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The ball is in review committee's court

The review committee of the BCCI might be forced to intercede and make a decision in the snowballing spat between Saurav Ganguly and Greg Chappell

Cricinfo staff
24-Sep-2005


Sunil Gavaskar will play a crucial role in steering India out of the current mess © Getty Images
The review committee of the BCCI might be forced to intercede and make a decision in the snowballing spat between Sourav Ganguly and Greg Chappell. The committee meets on September 27 in Mumbai to review the Indian team's performance in the two tours of Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.
Former player Ravi Shastri, who is a member of the committee, confirmed the meeting's agenda. "We will review both tours", he told the Mumbai-based newspaper DNA. Ostensibly, it will be a review of how each player performed, but as the ambit of the meeting includes player behaviour too, Chappell's latest email to the board castigating the captain will certainly figure in the discussions.
The review committee includes Jagmohan Dalmiya, Ranbir Singh Mahendra, currrent BCCI president, S K Nair, board secretary, apart from the three former captains- Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Srinivas Venkatraghavan.
"Enough is enough," an said an angry Mahendra. "This controversy has brought a bad name to Indian cricket. We cannot allow it to go on. We will find out the truth."
With Chappell's allegations reportedly pointing to Ganguly's desperation to hang on to the captaincy, even at the cost of being a disruptive influence on the team, and his lack of mental and physical fitness to survive the rigours of international cricket, the board will certainly not be able to take an ostrich-like attitude to the whole issue.
Ganguly, on his part, has made any compromise near impossible by casting aspersions on the coach's very credibility. "You can imagine the the character of a person who within hours of a truce goes and writes such an e-mail," he told the Bengali daily Ananda Bazaar Patrika..
"This is unprecedented, differences of such intensity. Earlier if there were differences in the team they never used to come out. It used to be sorted out within the 'family' itself. But now, see what you have ... during the tour one group of players goes to the Victoria Falls while another sulks. That itself is an indication of a serious rift," Syed Kirmani, former wicketkeeper, told a television channel.