Leading Edge: So long Srini. Hello Dalmiya. How do we tell you apart?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Auckland

YOU might have thought there would have been dancing in the corridors of cricket’s lesser powers - like the International Cricket Council (ICC) and Cricket SA (CSA) - when news broke this week that Narayanaswami Srinivasan was no longer the godfather of the mafia otherwise known as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

Unlike in the movies, Srinivasan was not shot dead in a barbershop or over a plate of spaghetti. Instead, he was replaced by Jagmohan Dalmiya.

While Srinivasan was trying to make Sharad Pawar - a challenger for the position Srinivasan held but was being encouraged to relinquish because of an Indian supreme court investigation into spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League - an offer he couldn’t refuse, Dalmiya came round the outside like a buffalo girl and beat both of them to the punch and the presidency.

Srini deposed! Normal service to resume shortly! Cricket saved from itself! World peace looms!

Not quite. World peace could be easier to achieve, Isis and all, than ending India’s dominance of cricket beyond the boundary.

Just because Dalmiya is in charge does not mean the Indians are going to stop making most of cricket’s money, and keeping a larger chunk of it than they give to other countries. They are still going to call the shots, and the truth is they deserve to.

Cricket is an industry, not a democracy, and without India it would be but a blip on the international sporting scene, a small, strange game indulged in by former colonies and their coloniser.

The rest of the cricket world pays a price for indulging India because it’s the suits who make the decisions, not the players. For instance, most of the matches at the World Cup are day/night games. Which ensures they attract the largest television audience on the sub-continent. It also means teams who bat first in those games are unfairly advantaged. But, hey, get over it.

And it’s not as if Dalmiya himself will slice the cake more evenly. In the 1990s, in his earlier tenure as a heavyweight administrator, he cottoned on to the idea of selling the rights to India’s matches for increasingly vast sums.

It was also Dalmiya who, after the BCCI had tried and failed to stop CSA from appointing Haroon Lorgat as their chief executive, said, “Lorgat is a nice gentleman but it would be nice of him if he apologises.”

Lorgat has said no-one from the BCCI has told him what he should apologise for. The irony is that Lorgat himself has taken to demanding apologies from journalists, apparently for admissions he has himself made.

Not incestuous enough for you? Consider that Dalmiya - who was previously banned by Srini from holding any position within the BCCI, which led him to bleat, “I am being hounded” - is just another henchman in the bunch of cricket crooks commonly referred to in India as the “Chennai Mafia”. All the while, of course, Srinivasan remains as chair of the ICC. Oh, the sinister symmetry of it all.

So, there will be no dancing. Unless, of course, Srini tells Dalmiya there will be.