Mandira on their minds

Should the cash-rich BCCI be patronising the tawdry, unseemly, stunningly shallow Bollywood-isation of cricket coverage? Are its endless, relentless, financial desires that desperate?

Vikram Bedi Delhi

It would be timely in Indian cricket to remember the old, though these days discounted, truth that money is merely a means, not an end. This had been forgotten so much and so often in the Dalmiya years that Indian cricket has so far failed to adequately leverage its ample resources to the only proper end it should commit to—the excellence and glory of Indian international and domestic cricket as well as of Indian cricket culture as a whole.

The new dispensation has, predictably, shown good speed in sewing up many blockbuster commercial deals. But it appears to have an even worse case of the moral disease known as ‘confusing the ends with the means’ than the earlier regime. Perhaps, the feverish money-mongering of Lalit Modi, the new money wizard of the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), only seems to be worse than Dalmiya’s—perhaps it is in the euphoric ‘eight per cent growth’ and ‘India catching-up on China’ air.

Forgetting that the Indian board already has moneys far in excess of its needs and ambitions, even if these are understood maximally, Modi now wants to usurp the International Cricket Council’s (ICC’s) share of the boom in the Indian cricket market by apparently

calling off India’s future participation in the Champions Trophy, all of whose sponsors are companies targeting the Indian consumer market alone. This, despite knowing that a number of major cricket boards (New Zealand, the West Indies, Sri Lanka…) would be left  financially unviable were it not for the ICC’s redistribution of moneys from the booming Indian market via its showpiece events, the Champions Trophy and the World Cup.

There is considerable consternation

in the ICC and its member boards at the prospect of it being cut off from the

monetary froth of the India consumption-growth story. So much so that, Malcolm Speed (CEO of ICC) has openly scorned the Indian board’s money fetishism, suggesting that the only measure of cricketing power is the excellence of the international side—insinuating thereby that the BCCI is among the worst-administered boards around. He is not wrong, though he is, perhaps, being caricatural: there have been some improvements, and, also, it is too easy to underestimate the difficulties for even a sports body as dominant as the BCCI to build a culture of continuous sporting excellence in very adverse, utterly ‘third-world’ social and cultural conditions.

India’s not making it even to the semi-final stage of the Champions Trophy is the context for Speed’s attempt to mobilise Indian cricketing-public opinion: sweet timing. Except that the BCCI cannot be rendered culpable before the Indian cricket-public for very long. This public is amnesiac, and therefore fickle—both too forgiving and not forgiving enough. A few wins for the Indian side, the return of half-decent form on the field, and all is usually forgiven. Until, of course, the next

downturn in the team’s showings, in which case BCCI-bashing becomes de rigeur again.

This, though, is a good time for the Indian cricket citizen-fan to do something a little more constructive than vent violent anger at the ‘complacent superstars’, ‘the arrogant foreigner-coach’, the ‘weak captain’, the Indian players’ lack of virile ‘mental strength and killer instinct’ or the dirty ‘politician-turned-cricket administrator’. This is the time to make an attempt at calling attention to a few neglected,

unremarked factors in the continuing under-achievement of Indian cricket.