Dalmiya bargains: B-team in pocket, stars on the side

A highly placed BCCI source told The Indian Express that the four had been given the option of dropping out. ‘‘The working committee was unanimous that it wasn’t a good contract,’’ he said.

The reaction from Leeds, where the players are camped ahead of the third Test, wasn’t favourable. ‘‘The BCCI can pick and send a second-rung team to Sri Lanka if it wants, but the players will not budge’’, their spokesman and former India captain Ravi Shastri told PTI.

‘‘All the 18 players of the team (in England) are united on the issue and none of them is going to relent.’’

This is an unusually tricky situation even for Dalmiya, the consummate fixer, who has allowed things to reach this messy pass. Indeed, there’s been something mysterious happening in Indian cricket. Why, almost two weeks after the contracts affair first came to light, are so many questions unanswered?

• When were the contentious clauses on ambush marketing slipped in?

• Why did the BCCI inform the players at the eleventh hour?

In their statement yesterday, the players said they were first informed of the contract on July 13, the day of the NatWest Trophy final. Yet the agreement with the ICC was signed in May 2001.

• Why has the BCCI left today’s decision open-ended and not closed the issue once and for all?

And, finally, why is Jagmohan Dalmiya pushing so hard for a reconciliation, so keen to settle the matter, when other boards — the ACB, the ECB — are leaving it to the players? Especially when they (Australians and English) had got to know of the contract before the Indians did.

Dalmiya’s eagerness to reach a compromise, any compromise, and his obvious discomfiture with the whole situation seems all the more strange given that this is the kind of scenario he usually thrives in; the ICC apparently in the wrong, Indian officials kept in the dark.

The Sehwag affair is a trifling compared to this.

An ironic twist of fate for a man who calls himself the ‘pro-player president’.