Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) yesterday chose to move part of this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL) to the matchfixing badlands of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) rather than stage matches in SA.
After the IPL player auction last month, the tournament’s chairperson, Ranjib Biswal, and BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel said SA would be the preferred host if the event had to move because the Indian government would not have the resources to secure matches due to a clash with national elections, which will run from April 7 to May 12,
Instead, the first 16 games of the event, which is due to start on April 16, will be played in the UAE. Another batch of games, to be played between May 1 and 12, could be moved to Bangladesh.
Rather than the BCCI’s known dissatisfaction with Cricket SA (CSA) chief executive Haroon Lorgat, the key reasons for the change of heart would appear to be the logistics of relocating so few games and the costs involved. Another, apparently, is that CSA insisted on the entire tournament being played in SA.
“If more matches were to be shifted SA would have been the automatic choice,” an Indian insider said yesterday. “SA was never out of contention, but more franchises wanted to go to the UAE and Bangladesh than to SA.”
When a similar security situation arose in India in 2009 the BCCI transported the whole of that year’s IPL to SA, where CSA and their affiliates delivered a stunning organisational performance at short notice.
The tournament ran seamlessly at a public level. Behind the scenes, IPL organisers seized control of stadiums and made unreasonable demands that saw debenture holders turfed out of their suites.
That led to the Gauteng Cricket Board being put under administration by CSA and the Wanderers being stripped, temporarily, of its status as an international venue.
The 2009 IPL pumped about US$100-million into SA’s economy, and CSA were paid a bonus of R4.7-million for the successful staging of the tournament. But the money was not properly declared to CSA’s board, resulting in the sacking of then chief executive Gerald Majola and the partial restructure of the board.
Between 1984 and 2000, India played 73 one-day internationals in the UAE, all of them at Sharjah - the centre of cricket’s matchfixing underworld. Also in 2000, the scandal that claimed the career of Hansie Cronje broke.
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Australia have played six tests in Sharjah since 2002. The ground has also hosted 48 ODIs since 2000 and nine T20 internationals since 2013.
But India, cricket’s richest and most powerful country as well as home to an illegal betting industry that felt a surge of US$5-billion during the 2011 World Cup alone, only returned to the region in 2006 in two ODIs against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi.
A judicial investigation into corruption in the IPL will resume hearings in India’s supreme court tomorrow. The focus of the probe is Gurunath Meiyappan, the son-in-law of BCCI president Narayanaswami Srinivasan.
While the International Cricket Council (ICC) welcomed the BCCI’s decision to stage IPL games in the UAE, they seemed to be aware of the dangers of doing so.
“Recognising the importance of the integrity of the competition, the ICC will provide its full support for the matches in the UAE, including through the provision of anti-corruption services,” the ICC quoted chief executive David Richardson as saying in a statement.
CSA ignored requests for comment.
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