SO ARE THERE benefits to being a non-controversial, non-political player in the BCCI?
Yes there are, ask the new BCCI ‘honorary’ secretary Sanjay Jagdale.
A former first-class player, a former national senior and junior selector, the tall Jagdale gets set to don a big role in Indian cricket. Jagdale was always a side actor, quietly working in the background as Indian cricket made rapid strides.
As a selector, Jagdale earned the trust of his chairmen, Chandu Borde, Kiran More and Dilip Vengsarkar. Insiders believe Jagdale was the man who initiated a number of radical changes in Indian cricket.
Whether it was the sacking of Sourav Ganguly as captain, or installing MS Dhoni as the Twenty20 captain for the inaugural world event. Some even give him credit for ending the one-day international careers of Ganguly and Rahul Dravid.
The biggest feather in the Jagdale cap, according to many, is the fact that he proposed the two-captain theory with Anil Kumble in charge of Tests and Dhoni taking care of ODIs and Twenty20s.
They say Jagdale thinks passionately about the game and is a quiet man who makes his point with a lot of force behind closed doors.
So his elevation as the cricket Board’s ‘honorary’ secretary should be good news, right? Maybe not so. Here’s why.
Jagdale is but a compromise choice as sniper attacks from East Zone, led by Jagmohan Dalmiya, scuttled the move to elevate a younger Ranjib Biswal, also a former cricketer, to the post of secretary. Jagdale emerged as the compromise, non-controversial candidate.
Biswal, the more in tune and aware of the politics administrator, was sacrificed to satisfy the new ally (Dalmiya).
After three years of having its strongest secretary since Dalmiya, BCCI will slip back into an era when the secretary waited for a go-ahead from the president for anything and everything.
This has been part of the glorious ‘democratic’ tradition of the BCCI. If the president is powerful, like what Dalmiya was and like what Srinivasan will be, the secretary will just remain a rubber stamp.
His best role will be to convene senior selection panel meetings, make notes. But even then, he will need presidential approval before releasing players for any overseas assignments.
At least the previous Board secretaries, apart from Srinivasan, got an opportunity to attend ICC meetings. It remains to be seen if Jagdale attends any of these meetings.
So as a quip in one of the newspapers suggested, it is back to the Dalmiya era when the president and secretary were one and the same.
Of Committees And The September Syndrome…
Much hullabaloo has been created over the fact that Sunil Gavaskar is stepping down as technical committee chairman and the fact that Sourav Ganguly is going to take over.
Well, there is nothing to crow about it. The technical committee meets, if required, once in a year and sometimes does not even meet. So the committee remains just on paper and it sounds very nice to sex it up and say that Ganguly is being offered a role.
The same is the case with National Cricket Academy. The NCA committee hardly ever meets. In fact the NCA panel talks about setting up zonal academies every year, about getting bigger land and so on. There was even talk of shifting to Hyderabad.
But again in the glorious democratic tradition of the BCCI nothing ever moves till the powers that be actually want it to.
For most other committees it is just a year-long stamp of approval that the BCCI mandarins accord to themselves as acting for the greater good of the game. Take a look at all the 13 committees. Most of them have never met for years, but get reconstituted annually as a routine.
These committees finally have no say anyways because everyone knows where the final power rests. The running joke in Dalmiya’s regime was that the working committee would be told of a decision and everyone would just nod their heads and go with it.
Expect much the same.
The most moribund (naturally?) is the museum committee, which has been in existence since 2005-2006. There are all of 13 wise men whose collective wisdom is supposed to be directed towards helping with setting up a museum in the BCCI office.
The amazing part though, is that for five years this panel has got bigger but has never found the time to make one extra move to make the dream of a cricket museum a reality.
This is much like what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the BCCI dragged its feet on setting up its own headquarters.
As is its tradition, yet another committee, called the Headquarters committee was set up. This committee met sporadically over the course of 10 years, scouted land in Mumbai and even Delhi.
The biggest decision of this panel was that it did not take any decision. Finally Sharad Pawar took over in 2005-2006 and in seven months the spanking new BCCI headquarters was ready.
BCCI gets into a Come September syndrome, whereby they believe that forming committees annually is an effective way of showing work is happening.
But the problem is decision making becomes hostage to this September AGM. These committees have members who are there for just a year, so do not have long-term vision, as is the case with the parent body itself.
Even if the committees don’t meet, they exist on paper and the BCCI gets an opportunity to tell the world that they are on the ball in matters cricketing.
No one ever cross checks about these issues and in the end, these nondescript committees slip under the radar.
The only time when the BCCI was shaken out of its slumber was when the Kotla ground in Delhi was deemed unfit to host a one day match. Senior BCCI officials watched with shock as the match was called off due to a dangerous pitch.
The result of the global insult inflicted on India and more clearly on BCCI was that the grounds and pitches panel was disbanded immediately.
But then again a new panel did not get named till, you guessed it right, September. This is the glorious tradition the BCCI follows by rote.
In a way it is good that there is no inquiry committee into the England debacle. Who knows, that panel may never ever meet.
FOOTNOTE: The new chairman of the media committee (again a dysfunctional panel) is the suave and media savvy former Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. If past history is anything to go by, in any case for the next two years no one will be allowed to talk, so maybe this is another of those on-paper panels. Or is it? Maybe time will tell otherwise.
