The day cricket failed itself and society failed cricket

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

LAST year, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) hacked seven of the 12 matches their team were due to play in South Africa out of the tour schedule, and there was nothing Cricket South Africa (CSA) could do about it except be relieved that MS Dhoni and his team arrived at all.

This year, the BCCI have thrown their toys out of the box and their lawyers into the fray over West Indies’ players abandoning their tour of India because of a dispute with their board over money.

West Indies’ next engagement is in South Africa in December and January, and after significant pessimism that they would turn up the latest noises out of the Caribbean are that they will.

The irony cannot be lost: CSA should forgive the BCCI for some of their brattish behaviour of last year if the pressure the Indian board puts on the recalcitrant West Indians makes them straighten up and fly right to South Africa to play all three Tests, all five one-day internationals and all three T20s. Avoiding being sued for millions of dollars by still another national board should be a powerful incentive to do just that.

It has taken too long for the BCCI to give world cricket something besides money, but we should probably be grateful nonetheless. At last, we can take India seriously. Finally, all that excess is being wielded as authority. Not before time, India are accepting the responsibility of leadership - a role they have demanded for themselves for years.

They are doing so selfishly, of course. Had the Windies baled out of a tour to South Africa, for instance, the BCCI would have kept their focus fixed firmly on their bejeweled navel and not uttered a sound. But one improvement at a time - today leadership; tomorrow the recognition that other countries do not play cricket only to provide opponents for India or hired guns for the Indian Premier League (IPL); a decade or four from now, selflessness. Hey, we can dream, can’t we?

In fact, the revolutionaries out there should realise that the best way to transform this hopelessly outdated game that swaps one bunch of colonisers for another would be for more teams to pull out of visits to India.

Cutting off the supply of tours to apartheid South Africa helped force lasting political change. Surely denying the BCCI legitimate opponents for their team to play against would have a similar effect? Perhaps not: already the IPL tells us the BCCI will invent whatever reality suits them. There is, in fact, nothing to stop them from rounding up rebel teams, paying them far more than what other national boards could, and calling those matches Tests and one-day internationals.

That worked in apartheid South Africa, at least for a while. And cricket in apartheid South Africa had a lot less money to throw at its problems than the BCCI.

If all of the above sounds cynical and sarcastic, that’s because it is - and not without reason.

On Monday, the BCCI revealed that they had received a letter of apology from the West Indies Cricket Board in which the latter admits to their bankruptcy. On the same day, India’s supreme court decided to spend another four days deciding whether the BCCI’s president, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, should be permitted to stand for re-election despite strong evidence that he is dangerously unsuited for his position.

The court was furnished with the Mudgal report into spot-fixing - which implicates Srinivasan, the most powerful man in cricket, lest we forget - a week ago. Has the court read the report? No.

So, we are stuck with an inept, penniless national board grovelling at the feet of another that is ridiculously rich but riven with wrongdoing from the top down. A higher authority has the power to do something about the mess but sits on its learned hands instead. If that is not reason to succumb to cynicism and sarcasm, nothing is.

Some time in the future, perhaps soon, perhaps not, when cricket as we know it has shrunk to the size of croquet and is most widely played in prisons filled with aging white-collar criminals, we should remember days like Monday; when cricket failed itself and society failed cricket.