ensure that the various associations and the BCCI itself made the changes necessary to bring them in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling. It is in charge of transition.
The two-member CoA will be reduced to a single member — Diana Edulji — in May next year when Vinod Rai turns 70 and steps down.
The Supreme Court’s reluctance to fill the vacancies following resignations by Ramachandra Guha and Vikram Limaye and the CoA’s own recommendation that it should be handed over administration of the BCCI do not augur well. In its fifth status report submitted to the Supreme Court in August, the CoA had said that the “governance, management and administration” of the board be handed over to it along with a professional group headed by CEO Rahul Johri till elections are held.
Deadlines have been missed and then extended, the Supreme Court has alternated between acting tough and keeping silent, the BCCI has ignored rulings and got away with it. There is an old joke about cricket — that if you wanted rain, play a cricket match. Cricket administration in India seems to have evolved a joke of its own. It doesn’t matter who is in charge, soon everything resembles the BCCI.
When the Indian captain says that tours ought to be better planned, and that players deserve rest, two responses seem natural. One, why now? Why squeeze in a pointless home series against Sri Lanka (not pointless for the channel with the TV rights, perhaps) at all?
It was thanks to the captain that the original four-Test series in South Africa was reduced to three. South Africa wanted a Boxing Day Test, India wanted rest after the Sri Lanka series and that was that.
Yet Virat Kohli makes a point. The CoA has promised to meet the players during the Delhi Test to discuss this. The better way would have been to ensure that a Players’ Association was in place and to deal through that body as it is done in other countries. You cannot deal with the players directly on every issue — from schedule to payments to anything else. They need to be left alone to play cricket.
Yet the Supreme Court-mandated Players’ Association is nowhere in sight. This is something the CoA should have put in place.
The BCCI’s allergy to a players’ association — which it sees as a pesky trade union — is a long one. Ironically, players haven’t been too keen on it either. This is because of the star system. A Sachin Tendulkar or a Virat Kohli find it easier to call a board bigwig than to go through an association. This, even if, as has happened in the past, what is good for Tendulkar is not necessarily good for Indian cricket.
The suggestion by Rai that India play a minimum 80 days of international cricket in a year may sound reasonable till you realise its not the minimum that Kohli is worried about, but the maximum. This year, India had scheduled 97 days of international cricket, South Africa 83, England 82 and Australia 75.
With the World Championship of Test cricket set to commence in 2019 and the various domestic T20 tournaments cutting into the schedule in many countries, there is obviously need for balance.
The current lot may be the last set of players which believes that Test matches are the “real cricket” and the one to aspire to. And even among them — true across the world — there are a significant number which thinks that white ball cricket is the real thing.
These are difficult times for the international game. India has a major role to play in keeping the flock together and leading the way in the direction the game will go. Uncertainty is the enemy of progress, something all arms of the administration should be conscious of.
