Milked Sheikh

Yet, tempting as it may be to take it at face value, the story is only half accurate. Bukhatir’s passion for cricket — ‘‘I first played the game in 1964 at the age of eight,’’ he told The Sunday Express, ‘‘I was then living in Karachi’’ — doesn’t come in the way of business savvy.

Bukhatir is chairman of the Cricketers’ Benefit Fund Series (CBFS), which has been hosting one-day internationals (ODIs) in Sharjah since 1984 and Tangiers, Morocco, more recently.

Pertinently, he is also chairman of Bukhatir Investments Limited, a business conglomerate with an annual turnover, he says, of ‘‘$ 1 billion’’ and with interests in real estate, shopping malls, automobiles, real estate, infotech — ‘‘We are the biggest IT company in the UAE, local dealers for Hewlett Packard.’’

In the immediate context, Bukhatir is chairman of Taj Television, the company that runs Ten Sports and which has just had its exclusive rights to the Indo-Pakistani cricket series handed over to Doordarshan (DD) by court order. In short, he’s just been milked.

Life was decidedly simpler back in 1981. That was when Bukhatir invited unofficial Indian and Pakistani teams — one lead by Sunil Gavaskar, the other by Javed Miandad — to play exhibition matches in Sharjah. He had smelt opportunity in the entertainment-starved south Asian diaspora in the UAE. Bukhatir certainly knew his market. Aside from memories of Karachi, he was and is fluent in Hindi, a legacy of many visits to Mumbai (‘‘I love the city’’).

In 1984, Sharjah saw its first official ODI. Test cricket arrived in January 2002, with the West Indies playing Pakistan. In the aftermath of 9/11, the team from the Carribean had refused to travel to Pakistan and the matches were moved to neutral Sharjah. Bukhatir’s dream had outgrown his imagination.

In the intervening period, there had been nightmares too. For 20 years, Sharjah saw magical cricket, Miandad’s last ball six in 1986, Sachin Tendulkar’s masterful centuries in 1998. It feted movie stars and socialites. Disturbingly, the stadium was also the haunt of Dawood Ibrahim — and never far away from the rumours about illegal betting syndicates.

When the match-fixing scandal broke in 2000, CBFS found itself in the line of fire. In 2001, the Indian authorities imposed a three-year ban on the national team playing at ‘‘non-regular’’ venues such as Singapore or Toronto — or, of course, Sharjah. Without Indian participation, Bukhatir’s cricket empire was wounded, his plans to replicate the ‘‘offshore’’ experiment in Tangiers crippled.

The year 2004 was supposed to be Bukhatir’s moment of redressal. The India-Pakistan series was meant to give Ten Sports the impetus to take on the Big Daddy of sportscasting, ESPN-Star Sports. Plans may have gone awry but there’re still two lighthouses on the horizon.

One, on March 31, the Indian boycott of Sharjah ends. Starting April 1, Sourav Ganguly’s team should be free to play wherever the CBFS caravan takes it.

Two, the construction of the Dubai Sports City has begun this year. When completed in 2008, the five million square metre complex will be about the most impressive permanent sports facility this side of the Suez: four stadia, one covered stadium, villas for 60,000 residents, a golf course designed by Ernie Els, Manchester United’s first football school outside Europe.

Not bad for a somewhat crazy sheikh.