A bright future for BCCI

A team of administrators has been appointed to the BCCI by the Supreme Court. The order may have come a tad late, but it promises a brighter future in the game’s administration. A whole set of “honorary” officials stand virtually eliminated thanks to the cricket czars they followed and who led them down the garden path into this losing battle against the top court. So much water may have flowed down the Ganga since the first case was filed in the matter of conflict of interest in 2008, regarding N. Srinivasan’s company buying an IPL team and yet the BCCI remained adamant that its autonomy was inviolable simply because it had money in the bank. Such arrogance was bound to come a cropper when measured against the principles of fair play for which the very game of cricket stands as a metaphor.

Financial probity might become an absolute priority as the reputed former CAG Vinod Rai and the financial expert and IDFC chairman Vikram Limaye are in the panel along with a woman cricketer and a historian, who might be able to steer the BCCI away from all the historical mistakes made in the last decade. Even at this stage, the board, with the active support of the government of the day presumably because one of its MPs heading the board was toppled, is attempting to scupper the reforms through legal challenges. There are a number of associations — including that of Mr Srinivasan whose excesses and defiance of court orders in his regime led to this present sorry state of affairs in the BCCI — which are allowing ineligible administrators to stay on in defiance of the Lodha panel recommended reforms which have the sanction of the top court. All associations must fall in line with the reforms if the BCCI is to win back its autonomous administrators.