The sovereign republic of the BCCI
The Indian
board is setting a precedent by ignoring the FTP, and thus seemingly
reserving the right to do with international cricket as it pleases
At one point in his excellent new book on the modern powerhouse of Indian cricket, The Great Tamasha,
James Astill stops to wonder whether India is becoming "an oligarchy, a
democracy stage-managed by a corrupt super-elite". One might harbour
exactly the same thought about cricket.
Consider this: under the ICC's Future Tours Programme, the BCCI was
scheduled to visit South Africa between November and January for three
Tests, seven ODIs and two T20Is. Except that in July the BCCI began to dicker
about the schedule, in the same way as six months earlier it had
refused to be pinned down on the matter of a schedule for a tour of New
Zealand, also listed in the FTP.
Never mind that South Africa and India, first and third on the ICC Test
rankings, represent probably the best cricket we have a chance of seeing
in the present environment. Never mind that Cricket South Africa, like
New Zealand Cricket, is an organisation whose finances depend acutely
on television revenues, of which the presence of an Indian cricket team
would afford them a share; in fact, that was the point. Then the BCCI
announced that India will play
two home Tests against West Indies, not part of the FTP, partly
overlapping with the time previously allotted to the South African tour.
It is now possible there will be no visit to South Africa at all.
On all this, there was no elaboration whatsoever, official or
unofficial. In positing nine possible explanations for the Wisden India
website, Suresh Menon observed that the BCCI had gone beyond its usual
domineering ways and was "functioning like a secret society". All that
seems agreed is that the BCCI and CSA have a feud. We know this because
CSA's chief executive, Haroon Lorgat, has offered to apologise, which apparently BCCI's locum president Jagmohan Dalmiya thinks is a good idea
without troubling to specify for what - something that transpired when
Lorgat was running the ICC, one must assume. Dalmiya was certainly
sorely grieved when Lorgat shifted the India v England match from the
badly incomplete Eden Gardens during the 2011 World Cup.
The other salient fact is that the BCCI has its annual general meeting
coming up on September 29, the overpowering presence at which will be
its il capo dei capi, N Srinivasan,
temporarily restricted by the betting misadventures of his son-in-law
in the IPL but still the master string-puller. Since the May
allegations about Gurunath Meiyappan, and about spot-fixing in the IPL,
the BCCI has lurched about like many a debauched and embattled political
regime.
Quick private inquiry to exonerate all concerned - thank you, former judges Chouta and Balasubramanian! Rehabilitation of former enemies
it is now expedient to embrace - sorry that we once expelled you "for
life" for corruption, Mr Dalmiya! Morale-boosting tributes from selected
kiss-ass courtiers - congratulations, Mr Shastri, on a Sardesai Lecture
that had it been delivered in North Korea would have brought a blush to
the cheek of the Dear Leader!
The decision to superimpose West Indies' visit on what should have been
the trip to South Africa is double the fun. There's crude populism -
hey everyone, let's cheer for Sachin's 200th Test!
There's gratuitous gunboat diplomacy - if you want our money, Mr
Lorgat, you better beg for it! And it coincides nicely with the meting out of "justice" to the previous regime - that means you, Mr Lalit Modi!
Because that general meeting has already been designated for imposing a
life ban on the IPL's Icarus-like founder after a three-year
investigation found… well, not as much as it wanted. After all the
initial finger-pointing, the BCCI's star chamber had to work pretty hard
to make the crime fit the pre-ordained punishment, because in the end
he has really only been convicted of the high-handed unilateralism for
which he had always been known, and in which the BCCI had previously
indulged him. Perhaps his misdeeds lie elsewhere; perhaps the charges
themselves achieved the desired end anyway.
