Over a fine dinner in a luxury Bombay hotel on Sunday night, 100 members of the BCCI hierarchy agreed unanimously on a new President. A Proper Cricket Man™; a former captain, no less, who led India for 6 years and 195 internationals; and an experienced cricket administrator at both state and national level. This ends a period of 2 years when the BCCI didn’t have a permanent President and was governed by an unwieldy combination of interim office-holders and a Supreme Court appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA), which barely agreed with itself let alone the BCCI top brass. Step forward Sourav Chandidas Ganguly.
The position has become something akin to that of Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts - since N Srinivasan failed upwards in 2014, leaving the BCCI under a particularly opaque cloud to become the ICC’s first Chairman, here’s how the holders of the BCCI Presidency have fared:
2014: Shivlal Yadav - Interim
2014: Sunil Gavaskar - Interim (IPL only)
2015: Jagmohan Dalmiya - Died in office
2015-2016: Shashank Manohar - Resigned to apply for newly independent ICC chairmanship
2016-2017: Anurag Thakur - Sacked by Supreme Court and charged with perjury
2017-2019: CK Khanna - Interim; BCCI overseen by CoA
So the game’s richest and most influential body finally having a permanent President who has the full backing of the board is a good thing. Right?
Wrong.
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Ganguly hasn’t even been ‘elected’ yet, let alone taken office, and he’s already testing the heavy artillery. With an almost Nigel Farage-level display of the powerful playing at being oppressed, Ganguly stated:
“That’s one area that we will look into. We haven’t received any money from ICC in the last few years - money in the sense what we deserve. India generates 75-80 percent of global revenue, so that’s going to be on the agenda. Talks and discussions need to happen and we have to find a solution as this is not leading anywhere.”
The BCCI is due to receive $405 million over the 2015-2023 funding cycle. Not only is that almost 3 times more than the ECB, the next-best funded board, it’s 2.5 times more than the ICC’s 93 Associate members combined. Throw in $3.2 billion for international, domestic and and IPL TV rights from Star Sports, $219 million for neutral venue TV rights from Zee, $100 million from new team sponsor Byjus’s and $52 million from kit sponsors Nike, and it’s fair to say that the BCCI are doing alright.
But many of the 100 people in that Bombay hotel on Sunday night hanker for the days when things were even alrighter. Under the Big Three model, a structural coup enacted in 2014 by Srinivasan & co which concentrated power and money in the hands of the BCCI, ECB and Cricket Australia, the Indian board would have received $570 million in ICC funding from 2015-2023, with those outside the Big Three losing out. It is not enough, it seems, for the BCCI to win - everyone else must lose.
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The day after that Bombay dinner conclave, the ICC’s board meeting gave us several reasons to be cautiously optimistic:
Three things in particular indicate a long-overdue attempt from the ICC to clip the BCCI’s wing:
Tournaments every year from 2023-2031;
All ICC members to be able to bid to host them from 2023;
The establishment of a Governance Working Group.
Ignore for now the fact that the extra tournaments may be a nonsensical six-team ODI tournament: the fact that it is an ICC tournament means that the BCCI cannot claim the lion’s share of the funds from it, nor can they schedule a TV-company pleasing bilateral series during it. Nor will they, England and Australia be able to monopolise the windfalls that come from hosting tournaments.
But it’s the third that will make the BCCI most worried, and thus most belligerent. We don’t yet know the remit of the Governance Working Group, but we do know who will be on it. It will be headed by the chair of Cricket Australia, and staffed by the chairs of New Zealand Cricket, Cricket Scotland, the Pakistan Cricket Board and Cricket South Africa, and the president of Cricket West Indies.
You will note who is not on it. There is no BCCI representative.
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Even allowing for the BCCI’s administrative chaos and lack of anyone who could plausibly be that representative, it’s hard not to see this as a calculated move by Manohar, ICC Chief Executive Manu Sawhney and ICC independent director Indra Nooyi. They may all hail from India, but former Star Sports managing director Sawhney is used to dealing with the BCCI as his partner not his master, and former PepsiCo CEO Nooyi has no ties to the old guard.
As for Manohar…the fact that he is not only Indian, but used to occupy the position to which Ganguly is about to ascend, may never be forgiven by those he left behind at the BCCI. It was under Manohar’s stewardship that the Big Three model was broken down (though its legacy still persists in the hateful 10 team 50 over men’s World Cup), and his tenure has been characterised by battles, usually successful, with his former employers. His steadfastness and his consultative approach to governance have earned him respect and a degree of loyalty from the previously excluded nations, coinciding with the years while the BCCI was too consumed with counter-revolutionary bloodletting to do anything about it.
But now the Reign of Terror is over. The surviving members of the ancien regime have gathered behind a new champion, and out of the post-revolutionary rubble step Ganguly, who would no doubt be flattered to be compared to Napoleon, and Srinivasan, who makes for a rather taciturn Talleyrand. Make no mistake - while Ganguly was not Srinivasan’s first choice, it is the Chennai cement mogul’s vision that the lordly Bengali has been tasked with enacting. There will soon be a reckoning.
Manohar and the ICC had better be ready.