Forget Rahul Dravid, N Srinivasan is India’s new wall!

N Srinivasan played out the whole episode like a deaf, Teflon wall in the face of logic and culpability © PTI

By James Marsh

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N Srinivasan’s performance at his press conference on Sunday teetered on the fault line between inspiration and delusion. There sat the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), plonked down like giant slab omnipotence, as he remained utterly unrepentant for and oblivious to what had happened in two of his fiefdoms, the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Chennai Super Kings (CSK). As far as crisis management at media appearances go, he was fairly impressive, displaying a mixture of relentless authority in the face of his accusers and well-maintained incredulity at any suggestion he himself could be held in any way responsible for a member of his family being arresting on suspicion of betting on matches involving a franchise he owns. The very thought of it was alien to a man of his standing’s moral framework, as he set about making plain to all who were compelled to listen.
 
There were kidney-punch questions, criticisms, seemingly irrefutable pieces of evidence chucked his way by the assembled journalists, but they all bounced off him, or at least he seemed to truly believe they did. Even when faced with the apparently cast-iron proof that his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was officially involved in several capacities at CSK, Srinivasan managed to bluster some defence about him just being a “young enthusiast”, a mere overexcited fan. Srinivasan played out the whole episode like a deaf, Teflon wall in the face of logic and culpability, an administrative Berlin to Dravid’s cricketing Jericho.

Later in the day, however, this facade cracked very slightly as he looked genuinely worn and hurt after being booed following the conclusion of the IPL final by the 60,000 crowd at Eden Gardens. It was hard not to refer back to what he’d said in his press conference about India Cements’ long-standing and ostensibly above board financial support of cricket and cricketers and wonder whether Srinivasan was musing on all the years he’s put into life, industry and the game, and yet how unjustifiably unappreciated he’d become in the face of such a trivial little corruption scandal. “The people have spoken, the bastards,” he was possibly thinking, echoing the words spoken by a former Democrat political strategist of the seventies even as his reputation became more Nixonite by the hour. No one felt sorry for him, but it wasn’t inconceivable somebody could have done. 
 
Indeed, it’s the politics which give such little hope for cleansing at the BCCI and, by proxy, world cricket. Srinivasan has never held public office in India, other than being the Sheriff of Madras for two years between 1989 and 1991, but the various vested political interests involved in both his retention and any, albeit currently unlikely, potential successor must again raise questions over governmental interference in cricket, a notion which has been dismissed as quaint and quietly put on the back-burner by the ICC in the last couple of years after some gung-ho proposals put forward a while back. 
 
In June 2011, the ICC Annual Conference called for a separation of powers between cricket boards and governments, giving national bodies a deadline of two years to have a clear out of politicians or face severe financial penalties. This recommendation was subsequently watered down a little in the Woolf Report which, although presented as broadly supporting separation, offered plenty of wriggle room, and stated that, “governments taking an interest in the development of cricket and providing support and patronage to Member Boards may be acceptable or even desirable. It is a matter of achieving an appropriate balance between support and interference. It is important for the credibility of such safeguards that once defined, they are enforced rigorously and consistently.”  Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were surely to the fore of Lord Woolf’s thinking here, and the new ICC President, Alan Isaac later picked up this baton of equivocation late last year when he said that there would now be a “period of reflection” on those initial measures, which he went as far as to term “draconian.” 
 
Despite this, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) recently went to great pains to point out — not wholly convincingly — that the appointment of Zaka Ashraf as its chairman earlier this year conformed to those 2011 standards so it appears that they do have some standing, if only as a public relations gimmick for national boards. The ICC’s position is therefore a little unclear. Are the 2011 proposals still valid or is the Woolf Report’s call for balance now the standard? Perhaps, in spite of the PCB’s apparent desire to acquiesce, it is the period of reflection that holds sway? Some clarity on this would be welcome, but, as with its anti-corruption unit, the ICC can only ever be a water pistol trying to put out a forest fire.

However, by accepting the status quo of government interference in the name of realpolitiking, it has only enhanced the power of men such as Srinivasan, whose connections allow him to remain upright and in place even as the dogs of logic and sense increasingly cock their legs at his fading brickwork. For the time-being he remains steadfast and immovable, India’s new cricketing wall who, in his own and depressingly probably quite accurate words, simply will “not be bulldozed.”

(James Marsh is a TEFL teacher based in the Czech Republic, although his real occupation is alienating those close to him by wallowing on statsguru. He blogs on cricket at Pavilion Opinions and can be found on Twitter at @PavilionOpinion)