Board Games

Eventually Maqbool 8216;Macky8217; Dudhia got the job. The Zambia-born Zimbabwean of Gujarati origin became CEO of the Bangladesh Cricket Board starting October 1. Bangladesh may not have much of a cricket team but it8217;s walked the first steps to a modern, professionally-managed cricket administration.

It is the sort of story that wants to make you sigh. Somewhere, deep inside every Indian lurks an undying optimist. He8217;s entitled to his fantasies: eradicating illiteracy, de-politicising economic reforms, cleaning up the political system8230;professionalising the Board of Control for Cricket in India BCCI.

As everyone knows, India8217;s richest sports body 8212; in financial year 2003-04, its income is expected to be Rs 73.71 crore 8212; is about as transparent as Delhi on a foggy January morning. Over the past week, two national selectors 8212; Kiran More and Pranab Roy 8212; have been brought under scrutiny in a bribery scandal and the board8217;s reputation for opacity has only got worse.

Has the selection process been compromised? Is the BCCI accountable to the cricket fan, to the media, indeed, to the country? There8217;s no point asking these questions. People have already drawn their own conclusions.

Some have argued that better paid selectors 8212; not 8216;8216;honourable gentleman8217;8217; who occupy honorary posts 8212; are the answer. At least one board official dismisses this: 8216;8216;If you8217;re a man of integrity, you8217;re a man of integrity. Salaries have nothing to do with it.8217;8217;

Having said that, the BCCI has institutionalised 8216;8216;shamateurism8217;8217;; its officials get paid nothing, because they8217;re supposed to be doing their job for the love of it. As a result, they are accountable to none.

So what8217;s needed?As one cricket official says, 8216;8216;Simply put, the BCCI has to bring its systems in tune with the fact that cricket is now a 12 months a year game, not one played for only about six months, with long gaps in between.8217;8217; It needs, he says, full-time, properly-remunerated people for:
8226; handling tours and international cricket
8226; domestic cricket
8226; finance and marketing
8226; public affairs and communication
8226; technical issues;
8226; umpiring issues.

Take the first: essentially scheduling, ensuring that the team gets the right practice facilities and so on. 8216;8216;These are minor roles that should be performed down the line,8217;8217; says one official, 8216;8216;when we tour abroad we hardly, if ever, meet the host board8217;s chief executive or president. We interact with key people responsible for running the tour. Here everything boils down to the BCCI president or secretary.8217;8217;

As a result, in Kolkata just before the recent tri-series final, it was left to Jagmohan Dalmiya, the BCCI president, to announce that Saurav Ganguly was injured and would not be playing. The Australian Cricket Board president would never dream of announcing Glenn McGrath8217;s fitness status. That8217;s the job of the coach, the physiotherapist or the media manager.

Does the Indian team have a media manager? Good question. Officially Amrit Mathur, a railways officer currently on study leave, is the BCCI8217;s communications director and went to the World Cup with the team over the past year as its media interface.

He was supposed to move to the BCCI on a three-year deputation, as a paid employee. Somewhere along the line the men who run Indian cricket got cold feet; and Mathur is going back to Rail Bhavan in January.

Take finance and marketing, long seen as the BCCI8217;s great strength. In 1999, the BCCI sold telecast rights for all cricket to be played in India for the next five years to Doordarshan. The deal earns the BCCI roughly Rs 54 crore a year. Famously, the BCCI did not invite sealed bids but waited for television channels to approach it and begin verbal negotiations; but that8217;s another story.

Astonishingly, the radio and Internet rights were bundled along with the television rights and given away free to DD. Nobody in the BCCI8217;s finance and marketing committee thought they were worth anything.

In the intervening period the FM boom and the explosion of cricket-related content on the Internet 8212; accessed by Indians from Minneapolis to Matunga 8212; have left the BCCI looking very, very silly.

In a corporate entity, an executive who failed to foresee the market thus would be reprimanded. In the BCCI, paunchy old men shrug and mutter, 8216;8216;What to do?8217;8217; The BCCI gets away because it is not a business corporation, it is not a democratic society, it is, really, a cartel.

In theory, the BCCI will tell you it has multi-member committees for all the tasks its critics demand full-time managers for. In practice, what do these committees do, other than meet periodically, collect their DA and fly home?

The working committee is a strange animal. The BCCI8217;s four office-bearers 8212; president, treasurer, secretary and joint secretary 8212; are ex oficio members. So is one representative each from the associations running India8217;s five traditional test centres 8212; Kolkata, Kanpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi. That8217;s one from each of the BCCI8217;s five zones.

Additionally five other associations, one from each zone, are rotating, one-year members. Finally, if an association is to stage a test match in a 12-month period, it is entitled to a place on the working committee for that year.

8216;8216;In this way,8217;8217; points out a former board official, 8216;8216;about 20 of the BCCI8217;s 31 member associations end up on the working committee.8217;8217; It8217;s one happy family.

The contradictions stand out. The Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association has a permanent slot on the working committee but the Karnataka Cricket Association does not. The locus of the game has shifted, the BCCI has not.

Of course, the office-bearers and the working committee change by the year. Then the merry-go-round starts again.

A sports channel executive sums up what happens next: 8216;8216;The BCCI is just so ad hoc, it doesn8217;t even have a central address.8217;8217;

If you visit the ICC website hosted at http://www.cricket.org, you8217;ll find that the England and Wales Cricket Board8217;s home is at Lord8217;s, London. The Pakistani board8217;s HQ is Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore. Cricket Australia8217;s home is in Jolimont, Melbourne.

The BCCI8217;s address is: Kairali, GHS Lane, Manacud, Trivandrum. Why? Simple, it8217;s the address of the current secretary, S.K. Nair.

As they say, there is the right way, there is the wrong way 8212; and there is the Indian way. It8217;s a principle the BCCI has perfected to an art form.