Leading Edge: India's second-hand jackboot would fit any board

TELFORD VICE

This country endured 296 years of racial oppression before unearned privilege for a few and brutal hardship for many was made law. Formal apartheid lasted a comparatively mere 46 years. Its aftermath will trouble us for significantly longer than that.

In those terms, cricket’s struggle to save its soul from being crushed under India’s jackboot pales into something close to insignificance. But our experience as a nation holds powerful lessons for the game. They are:

* Cricket had major political problems and inequality issues long before the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) discovered the value of gargantuan greed and bulletproof bumptiousness.

* The madness that the BCCI evidently runs on will throw itself off a cliff one day.

* When it does, everything will not be alright. Not for a long time; perhaps never.

International cricket has always been controlled by selfish people. Once, those people were England and Australia. In fact, had television not become a vehicle for delivering cricket to a large audience - and had cricket’s commercial value not exploded as a consequence - the world’s players would still be told what to do by the twin MCCs: one in Marylebone, the other in Melbourne.

So let’s not pretend that India are the only reason cricket is a mess. Without the BCCI, it would be much smaller and even less perfectly formed. And had England’s or Australia’s or Bangladesh’s or SA’s administrators - anyone but India’s - been besieged by television executives fanning them with large fronds banknotes (of course, it helped that no other country could put the best part of a billion bums on seats in front of the box) the home of cricket would have remained at Lord’s or the MCG, or upped sticks for Dhaka or the Wanderers. Bad people are bad people, whatever their race, culture or creed.

But bad people also get it wrong eventually, especially in sport - where they don’t often have access to weapons and political clout with which to entrench themselves, as they would do in the real world. Some, like Sepp Blatter or Louis Luyt, are grim survivors. But for every Blatter or Luyt there is a Bernie Ecclestone or a James Evans. Their egos, which is all they have to offer, get the better of them. So we wait.

For how long? No-one can say. And will cricket be better off for the BCCI’s demise as an obscenely monied bully? Probably not, because - as we can see from England’s and Australia’s eagerness to be part of the big three - there are plenty of pretenders to the throne. In the past, people would involve themselves in administration at high levels for the power and influence that came with the territory. They still do so for those reasons, but now they are also motivated by the money cricket has proved itself capable of generating.

Show me a sport suit of any shade and I will show you a greedy, dishonest, undeserving, deeply dodgy person. There are exceptions, but they need to prove themselves as such. Before that, they must be treated as if their default setting is mendacity. That is not cynicism talking. It is experience.

So is this: in international cricket, the glory matters much less than power and money.