Please, Mr Srinivasan, hire me

www.GOcricket.com - http://www.gocricket.com/Please-Mr-Srinivasan-hire-me/Telford-Vice/columnshow/44809067.cms

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

DEAR Mr N Srinivasan,

Please, kind Sir – may I have a job? I am not sure what I could do for you at the Board of Control for Cricket in India, but I would be happy to make tea or take out the trash or ensure that your toupee collection is correctly catalogued and kept in the manner to which you have become accustomed.

For any or even all of these important but menial tasks, I would be satisfied with being paid the merest fraction of what Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar reportedly earn. Whatever that amount is, I figure it has to be more than what a lowly freelance writer makes.

If none of the above takes your fancy, I would be willing to wear as a mask a cardboard cutout of the face of that pesky Haroon Lorgat and impersonate him having the temerity to take up a position as chief executive of Cricket South Africa despite having earned your lasting disapproval.

What made this man think that his old job as chief executive of the International Cricket Council gave him the right to tell you what to do and what not to do? And now that he has left the ICC he reckons he is free to do as he pleases and to hell with asking your permission. Honestly, what cheek.

Please note that as this would be a special duty, we would have to negotiate a special fee. Verbal abuse would be part of the bargain. However, should you wish to throw a punch at me or aim a kick at my shins while I am in character, the price would have to go up further. But we can talk ...

Speaking of whom, it would be remiss of me not to inform you that Lorgat could be cut from the same cloth as you. Or at least from a remnant of the lining.

Lorgat has, after all, admitted to offering reporters incentives of alternative information in return for them not writing stories he would rather not be published.

Of course, you would probably not bother with trying to persuade the press to write what you like. Why delude yourself that you can control what appears in the papers when you can simply disregard the press’ existence, as you do so well?

Now that I have gone down this road, perhaps I have stumbled on the service I could perform for your fine self – allow me to offer myself, Sir, as your humble South African servant; the man you could turn to find out what is going on here in Lorgatland.

I realise that the South Africans are low on your radar now that you have put them in their rightful place among the Small Seven, but you never know when their delusions of importance will make them do something even sillier than usual.

Paranoia has already set in, what with franchises suspecting CSA of snooping on their email accounts and apparently threatening to force lie detector tests on those who talk to the reporters whose work gets their goat.

Now, that and the fact that you have yet to find much use for ridiculous ideas like fairness and media freedom should ring an alarm in your head. It means that you, Mr Srinivasan, are not the only bad boy on the block. It also means you have rivals.

Know, too, that now that the great god of football is taking a serious tilt at India in the shape of the Super League – that they have found commentators more dangerously enthusiastic than Danny Morrison tells us just how serious the tilt is – you are going to have to deal with one Sepp Blatter.

He hovers, smilingly, like a geriatric cherub. He often wears the startled expression of a conductor who can’t quite remember where he left his bus. Do not be deceived – this man is a shape-shifter from sport’s twilight tunnel of all things bad. How else could he have survived 16 years as the boss of world football.

Happily, then, Blatter loves us down here in Africa. So much that he gave us the 2010 World Cup. The fact that our countries keeping returning him to office may have something to do with it. Whatever. He is often here, plotting awfulness under the guise of hovering, smiling and searching for a bus. That means I could keep an eye on him for you, too.

You might scoff at the suggestion that anyone out there could be as nasty as you. But consider the manner of your own rise to the very top and you will realise that you cannot afford not to watch your back. Or to have it watched.

Which is what I am offering to do for a small fee. Relatively small, of course. I have neither Mr Shastri’s Dabangg moustache nor Mr Gavaskar’s gift for looking like a civil servant asleep at his desk, so I would not dream of demanding what the papers say you are paying them.

By the way, in future correspondence in the course of what I am confident will be a long and rich relationship, could I call you N?

Perhaps not. Regardless, I am here: ready, willing and able to help.

Yours in the ongoing search for as much money and power you – or even me - could shake a toupee at.