We should ask ourselves: What is the Indian way?

It would be interesting to study the culture of cricket in the country and the answers would help us work on what needs improvement

October 30, 2018 06:03 pm | Updated 09:06 pm IST

The report was released only after the chairman of Cricket Australia David Peever (above) had ensured that his re-election went through without a hitch

The report was released only after the chairman of Cricket Australia David Peever (above) had ensured that his re-election went through without a hitch

While Indian cricketers have for years aspired to play the Australian way, India’s administrators too have pointed to Cricket Australia as the epitome of good governance. Now it transpires that neither is a good role model; in fact, where manipulating the elections to hang on to their posts is concerned, Australia seem to have learnt from India.

An independent review by the Ethics Centre h as deemed the cricket culture “arrogant” and “controlling”. This was in Australia, but could apply to India too, especially where officials are concerned. No game is greater than its greatest player goes the cliché, but many Indian officials have over the years considered themselves greater than both the players and the game.

There is much to recommend such a “culture review” of Indian cricket; introspection is never a wasted exercise.

It is remarkable how when what is public knowledge becomes part of a formal report, people sit up and take notice. What is significant about the Australian report is that it was released only after the chairman of Cricket Australia David Peever had ensured that his re-election went through without a hitch. Had the members read the report first, it might not have been as smooth. Just as players learn from one another, so too do the officials. Familiarity breeds imitation. In fact, in one of its 42 recommendations, the Ethics Centre refers to the Board of Control for Cricket in India as an example.

The report places the blame on the administrators for the decline in standards of behaviour, culminating in the cheating incident in South Africa where senior players Steve Smith, David Warner and junior Cameron Bancroft were caught tampering with the ball.

“Australian cricket has lost its balance,” it said, “The leadership of CA should also accept responsibility for its inadvertent (but foreseeable) failure to create and support a culture in which the will-to-win was balanced by an equal commitment to moral courage and ethical restraint. In our opinion, CA’s fault is not that it established a culture of ‘win at all costs’, rather that it made the fateful mistake of enacting a program that would lead to ‘winning without counting the costs’.”

Indian cricket’s problems are different. The culture of arrogance overall is a recent phenomenon and has to do with the enormous amounts of money the country generates for the game.

The average Indian player is better behaved than the average Australian, but then the Australians have had more practice having been at it longer. The Australian Cricketers Association’s plea to lift the ban on the three key players caught cheating based on the report that traces it all back to the culture encouraged by the administrators is ridiculous. You can blame the culture for the thought process, but the players will have to pay for their actions.

Among the 42 recommendations by the Ethics Centre is the formation of an ethics commission for Cricket Australia — an idea that has existed on paper in India for a while now. There is too the idea to establish a Council to bring together cricket’s major share-holders, for one of the problems has been the lack of communication among them. This is equally true of India, and something worth emulating; there is an idea here also to work on a mechanism for stimulating and increasing the game’s fan base.

Other recommendations include a formal leadership training course for captains, and a plan to ensure that international players take part in domestic first class tournaments.

The board should be subject to the code of conduct too — something that has caused trouble in India in the past. In the third year of the IPL, Ravindra Jadeja was banned because he tried to negotiate a better deal for himself. It was ironic and a hint of the culture in which the players worked that “negotiate a better deal” was virtually the guiding motto of the IPL itself and the BCCI.

When what applies to the governing body does not apply to the individual player, there is trouble. The solution is not to punish the player, but to ensure that the governing body is subject to its own code of conduct.

It would be interesting to study the culture of cricket in India. What is the Indian way? It’s a question we should be asking ourselves. The answers would help us work on what needs improvement. It would be a worthwhile exercise, even if those in power do not always like to hear the truth.

But before we get there, the BCCI should make the Committee of Administrators superfluous — not by bickering, but by following the Supreme’s Court’s rulings. Not one of the 34 associations is “fully compliant” with the reforms. This is not very encouraging, even if half of them are in the “substantially compliant” list. Perhaps the manner of the defiance best defines the culture of the cricket today which can be summed up in three words: We know best.

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