The Challengers

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

The ICL may not turn out to be a success, but it has given the BCCI a wake-up call. L Suresh reports.

They said it wouldn’t be able to find enough players. 51 players were signed up. They said the stars wouldn’t be a part of it. Everyone from Brian Lara to Glenn McGrath, Peter Fleming and Inzamam-ul-Haq are being spoken about. They said Twenty20 was a young man’s game and only retired veterans were joining in. 20-somethings like Ambati Rayudu and heaps of players from Bengal and Hyderabad leaped into the fray. They said it would fail to attract international class. Mohammad Yousuf, Chris Cairns, Nathan Astle – class really doesn’t get better than that. They said that the state cricket associations would not provide grounds for matches. Laloo Prasad and the West Bengal Government promptly threw open the Railways grounds and the Eden Gardens respectively.

They further assumed that there wouldn’t be enough sponsorships. The Sahara Group and Bisleri have already evinced interest in sponsoring teams and tournaments. Chennai’s Mayajaal has been identified as a coaching venue. Sandeep Patil and Pranab Roy have already been signed on as coaches and John Buchanan, if he agrees to come on board, could well be the star who could dwarf the best of cricketers. Kapil Dev, Kiran More and Prasanna have taken on the mantle of top management. Zee Sports and Dish TV are all set to relay the matches across the country.

So there you have it. For the first time since the inception of Indian cricket, the BCCI finds itself in a scrap – and for the first time, it has nothing to do with telecast rights or an election. It’s too early to speculate how this battle will turn out to be – a Hercules vs Atlas clash of the Titans or an Alien vs Predator rumble of the monsters.

Forget the World Cup, the Ashes, the Indo-Pak encounters and the Twenty20 matches, this is the real thing. The bash up between two giants, both of whom live in palatial homes with backyards where money grows on trees.

It is ironical that the Twenty20 tournament has proved to be both cause and effect in this spectacle. It was for the Twenty20 World Cup that most countries chose to overlook their star players and a good lot of them ended up joining the ICL – to play the Twenty20. The debacle could have easily been avoided if only the Boards had called in the omitted players and explained to them their new-found policy of grooming young talent through the shorter version of the game. But for long, cricket administration has been, quoting MTV’s fillers – one’s father’s ancestral property, and for many years, players have had to contend with learning about their omission from the media. Not any longer. The players finally have a place besides home (or the neighbourhood pub) to go back to if they don’t find themselves in the team. There is the ICL.

A short audio visual of the scrap-up so far would be best edited to a sound track of ‘Can’t stop this thing we started’ by Bryan Adams. ICL fired the first salvo and it has hit the BCCI where it hurts most – its hugely inflated ego. Now there’s no going back for either party. With the kind of money pumped in, with the kind of contracts being offered, walking away from the battlefield is no longer an option, unless one sees the next set of punches being exchanged in the court of law.

And that too has happened. The ICL has gone to court with a simple question – who is the BCCI to go around telling the public at large that it is the official representation of India? In fact, the BCCI had absolved itself in an earlier case involving the Zee telecast rights by claiming to be a private body and only answerable to its members. Furthermore, it has also gone on record that the team represents the BCCI, and not India.

Records state that the players employed by the BCCI are ‘employees of a private society registered as an association under Tamil Nadu's Society Registration Act of 1860’. This association is affiliated to a limited company – the ICC - registered in British Virgin Islands. Well, as people once used to say about a typical Bradman innings, “this one is not going to end in a hurry.”

If there’s one thing that the emergence of the ICL has successfully accomplished, it is a shake-up - of the cricket system, the age old policies of governance and the oligarchic control of the game by a body comprising members who have little or nothing to do with cricket. While the ICL may not have got its choice of players, with McGrath, Warne, Fleming, Shoaib Akthar, Mohammad Asif, Boucher, Langer and Damien Martyn either undecided or having refused lucrative offers, it sure has created a strong foundation for itself with big names for the behind-the-scenes activities - Kapil Dev, the biggest influence in Indian cricket besides Gavaskar, Tony Greig the expert on breakaway leagues thanks to his precious experience with Kerry Packer, Dean Jones, the man with as many contacts in Asia as he has in Australia, and the wisdom and experience of Erapalli Prasanna.

