Sunday Times - February 16, 2014
TELFORD VICE, Centurion
A son is desperate with fear and loathing. His father, he says, sent the police to beat him up and threaten him and his partner. “He could not believe that his only son was homosexual and he believed he could treat me for it. For me, he is no less than a psychopath.”
The father, a successful businessman, does not make important decisions before consulting his astrologer. Even unimportant decisions are given the crystal ball treatment: company vehicles are not parked until the astrologer ordains the spot that will bring good luck.
He is, according to someone who has been close to his circles for years, “a streetfighter who will do anything to win. Those on his wrong side are neither forgiven nor forgotten, but loyalists are looked after”.
This man is not some nasty nut from a novel. He is Narayanaswami Srinivasan, a chemical engineer, an avid reader of murder mysteries, a movie buff, a golfer who, before he took on the cares of becoming and remaining a billionaire, had the time to whittle his handicap down to six. To his lickspittles he is “Srini Sir”. He is also the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), a position he fills with the cold cruelty of a small boy deciding which wings to pull off which insects.
As such, Srinivasan controls more than 70% of the revenue that flows into cricket. That’s how much the BCCI earns for the game, largely from the sale of the rights to broadcast matches played by cricket’s most marketable team, India, and its most lucrative competition, the Indian Premier League. Barring a couple of comparative ifs and buts like England and Australia, India are cricket’s economy.
South Africa? They’re part of what has come to be known in recent weeks as the “small seven”: the test-playing countries who are not India, England or Australia, who comprise the “big three”. On this scorecard, how good a team you field does not matter. What matters is how much money you make.
In reality, there is only a big one, and that one is India, who have risen to that pinnacle in the past 15 years on the back of a re-alignment of stars Srinivasan’s astrologer would have killed to have identified.
Cricket was a twee, British colonial pursuit whose relevance was temporarily elevated by phenomena like the great West Indies teams of the 1970s and 80s and Kerry Packer proving, in 1977, that poorly paid players had a price and that he was willing to pay it if they signed up for his rebel World Series.
But, for the most part, England and Australia controlled the game. Everyone else knew it and did not have the money to change that reality. Until, that is 1993, when the Imperial Cricket Conference became the International Cricket Council (ICC), England and Australia lost the veto they had by virtue of being foundation members of the original ICC - South Africa, the third foundation member, had been sidelined by apartheid - and, crucially, it was decided that money raised by the sale of television broadcast rights would belong to the country that hosted the matches in question.
The deregulation of India’s economy, the satellite television explosion - currently the country has 748 commercial channels - and the consequent boom in advertising turned cricketers who had previously helped sell hair oil on billboards into walking, talking, home-invading billboards themselves. This revolution was not so much televised as made-for-TV.
Still, a catalyst was required. He had arrived on the test scene in Karachi, Pakistan on November 15, 1989, a callow 16-year-old whose mop of curls and angelic face could sell anything. He could also hit almost any delivery to the boundary, and with the grace and composure of a man twice his age. His name was Sachin Tendulkar.
As India’s economy and its television industry ballooned, Tendulkar grew into the most complete batsman cricket has yet seen - and into his persona as the “Little Master” and a “god” - and the price the BCCI were able to demand for their broadcast rights increased. With more money came more power, and with them came arrogance.
Not that the rest of the cricket world did much about stopping the creation of the monster. If anything, and in exchange for a few million dollars more, they helped Dr Frankenstein tighten the bolts at the modern prometheus’ temples by their eager acceptance of India’s monopoly. Perhaps anyone would have. In 1993, around GBP100 000 was budgeted to run world cricket. Between 2001 and 2007, the ICC banked profits of about US$300 000 000 - much of it Indian money.
All the while, the giant we know as Srinivasan was also growing. First elected to the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association in 2001, he was BCCI secretary by 2005 and the president by 2011. He is now in his second term as BCCI president, and is set to serve the ICC in the newly created position of chairperson.
Srinivasan is likely to assume that office despite his son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, being found guilty of illegal betting on Indian Premier League matches. Add that controversy to the slew of others that pollute every area of his life.
Plainly, Srinivasan is not a nice man. But he is the devil Cricket SA (CSA) would have had to make a deal with in the shadows of the International Cricket Council (ICC) board meeting in Singapore last weekend to hang onto a semblance of importance in the game.
Not that CSA, in their seeming obsession with ensuring that the truth is what they say it is, regardless of whether it is the truth, will admit as much.
Despite strong indications to the contrary, they are trying to tell us they did not change their position from opposing to supporting a BCCI-driven proposal to invest control of most of the authority and at least half the revenue in world cricket to India, England and Australia.
And that after stating their opposition to the original proposal, which even in the weakened state in which it was accepted by the ICC board has retained its key elements. CSA held the casting vote, and used it to ensure they would be back in favour with the BCCI.
The price of being out of favour is R318 000 000. That’s how much a meeting of CSA’s finance committee this week said had been lost when India shortened their tour to South Africa this summer from 12 to five matches.
CSA claim they don’t understand why the Pakistan Cricket Board, who along with Sri Lanka Cricket considered CSA their comrades in this fight, should say they feel betrayed by the South Africans.
“We were not allies in any sense,” CSA’s president, Chris Nenzani, said. “I believe we don't form any permanent allies neither do we make any permanent enemies.
“What we do is we form strategic allies at strategic points in time in order to achieve a certain point and once you've done that you move in different directions.”
There are many ways to confirm your principles are for sale. That’s one of them.
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