The sick season

I had hoped to restart this column with a smile. After all, this was meant to be India's high season. The hard yards had been done last year: the draw in Australia was like a win, victories in Pakistan were glorious and unprecedented, and now was the time to cash in. Even the Indian cricket board was due to earn itself the handsomest of television deals, and wholesome prosperity, cheer and fulfilment beckoned.

Yet, just a week before a series billed as the biggest of their lives by many Indian and Australian players, fighting off gloom is a hopeless struggle. And this gloom is only partially caused by the fact that the Indian team has just been bowled out for 213 by an India A attack, with the unheralded Joginder Sharma - pressed into service only because Ashish Nehra hobbled off with a twisted ankle - claiming Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Yuvraj Singh. It has been caused mainly by watching the Indian cricket board reveal itself in the murkiest of colours.

It has taken only three weeks for three feelgood years to come undone. Undeniably, the progress has been real, but events in the past weeks, culminating in an election fought in the foulest of spirits, have reaffirmed that the core remains as rotten as ever. I have alternated between feeling horrified, repulsed, outraged and ashamed, until I was left with terminal depression. How long will it be before the rot at the core rises to the surface once again?

The grouse is not against the election itself. It's not even against the politics of the board, or even the politicians who come rushing in. Sports politics is often dirty, and every sporting body in the world has an elected chairman or president. Sepp Blatter has hung on to the presidency of FIFA since 1998, and Juan Antonio Samaranch managed to anoint himself as the honorary chairman of the International Olympic Committee for life. Even Cricket Australia has a nominated chairman in Bob Merriman. No, the scary part about the BCCI is not that it has an elected president, but that its governance is solely dependent on the will and whims of one man.

To be fair, Indian cricket owes a lot to Jagmohan Dalmiya. The brilliance of players like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar earned it admiration and respect, but Dalmiya made Indian cricket count. Without his financial savvy, world cricket would perhaps be broke, England and Australia would still have the veto, and Indian cricket would be a middling enterprise.

Dalmiya didn't invent the television market, but he spotted its potential before most others did, grabbed it and hurtled the cricket economy forward. He also helped Indian cricket forward by embracing contemporary ideas, hiring professional personnel to help the Indian team, promoting A tours, and investing in training infrastructure.

But, unfortunately, his reforms did not visit his own doors: the BCCI remains a retrograde, anachronistic body ruled by ad hoc-ism, arbitrariness and the fancies of its president or power-broker. Dalmiya has done a lot to make cricket a commercial enterprise, yet nothing to run it like one. Far too much depends on one man for cricket's good. It helps little if that man is hardly accountable.

India are about to play a Test series that has the world riveted. But we don't know yet on which TV channel we can see it, or whether we will see it at all. Pleading helplessness that the matter is now under the jurisdiction of the court simply doesn't wash. Who brought about this situation? Who delayed the bidding process until the 11th hour? Why wasn't this process completed five months ago? If a channel was ineligible by the criteria set by the board's own tender document, why was its bid accepted and why was it asked to re-bid?

Or take this. India play the first Test in a week's time. Forget picking the team, the men who pick the team haven't been picked yet. Only one of the current selectors was on hand to see India Seniors take on India A, where Sridharan Sriram, a genuine contender, scored a polished hundred. And that man, Syed Kirmani, the current chairman of selectors, won't be sitting at the next meeting.

Why? Because he was filling in for Brijesh Patel, who was Karnataka's representative in the South Zone quota. The men entrusted with the task of singling out 15 men to represent a country of a billion are not picked on merit. The selectors, who decide the fortunes of men who earn millions, get paid nothing. Their positions are handed out as favours. It's a miracle that berths in the Indian team are not privately auctioned.

No, the problem is not with an elected president. The problem is what is beneath him. Yesterday, Mid-Day, an afternoon newspaper, published a few pictures of the decrepit headquarters of the BCCI at the Brabourne Stadium. An organisation likely to have a turnover of Rs400crore (approx US$87million) deserves an office better than that.

First of all, it deserves to be run like an organisation. It deserves a chief executive who's accountable to the board. It deserves a chief financial officer. It deserves a marketing head. It deserves employees. After all that, nobody would grudge the president his post, or the powerful their dummies.

Sambit Bal is editor of Wisden Asia Cricket and Wisden Cricinfo in India. His Indian View will appear here every Thursday during the Indian season.