****
To be fair to the BCCI, cricket administration is hardly to be
associated with transparency and accountability anywhere. It is the
domain of self-constituting national monopolies. Cricket boards have no
shareholders to appease or voters to placate. The cricket-loving
public, in whose name administrators sometimes purport to govern, are
diffuse, unorganised, and care little about who's running things,
providing they enjoy a bit of what they want every so often - whether
that's semi-regular ebullitions for Sachin in India, or the maximum
Ashes cricket in Australia and England. Unlike players, bound tight by
codes of conduct, boards essentially police themselves, with all that
that entails. What some regard as cricket's overall governing body, the
ICC, has the barest powers of oversight, and receives from most of its
directors only perfunctory attention: they have not visited its
headquarters for nearly 18 months, preferring to meet in a resort at
colossal expense while complaining that the council costs too much.
This is actually a subtext of the present imbroglio. None hold the ICC
in such conspicuous contempt as its largest member, the BCCI having
declined to sign the FTP and now setting a precedent in ignoring it
altogether. The casus belli was the Woolf Review, a thorough
examination of the governance of world cricket initiated by Lorgat,
which in February 2012 made high-minded, far-reaching and arguably
unrealistic proposals for turning the ICC into a full-fledged governing
organisation with independent directors.
The BCCI was having none of it. The ICC govern in the interests of cricket?
Not on Srinivasan's watch. And as it happens, a tiny chink of light is
available to study this by: it's a copy of the minutes of the ICC's
January board meeting, which has for many months been passing
surprisingly unremarked on what we might call Modileaks - Lalit Modi's
idiosyncratic but entertaining website.
|
|
|
|
|
| The BCCI is an organisation with many more problems than are sometimes
acknowledged - full of ambitious people pulling in different directions,
operating in an uncertain political, commercial and legal environment,
shaped by a turbo-boosted economy that has bestowed its benefits
unevenly and whose impetus is currently faltering |
|
|
|
|
|
For connoisseurs of shambolic governance, these minutes contain much to
savour, but let's confine ourselves to two nuggets. Firstly, at section
6.2, you will find an attempt by ICC ethics officer Sean Cleary to
raise Clause 3 of the council's code of ethics which binds ICC board
members to act as, amazing to say, ICC board members. Let the minutes
record: "Mr Srinivasan explained that he did not agree with that
principle and that his position was that he was representing the BCCI."
Singapore's Imran Khwaja, one of three Associate member representatives
on the executive board, then pointed out the bleeding obvious, that
"this matter needed to be resolved one way or another in order to avoid
directors technically being in perpetual breach of the Code of Ethics
and for the ICC to be seen as a credible organisation and an effective
Board". And, of course, everyone then stepped delicately round the
multi-billion-dollar elephant in the room.
In order to convey his point, Cleary rather bravely invoked examples of
ethical failures at FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, and Union
Cycliste Internationale: "He emphasised that the current version of the
Code of Ethics binds everybody, but that if it is flouted by all, then
it becomes meaningless." Yet rather than an address what might be
regarded as a pretty fundamental point, Srinivasan responded by calling
on Cleary to investigate "certain matters, which relate to the former
Chief Executive, Mr Lorgat".
What this means, who is to say? Innuendo now swirls around Lorgat in
much the same way as it did around Modi, with nobody showing much
interest in clearing it up - not even journalists, happier these days to
feed a swirl of rumour than do anything so vulgar as unearth a fact.
Anyway, precisely nobody was prepared to point out the manifest
absurdity of Srinivasan's position - the board member who openly scorned
the code of ethics in his own case demanding that it be applied to
someone else.
Secondly, at section 9.3, ICC legal officer Iain Higgins attempts to
lead a discussion of the FTP agreement, whereupon Srinivasan explains
why the BCCI refused to sign it. Let the minutes record:
"Mr Srinivasan explained that the BCCI's position was
that it wished to retain the right to unilaterally terminate the FTP
Agreement: a/ in the event of certain financial or structural changes
emanating from the implementation of certain recommendations from the
Woolf Report; and b/ should it be required to use DRS in any bilateral
matches. In the meantime he explained that the Indian national team
would continue to play the fixtures in the FTP Schedule, but he noted
that it was finding it difficult to continue the commitments because
there are so many events in the calendar."
Well that's jolly nice of them, then.