So let’s announce the challenger and the crown holder. On the left, weighing years of experience in international cricket are Messrs. Kapil Dev, Tony Greig, Dean Jones and Prasanna. And on the right, weighed down by their zones, factions, political strife, farcical elections and gargantuan money bags are, err… a bunch of gentlemen whose closest brush with cricket was when they passed a TV when a live telecast was on. No competition, you would say?

But the extent to which the ICL may succeed can be gauged by the tremors felt at the BCCI. The knee-jerk reactions have already begun and in what is likely to be a bonanza for long-forgotten state players, domestic fees have gone up. The prize money for domestic tournaments is also going up exponentially. A Twenty20 format – the Professional Cricket League - has been quickly assembled to counter ICL’s Twenty20. Even as his son Rohan is contemplating joining the ICL, Gavaskar Sr. has been put in charge of BCCI’s version of the hit-and-run game, a move touted by news channels as reviving the infamous Gavaskar-Kapil Dev rivalry.

Sounds good, but isn’t someone missing a point here? With groans of aches and pains and injuries and overcrowded schedules, it is more than likely that key players from most countries will give such jamborees a miss. If that happens, we are back to a virtual replica of the ICL Twenty20, with out-of-work and out-of-action players battling it out. One up? More likely that it’s one more.

Honestly speaking, the ICL is yet to take off and has a long way to go before it can achieve the status that BCCI has reached in the country. But by such exaggerated reactions to the new-found league, the BCCI is actually making it out to be stronger than it actually is. Players currently in circulation are being banned for joining the ICL while those who have retired are being banished from their respective state associations. (Of course, in all its benevolence, the BCCI is also being rumoured to be offering a ‘full pardon’ to those players who are willing to do the u-turn and come back into its fold.)

The contenders have already been labeled the ‘rebel team’ and the ICL has already pointed out that BCCI’s team is not the ‘official’ one. It would be interesting to witness a situation when a Twenty20 gets incorporated into the Olympics or the Commonwealth and India has to send an official team. So which would be the real Team India?

Meanwhile, state associations have been ‘actively discouraged’ from allowing their grounds or infrastructure to be used by the ICL for training or for conducting matches. And of course, the biggest gaffe of them all, one that is likely to backfire in the BCCI – the shoddy treatment of Kapil Dev.

While one can celebrate the Hazares, the Merchants, the spin quartet and the Gavaskars of Indian cricket, it is beyond doubt that Kapil Dev has single-handedly brought India to that turning point in life when cricket began to be taken seriously by fans and marketers alike. To a drowning soul clutching at straws, the 1983 Prudential World Cup came in like a Baywatch lifeguard, not just saving millions of Indians who, after decades of defeats, were fast sinking into depression, but also glamourising a game that suddenly gave its players star status.

The NCA Chairman’s Post, the assorted memberships and the meager pension is chicken feed – the loss of which should leave Kapil completely unperturbed. What he should do now is dare the BCCI to wipe out his contribution from their records. 687 international wickets, the famous 1986 series win in England, his fabulous 175 against Zimbabwe and that crowning glory – the Prudential World Cup. In a decade, he notched up half of India’s most memorable moments over a hundred years. Will the BCCI delete these little entries from their columns?

If the BCCI sat back and reflected on the turn of events, it would realize that its contracted players, barring a couple, have a lot going for them in their current avatar. Besides graded payments, their endorsements, business interests and other lucrative means of income keep them all above board when the wave of greed sweeps across. In effect, it would only be the fringe players who would ‘defect’ and that wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. Not only would it give a look-in at younger talent, but it would also clear the air of the musty lot who are not getting anywhere in life.

Cricket has seen much worse in terms of an exodus of talent. The rebel teams to South Africa, the Packer’s Series and even the recent mass boycott of the West Indian team for the IndianOil Cup in Sri Lanka – Boards have had to contend with far greater damage-control measures. Which is why it is laughable to see the BCCI break into a sweat even before a ball has been bowled. In fact, hourly updates on the goings-on are making it difficult to find out what exactly is the latest on this long-drawn soap. But one thing is for sure - ICL, BCCI, NCA or KSCA, the cricket fans will be LOL (Laughing Out Loud).

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 02 September, 2007)