Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association miffed as Indore, Gwalior overlooked in match allotment

The last time Indore’s Holkar Stadium saw international action was back in December 2011, when India and West Indies met in an ODI. Gwalior’s Roop Singh Stadium in fact hasn’t hosted a high-profile contest since South Africa were in action in February 2010. Incidentally, both those matches witnessed significant landmarks with Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar scoring ODI double-centuries. MPCA secretary Narendra Menon said the state association was keen on finding the reason for the snub.

“We have not been getting matches for a while now. We don’t know the reason behind this. The MPCA is not part of the BCCI working committee so we don’t know what is happening within the offices of the board but we are surely going to try and find out,” Menon said.

No rotation policy

It is reliably learnt that the board’s tours and fixtures committee haven’t followed the traditional rotation policy during their previous two meetings and matches have been allocated to those state bodies, who have backed the incumbent BCCI bosses.

The one reason doing the rounds in the BCCI inner circle for this step-motherly treatment, is that it’s the board’s response to MPCA president Jyotiradtiya Scindia being the first person to ask for N Srinivasan to step down after his son-in law Gurunath Meiyappan’s name propped up in the IPL spot-fixing scandal last year.

Sanjay Jagdale, a member of the MPCA and then BCCI secretary, too had resigned in the aftermath of that particular scandal never to return to the board’s affairs.

Umpires Academy in limbo

IN another development, BCCI will be conducting its umpires educational programme and seminar from August 5 at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) in Bangalore.

The seminar was previously held annually at the Umpires Academy in Nagpur. But sources have claimed that the academy itself might get shifted to Bangalore with the final decision expected to be taken during the BCCI’s AGM in September. The BCCI had inaugurated the Nagpur-based Academy back in 2010 when Shashank Manohar was board president and Srinivasan the secretary.

Manohar had famously spoken out against the BCCI bosses during the spot-fixing scandal and some believe that the relocation of the Umpires Academy from Nagpur to Bangalore could be a result of that.