Incidentally, although Modi is being a little cheeky posting these
minutes online, there's really no reason for them not to be freely
available. They concern matters of significance to every cricket fan,
and contain no information that could be described as
commercial-in-confidence. An administrative class that took
transparency and accountability seriously would make all such
deliberations public. We are in a day and age of whistles being blown
left and right. Yet we know more about the internal policies of the US'
super-secret National Security Agency - thanks to Ed Snowden - than we
do about the attitudes and purposes of those who run cricket. So let's
get it out there, shall we?
The BCCI represents itself at the ICC in open defiance of the council's
code of ethics, and deigns to play other countries only in an
unspecified "meantime", reserving the right to set the whole of
international cricket at nought if anything should happen it doesn't
like. If it won't acknowledge it publicly, then we should spread the
word ourselves.
****
For the moment, international cricket under the foregoing conditions
quite suits the BCCI, preserving its freedom to reward those in favour,
to punish those out of favour, and generally to intimidate the
equivocal. Those favoured at the moment evidently include the West
Indies Cricket Board, whose captain was among those
who obligingly changed their vote on the ICC cricket committee away
from Tim May of the Federation of International Cricketers' Associations
to Srinivasan's water carrier Laxman Sivaramakrishnan.
The BCCI gave the WICB a nice fat tri-series three months ago; now the
WICB has returned the compliment by volunteering to provide extras for The Tendulkar Show.
NZC now also enjoys a crumb from the rich man's table, a truncated
visit by India being not only confirmed but brought forward, now that
its mettlesome chairman and ICC executive board member Chris Moller is
about to depart.
The out of favour obviously include CSA, despite the fact that four
years ago it was CSA that made possible IPL 2 at the 11th hour. The
trouble was, of course, that this abetted the BCCI's previous regime,
the Modi-Pawar-Bindra alliance, rather than the present mob, the
Srinivasan-Dalmiya-Sundar Raman junta; given the latter's manicheanism,
that probably constitutes giving aid and comfort to the enemy. (In the
annals of cricket administration, by the way, the relocation of IPL 2
must now be eligible for some sort of hall of shame, given its legacies
of crises and ill will at both CSA and the BCCI.)
As noted, CSA is acutely beholden to the BCCI. The members of its
superb Test team are in their playing and earnings prime, and
understandably eager to play in the IPL. The country's six professional
franchises depend heavily on the BCCI-led Champions League, in which
CSA, with Cricket Australia, is a minority shareholder. Rightly or
wrongly, some in South Africa sense that the BCCI's long-term aim is to
prostrate an on-field rival, perhaps also by levering CSA out of the
Champions League and replacing it with the ECB, thereby pauperising
South African first-class cricket. So while the wranglings of
administrators can seem as remote to the everyday fan as supersonic
fighters in the stratosphere, they are, under the influence of an
over-mighty BCCI, forming part of a more worrisome pattern. And what
happens when Srinivasan's unspecified "meantime" expires?
****
From your more militant apologist for Indian power in cricket, response
to observations like the foregoing usually condenses to: well, tough
luck; you ruled; now we rule. Yet this misunderstands the
nature of the change in cricket's patterns of governance. In the
hundred years and more that authority emanated from Lord's, cricket was
run along the lines of an English public school, at least as defined by
Lytton Strachey: anarchy tempered by despotism. Under the economic
dominion of the BCCI, the world is converging on the opposite model:
despotism tempered by anarchy, the anarchy coming mainly from within
India itself. For the BCCI is an organisation with many more problems
than are sometimes acknowledged - full of ambitious people pulling in
different directions, operating in an uncertain political, commercial
and legal environment, shaped by a turbo-boosted economy that has
bestowed its benefits unevenly and whose impetus is currently faltering.
At an operational level, ironically, the BCCI is an increasingly
impressive and efficient organisation, which probably deserves more
credit for what it does and how it does it: allegations of player
corruption in the IPL have been dealt with capably and expeditiously.
At a governance level, however, it is an arena of self-advancement and
self-aggrandisement.
External fights the BCCI is inclined to pick, like the current feud with
CSA, sometimes look like the phoney foreign war confected to distract
from an American president's personal peccadillos in Wag the Dog.
