It is about time senior cricketers spoke up against the mess that has beset cricket in India. The IPL fixingbetting mess calls for introducing a strict system of checks and balances on Indian cricket.
The end of the sixth season of the Indian Premier League has been in dismal conditions, with not just the league and the Board of Control for Cricket in India sullied, but the game of cricket itself being adversely affected.
Between the players arrested for alleged spot fixing to the president of the BCCI, N Srinivasan’s son-in-law being allegedly involved with murky people and dealings, even the healthy monsoon that has been forecast will be unable to cleanse the stench that emanates from Indian cricket.
It is not anybody’s case that due process of law should be subverted in the shrill demands that dominate the media. Ironically, some of the loudest critics of the BCCI and its president are also those who stood in line to get IPL largesse from him last year.
Yet, there is little doubt that the BCCI president’s continuation in office has become untenable, his son-in-law’s involvement being the proverbial last straw. Srinivasan’s personal or criminal culpability can be decided in court. But the BCCI is, quite simply, responsible for what happens to cricket in India.
By all accounts, there has been a massive failure in protecting the sanctity of the IPL. Therefore, both Srinivasan and IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla should have owned up and stepped aside – at least pending investigations.
Brazen defiance may work in the playground of legality, but it is a poor choice when it comes to winning public support. The job to both administer and cleanse cricket falls on the BCCI. But in the “anything goes” spirit in which the IPL has been run, responsibility is in short supply.
The problem with Indian cricket is a permissive culture. I don’t refer here to the razzmatazz associated with the IPL – parties, cheerleaders or the sex and lifestyle choices of players, or even the presence of denizens of the (unfairly maligned) entertainment industry. Rather, it is about being casual about the rules.
Sport at the highest level can only succeed if it exists in a controlled environment. As in a scientific experiment, the laboratory has to be pristine, the boundaries strictly defined, outside influences marshalled zealously. Evidently, the laboratory was breached during the IPL and those who hang around the fringes of the game gained not just access but control.
In that sense, the IPL is symptomatic of India’s emerging ethos, still coming to terms with an open economy with all its attendant pitfalls. Free enterprise unleashes vibrancy, energy and innovation, but history also shows that stringent checks and balances are needed if the environment is not to get vitiated.
Uncontrolled it can attract – apart from genuine prospectors – bounty hunters, gold-diggers, selfseeking cronies and cheats, resulting in destructive bedlam. Seen only from the prism of sport, this problem has occurred in baseball, tennis, football, boxing – indeed every discipline one can think of.
In his classic book on the professional tennis circuit in the early 1980s, Short Circuit, American writer Michael Mewshaw relates how players would tank matches, with officials and broadcasters looking the other way, to exploit the demand for the sport and its stars.
The problem gets out of control when the wink-wink approach involves several stakeholders and gets institutionalised. One doesn’t know as yet the extent to which the rot has set in Indian cricket but on the evidence of the past 15 years, it has possibly grown into a monster.
Cricket in India is today a $3-billion gravy train where the spoils – pecuniary and power – are shared by administrators, current and former cricketers, beneficiaries of the BCCI system and sundry opportunists. This means there is no one to watch the borders. As Juvenal asked in the 1st century AD: who will guard the guardians themselves?
The BCCI has a mammoth task ahead, not least of setting its own house in order. In the case of the IPL, for instance, the governing council can’t be a cosy club but must include outside directors and an ombudsman.
Coming under the RTI Act – but not under the government – is not as damaging to functional independence as the BCCI has made it out to be. To say that a multibilliondollar industry that affects the lives of a billion people is a private club is wearing a tattered fig leaf.
Domestic cricket too must be cleansed. Police investigation into spot fixing reveals that former players from the Ranji level are corrupting or being used to corrupt susceptible players.
Ultimately though, the current breach of the borders of cricket affects the final custodians of the game: cricketers themselves. Spot fixing sets foot inside the playing arena, which must at all time be sacrosanct.
This is the time for the players to find a voice and expression: as a service to the sport and themselves. The deficit of trust is not just in administrators, but has spread now to include players. If unaddressed, it could consume their credibility to the extent that the sport could collapse.
All things considered, do fans really care so much about administrators etc or about players? In the deepest crisis who would they trust more, N Srinivasan, Arun Jaitley, Rajeev Shukla et al or M S Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly?
This veil of silence that has been imposed or assumed must now be lifted or ripped apart. The integrity of cricket rests with the players and without integrity sport is meaningless. When the situation demands a raging bull, a holy cow is of no use.
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