Internal Matters

FOR THE BETTER-MEMORIED FOLLOWERS of Indian cricket, Krishnamachari Srikkanth’s dismissal of India’s tremendous Test match defeats in Australia and England this season as just happenstance harked to a painful period in the near past. In late February, Srikkanth, who captained India in the 1980s, and is now the chairman of the selection committee, spent more time praising Virat Kohli’s century that had led to a win against Sri Lanka at Hobart the previous night, saying that it signified the spirit of Indian cricket. The cricket administrations of the 1990s were similarly callous about their fans, for they saw their responsibilities selectively, and chose to play up individual successes even as their own inadequacies chipped at the edifice of the sport.

Meeting the press after the selection meeting for the meaningless Asia Cup on February 29, Srikkanth, wearing dark shades, continued to erode the goodwill of his playing days. The cricket press contingent is largely a passive herd, but after India’s terrible tour, Srikkanth’s assertions—such as “I can 500 percent assure you honestly that nobody’s been dropped”—were so oily that you could practically hear the bullshit detectors fizzle and explode. So they threw him question after question until Srikkanth let his natural game take over. It was, in hindsight, the sort of foolish behaviour people YouTube endlessly. He told a reporter to shut up, and accused the journalist of ‘fingering’ him (the word he used was ‘ungli’). He then took aim at the press, saying that he couldn’t comment on speculation that Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan had been dropped, and not rested. And if that wasn’t enough, he then put paid to the hopes of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) becoming a more open organisation by telling the media that Khan’s injury report “need not be shown to you. They are all internal matters.”

Indian cricket in the 1990s was run by administrators who worked in ostensibly honorary capacities—they did their duty, in theory, without payment. But it turned out that the perks—the daily allowances, the travel money—were eye-wateringly high, especially in contrast with poorly paid regional cricketers who faced political and logistical hurdles to simply play the game. Strange happenings were commonplace: when a bowler who few people had heard of was sent to the West Indies to bolster the Indian team in 1997, Sachin Tendulkar, then the captain, famously—allegedly—asked, “Noel who?”

Like now, the 1990s were a time of more questions than answers. And, so, Srikkanth’s responses to the press are a reminder that the only thing that has changed between then and now is the outward appearance of Indian cricket, the bits we can see: how our players played, their attitude, their approach, their conduct. The enormous machinery that runs Indian cricket, insidious and invisible, remains as menacing and dysfunctional as before.

On occasion, the machinery and its workings come to light. When Sahara India, which owns the Pune Warriors India, threatened to pull out of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in February, leaving the BCCI with little time to bung in a replacement, Sahara’s press release read like adolescent agony at the cricket body’s conduct. Oddly, that angst could just as well have been expressed by a fan: “…but our emotions were never appreciated and [in] many genuine situations, were not given due consideration at all”.

In the end, they reached an agreement that helped both the BCCI and Sahara save face, but this show of camaraderie could not contain the altogether new perception that, for the first time in years, the cricket board was vulnerable—because, barely two months before the Sahara threat, the BCCI had cancelled its television rights deal with Nimbus, which had earlier agreed to pay a large fee, due to delayed payments.

This was also an ‘internal matter’ until it came out that Nimbus had reminded the BCCI that, even though they were paying through their nose for top-grade cricket, the promised series against Pakistan (more lucrative than the others) was nowhere to be seen. But this, in the BCCI’s opinion, should not concern us, even though these deals have ended up compromising the viewing experience. It is not news that fans of Indian cricket get little in return for their devotion, but the BCCI’s aversion to any kind of explanation should be especially worrying.

While these times resemble the past, there are crucial differences: today, there’s more money at stake, and more unregulated cricket, than ever before. The tamashas, or carnival games, played in distant venues back in the day were seen, quite rightly, as hotbeds of corruption. Now, an advertisement for the IPL boasts that the tournament is, in fact, a carnival. An independent review of the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption measures commissioned by the cricket body was released in February; it pointedly mentioned the IPL. “The view of those consulted is that the arrival of international T20 cricket and the Indian Premier League has considerably increased the risk of match-fixing and spot-fixing,” the commission concluded.

While talk of fixing remains only talk for now, what’s undeniable is the belief among IPL franchisees that rules are bent to favour a few teams. Allegations that senior members of the BCCI have serious conflicts of interest are glossed over by a jumble of bureaucratic utterances (N Srinivasan, BCCI president, for one, told Forbes that the cricket body wasn’t his “grandfather’s company”—but that hasn’t stopped him from leading the BCCI while his company, India Cements Ltd, owns an IPL franchise, Chennai Super Kings, which employs the Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, in addition to hiring the chief of selectors, Srikkanth, as the brand ambassador for the franchise.) What’s clear is that the IPL, and Indian cricket today, isn’t quite the game as we’ve known it.

Here’s what’s happening. When the IPL was launched, cinema attendance plummeted. Filmmakers described the tournament as a black hole on the film calendar. But this year, the months of April and May, when IPL 5 will be underway, will see the release of movies starring Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn, among others. This is telling, for it means that filmmakers believe the IPL no longer has the hold it once did. Commentators of the sport have for years now been prophesying the oncoming fatigue—too many games, too little at stake emotionally. During the series against West Indies and England, stadia in India went empty for the first time in memory. Everything was ‘about to happen’ until it just happened.

Few, if any, know the direction toward which Indian cricket is headed. Transparency is still just a buzzword, and the sport’s development is tended to with less alacrity than a Twenty20 International in South Africa (if you haven’t heard about it, well, there’s nothing to see here).

When N Srinivasan said that the BCCI wasn’t his grandfather’s company—which Indian Cements Ltd was—and that its management was “straight, clean and honest and will take care of the BCCI’s interest”, you could ask, with a perfectly straight face, what the BCCI’s interest is. Cricket? Questionable. Wealth? Watch how many hands go up for that one. For a few years this past decade, Lalit Modi, for instance, boasted that he had signed the most lucrative deals any Indian sport had ever seen, and that his creation, the IPL, was a moneyspinner.

At the annual Sir Donald Bradman Oration in December 2011 before the Australia series the same month, Rahul Dravid, whose finger on the pulse on the world around him is keener than those of his administrators’, lived up to the event’s billing as a “contemporary discussion … on the spirit of the game and cricket’s role in the modern world”. In the middle of a remarkable talk, Dravid said, “Let us not be so satisfied with the present, with deals and finances in hand, that we get blindsided. Everything that has given cricket its power and influence in the world of sports has started from that fan in the stadium. They deserve our respect and let us not take them for granted. Disrespecting fans is disrespecting the game.”

Srikkanth, by the looks of it, had heard no part of Dravid’s speech. So there here was, in front of the press, justifying the indefensible, playing down what every clearheaded fan can see. “Overall, I think things are okay,” Srikkanth said. “And I don’t think we should really worry about it… I hope by God’s grace we enter the finals and hopefully win the finals.”

If you’re a fan of Indian cricket today, your hopes and prayers are all you have—because you don’t need to worry about ‘internal matters’.