BCCI’s knee-jerk reaction smacks of double standards
India's cricket board has never been serious about cleaning up the IPL
The resolution of the working committee meeting of the Indian cricket board in Chennai, to put it mildly, was much more tame than expected. While the degree of punishment for the errant cricketers is the prerogative of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), its knee-jerk reaction on Sunday reeked of double standards and a desperate attempt to save face for the brand IPL.
The BCCI, on their part, may argue that they did not want to jump the gun by imposing life bans on the tainted trio, as speculated by a large section of the media. However, it looks more like a different set of rules for different people, as around the same time last year Srinivasan & Co did not hesitate to impose a life ban on the little-known T. Sudhindra, a journeyman cricketer who was named along with four others in a TV sting operation for spot-fixing.
The pertinent questions here are: Is the BCCI trying to take the heat off the situation because a big name like Sreesanth is involved this time? Or with the IPL in its final week, are they are trying to show more prudence than last time so that the brand of the cash-rich league does not take a further beating?
And this is not the only issue where the board has shown a lack of consistency in their emergency meeting in Chennai. While the board supremo admits on one hand that they are handicapped as they don’t have the mechanism for monitoring the bookies, the BCCI has still gone ahead and started their own parallel investigation into the incident.
The so-called preventive steps, like the appointment of an anti-corruption unit (ACU) official with each IPL team or the mandatory accreditation of agents of the players, also smack of tokenism. While the stipulations of the ICC have made the players’ arena a sanitised zone for more than a decade, the IPL environment sees at least a dozen officials and semi-officials hanging around with the players in team shirts. How realistic is it then to expect one ACU official to keep track of all of them?
Talking of scrutiny of the agents, here is a small anecdote: One noticed M.S. Dhoni’s band manager (as well an old friend) cheering the Chennai Super Kings from the VIP Box, sitting right next to the Indian captain’s wife in a team shirt.
No prizes for guessing then that the changes are at best cosmetic and will eventually have no bearing on the way the IPL is run. This is the third IPL that the Indian board has been running in the post-Lalit Modi era and they have hardly shown the inclination to ‘clean up’ the house, as initially promised.
A quick example: Two of the teams who were sacked because of irregularities in shareholding patterns and foreign exchange violations are back
after winning court battles. No one even talks about issuing IPOs for the teams anymore, as originally planned — for that would call for greater accountability and transparency.
Why, then, blame the players alone?
