At one stage, the growth of BCCI as a financial powerhouse was probably logical and necessary for the game which is a religion in India. However, recurrent problems – the most recent being Sahara snapping all ties with the board – suggest that it has become too big and arrogant and may be headed for disaster, writes Arunabha Sengupta.
Published: Feb 07, 2012, 10:07 AM (IST)
Edited: Feb 07, 2012, 10:07 AM (IST)
When one nonchalantly severs the sponsoring hand that feeds oneself, there are definite signs of destructive delusion © AFP
At one stage, the growth of BCCI as a financial powerhouse was probably logical and necessary for the game which is a religion in India. However, recurrent problems – the most recent being Sahara snapping all ties with the board – suggest that it has become too big and arrogant and may be headed for disaster, writes Arunabha Sengupta.
Sometimes evolution crosses limits of utility and survival, and leads on to disaster and extinction. The plant eating Brontosaurus kept growing, possibly to evolve into a creature immune to the gnashing teeth of smaller carnivorous predators. However, once they grew enormous, the reptilian brain was not nearly enough to control the massive physiological system. Their bodies demanded unusual digestive time to handle the consumption required to keep it going. Eventually, the biggest creature on land failed to cope and became extinct.
In some ways, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) of today is very much like the over-evolved dinosaur of the Jurassic Era. Layers and layers of lucre consumed to build it into an unprecedented financial superpower in the history of cricket was perhaps a necessary step in the logical progression of the game. For a country where passion for the sport has merged with national identity and the sense of well-being for a major proportion of adherents, the growth of monetary muscle was perhaps an important mutation. If only to keep the supercilious snobbery of the Long-room of Lord’s from continuing to treat a cricket-crazy country as a vassal state harking back to the colonial past. It arguably served its purpose to prevent the Mike Dennesses of the world from getting away – when they strove to categorise the same expression of exultation as the natural reaction of a warm blooded youth on one hand and obscene gesticulations of a strange culture on the other, measured against their own yardsticks of fair play.
However, it increasingly seems that the BCCI has over-run the race for the survival of the fittest, has tripped and tottered on the threshold of ethics, and can be seen vanishing like a distressed mammoth into a quagmire of arrogance. The Sahara pull out may be the last level of sure-footing making way for predominantly unsure ground.
Domineering highhandedness
It is true that Sahara’s largely emotional allegations have to be met with scepticism – sentiments and sensibilities, after all, have little place in the brutal corporate world other than in falsified, eye-washing value statements. However, it does bring to the fore the domineering high-handedness that has accelerated in BCCI as their financial coffers have grown to bursting point.
With one-sided alliances, political clout and the commercial conquests of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the board has taken the ‘control’ within its name to freakish literal levels. It is one thing to extend crooked political tentacles and tie the International Cricket Council (ICC) into knots, so that the parent body of cricket dances like a puppet to the whimsical pulls of the strings, but taking the same autocratic attitude with a domestic corporate giant is a different ball game altogether. One can perhaps get away with dictating the Decision Referral System (DRS). scripting the Sydney-gate, tailoring the Future Tours Programme to suit the purse, and casually controlling the participation of Indian players in T20 tournaments other than the IPL; but when one nonchalantly severs the sponsoring hand that feeds oneself, there are definite signs of destructive delusion.
The march of happy times seems to have been called to a halt at the most unexpected moment and turned around on the double, making alarmingly good time in the backward journey of the last ten months. It is hard to believe that in April last year, India was sitting on the top of the world in two formats of the game, and the economic extravaganza of the IPL had built a virtual throne for the third format as well. The signatures had not yet dried on the renewed agreement drawn up with Sahara. The following of the game had seemed to turn a new bend with billions of feet planted heavily on the accelerator.
Multiple problems
However, since then, the fourth season of IPL has returned the lowest TRP, which spells disaster for a spectacle that feeds on television viewership. India has slipped quite some distance from the pinnacle of the Test world with whitewashes in England and Australia. And even when they had been decimating visitors in the cosy comfort of home wickets, the stands had remained empty in grounds that used to throb with electric excitement, with precious little done to engage an appropriate piper to bring crowds flocking back.
The Sahara pull out, after a 12-year alliance, now compounds the problems of BCCI soon after their turbulent split with Nimbus. The organisation remains proud and powerful, but now it has to deal with the simultaneous multiple problems of the lack of a major sponsor, a television rights holder, an IPL franchise and a taker for its internet rights. It more than underlines the prevalent views that the management of IPL is haphazard and pockmarked with vested interests and BCCI as an organisation is too big and too self-serving to care for basic niceties.
The dynamics of a complex cunning world of commercial sports cannot be mapped directly into tiny-tot talk, but nevertheless, a couple of age old adages seem to hold true – no one likes a bully and one cannot live alone. If the Board does not take stock of what is turning out to be a rather sticky situation, and mends its arbitrary, overbearing ways, it may soon find itself cut off by other allies and associates – ending up as a modern day mammoth, earmarked for extinction in uncomfortable playing fields.
(Arunabha Sengupta is trained from Indian Statistical Institute as a Statistician. He works as a Process Consultant, but purifies the soul through writing and cricket, often mixing the two into a cleansing cocktail. The author of three novels, he currently resides in the incredibly beautiful, but sadly cricket-ignorant, country of Switzerland. You can know more about him from his author site, his cricket blogs and by following him on Twitter)
