Bouncers flying in at him, Pawar offers straight bat

In his first big crisis since assuming office, BCCI chief Sharad Pawar today issued a plea to keep politics and sport separate. He made this...

In his first big crisis since assuming office, BCCI chief Sharad Pawar today issued a plea to keep politics and sport separate. He made this appeal on a day when he fielded a call from irate West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya, and when Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said he would allow a discussion next week in the House on the issue.

Only the subject of the controversy remained silent. Sourav Ganguly stayed put in his Kolkata residence today, saying he had no comment to make.

Pawar played a lone innings. It would cause ‘‘irreparable damage’’ to Indian cricket and cricketers, he said, if team selection figured in Parliament. He said he hadn’t met the selectors yet, and believed ‘‘there is no point discussing it (the selection process) in public.’’

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Selecting a team, he said, was an expert’s decision and ‘‘if the selectors feel they have committed a mistake, they will correct the same when necessary.’’

If Pawar was unsure of how to handle the crisis, he got a not-so-gentle nudge from a predecessor. Jagmohan Dalmiya shot off a letter today pointing out that BCCI convention had it that the president was consulted over selection issues involving senior players.

He also said the president had the power to change selection decisions and cited precedent: N K P Salve reinstating Sunil Gavaskar, ditto BN Dutt and Kapil Dev and, in 1946, the inclusion of Mushtaq Ali.

Perhaps that’s what prompted Pawar to say, later in the day, that he’d asked chief selector Kiran More to explain the team selection procedure for the Ahmedabad Test.

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The matter is not likely to end there. Raj Singh Dungarpur, eminence grise in the Pawar camp, said the president would be setting a bad precedent in asking for a re-think. And BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah ruled out the possibility of the decision being revoked.

In Kolkata Today

• Buddha says it’s ‘an insult to Bengal’

• Metro Railway and railway services disrupted

• Traffic held up due to road blockades

• Sports organisation calls for Bengal bandh on Dec 20

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