"The president will be a hero," says the political fixer. "He brought
peace." Someone quibbles: "But there was never a war." Explains the
fixer: "All the greater accomplishment."
Certainly the BCCI annual meeting is being treated with outsized
importance. Dalmiya has deferred consideration of the dispute with CSA
until afterwards: "What we will decide we will decide only after the
AGM. We are very busy with our AGM at the moment." Hey, never let the
triviality of competition between the world's two best cricket teams
stand in the way of something really important, like a meeting of
administrators! But if we accept the BCCI at its self-estimation, there
is a logical conclusion to this, in which international cricket,
especially Test cricket, dwindles independent of its relations with
India.
For some time, there have been essentially two tiers of cricket: the
tier involving India (significantly lucrative) and the tier that doesn't
(where, with the exception of the Ashes, the rewards are so thin that
Sri Lanka can hardly afford to play Test matches any longer, and
Zimbabwe and Pakistan must play consecutively at the same venue). The
latter can only weaken further; the former is ripe for rationalisation.
One of the most fascinating passages in Astill's book is an interview
with BCCI vice-president Niranjan Shah, the board's longest-serving
member, who runs cricket in the region of Saurashtra, thanks to a
membership populated with friends, relatives and cronies that has not
changed in 20 years. From his secure vantage point, Shah regards the
cricket world simply as an irritation. Why does India have to send
cricket teams abroad anyway? The IPL lights the way: all should come to
India as supplicants.
|
|
|
|
|
| In the years in which authority emanated from Lord's, cricket was run
along the lines of an English public school: anarchy tempered by
despotism. Under the economic dominion of the BCCI, it is despotism
tempered by anarchy, the anarchy coming mainly from within India itself |
|
|
|
|
|
At the moment we are getting money only when there is an
international game. So I think IPL is the first step on this issue.
Like in baseball, America is not worried whether other country is
playing or not. Because cricket is a major game here, so we should not
depend on whether England or South Africa come to India to get money…
ICC is trying to control us. That's my feeling. Most of the other boards
do not like that we make so much money and that their revenue depends
on whether our team goes to play them. So the whole thing has been
reversed. For cricket the only market in the world is India. The
market is here. So we will control cricket, naturally.
Shah isn't exactly one of cricket's leading-edge thinkers, being
remembered at the ICC for his fervent denunciations of T20 during
Malcolm Speed's period as chief executive: he declared it an abomination
to which India would never be reconciled. Yet Astill came away from
their conversation with the feeling that Shah represented the BCCI's
"majority view". This may or may not be true. What it more likely
reflects is the prevalence of a view at the BCCI that the cricket
world's only proper attitude to it is one of homage.
For the time being, as it negotiates a broadcast deal for the cycle of
events beyond the 2015 World Cup, the ICC is relatively secure. But it
is also in the throes of reviewing its group structure, specifically the
use of the British Virgin Islands by its development arm, and its
revenue-distribution model, including how it will handle the allocation
of its next lot of rights monies. Late next year, too, an option is
exercisable on the ICC's headquarters under which it can be "put" back
to the building's developers, Dubai Sports City.
The council could emerge from the process a very different-looking
entity, most likely a smaller one, relocated to somewhere like Singapore
and reduced to a kind of provider of auxiliary services, although still
available to blame when things go wrong. Such a step would be
unobjectionable to most cricket publics, who identify the council mainly
with fiascos - overlong tournaments, unintelligible playing conditions,
the DRS passim.
That would leave the way open to a long-awaited extension of the IPL
season. In the IPL, the BCCI created a mighty sporting product that was
also a rod for its own back. The league in its original specifications
and duration was only a marginal commercial proposition for franchisees:
why invest in a sporting brand name in order to leave it inactive for
nine or ten months of the year? As soon as private capital entered
cricket, the rules were different - its impact has simply been deferred,
not avoided. The one thing of which we can be fairly certain is that
the interests of cricket will be the least concern of anyone with
influence over the decision. The predominant motivations will be
individual ambition, commercial advantage and potential political gain,
and by the time we're told what has happened, there will be nothing to
do about it.
Results,
Fixtures,
Players,
Countries,
News
