Brand vs flag

Indian cricket has learnt to brace itself for the consequences of regional clout. With selectors representing different zones,token representation is discernible in team selection. Selectors often foist on the team fellow travellers with negligible chances of getting more than the odd game. Sometimes it works well too. When Sourav Ganguly was chosen for the England tour in 1996,critics sized it up as nothing more than the Easts assertion. As it turned out,Ganguly made consecutive centuries on Test debut,and in time India got its most successful captain till then. At its worst,thus,such territorial considerations give the team excess baggage; at its best,they give a player a shot,perhaps not justified purely on merit,to perform on the big stage and make it on the merit of that performance.

Many ways have been suggested to even the playing field for aspirants to a team. But what do you say when selectors acquire clear conflicts of interest in team selection? Consider K. Srikkanth. He is currently chairman of selectors; and as M.S. Dhoni recently informed us in a minor controversy,the selectors are accountable to nobody while deciding who plays for India and who does not. Srikkanth is also a brand ambassador for an IPL team,Chennai Super Kings. He will therefore invest some hope in their fortunes. But the former India bat and his fellow selectors are also present in South Africa to monitor the performance of Indian players with an eye to team selection for the Twenty20 world championship that follows soon after. For Srikkanth,thats as clear a conflict of interest as can be.

Srikkanth was unusually taciturn when asked about this. I dont want to talk about it, he told this newspaper. You ask the board about this issue. The board,alas,has a terrible record in taking conflicts of interest seriously. There is no transparency about the stakes its personnel have in cricket-related activity; with the IPL,those conflicts have become more pervasive. And when the going is as good for Indian cricket as it has been,these conflicting loyalties are too easily overlooked. But moments of reckoning do come. Were India to have a disastrous time at the T20 world championship,tolerance for these scandalous cross-holdings will dissipate. But need it come to that?