IT MUST have seemed rather odd, especially for those involved with administering Indian cricket.
Late last week the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced the venues and fixtures for all international cricket matches to be played in that country from 2013 to 2016.
But here in India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is yet to announce the fixture list for the series against West Indies scheduled to be held in November-December this year!
This is typical BCCI or rather typical India. We like to leave it till the last minute.
There is no forward planning. You can never have a situation whereby the venues know in advance as to when the matches will be held.
The draft schedule or rather a tentative series plan is available to us thanks to the ICC’s FTP, but the micro planning about each series at the level of the BCCI is never possible.
Four years is a long time in Indian cricket. Here dynamics change every September thanks to the AGM fever. So matches are allocated to centres according to who behaves best with those in power in and around the AGM.
This was not always the case. Till the mid-1980s, for example, the BCCI would allocate Test matches only to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Kanpur, Bangalore and Chennai.
What this would ensure was that India’s home international season would have a set pattern whereby the Test matches would be played definitely at these centres.
But as the power bases started shifting, new venues began to be added. So a Mohali, Nagpur and Ahmedabad were added to this list. This meant more room for political games.
The one-day international venues were far easier to play around with. Just distribute it left, right and centre, get the desired votes every September.
The one man who realised the potential of ODI cricket not just in terms of being a money spinner, but also in terms of votes at the AGM, was Jagmohan Dalmiya.
Dalmiya came in and changed the formula of awarding Test and ODI matches. To give a sense of fairplay and equitable distribution, Dalmiya named it rotation policy. So the Test and ODI matches were awarded as per a rotation formula.
But it was always a euphemism for rewarding the `best behaved’ association. So instead of awarding Tests to the best venues and the ODIs to the next best, it always went to those closest to the seat of power.
England for example always ended up playing ODIs at Guwahati and Jamshedpur, whereas Australia played at the marquee venues.
Despite the tall claims about the value of rotation policy, Mohali missed out on important games in the Dalmiya era because of the well documented falling out with IS Bindra.
Roles were reversed when the new regime came into power and Dalmiya became an outcast, Kolkata suffered as a result.
The real sad part was that while the selection of the national cricket team was meant to be the best in the country playing for the national flag, the same was not true about the fields they played in.
While this is not to say that the England way of getting counties to bid for matches is the right way to allocate venues, but the Indian way is certainly not right.
The venues must earn the right to host the best in the world, and not be handed one on a platter like it has been done by the BCCI over the years.
You have a situation where venues get prepared for a One-Day International once in three years and then regress further. Only the regular ones like Bangalore, Chennai etc are maintained all round the year.
The rotation system means that the venues get ready for an international game like a marriage hall as Kapil Dev once famously said.
That’s not the way it should be. In a season only the best eight centres should get a right to host an international –Test or ODI, even if it means more than one match in a city. The argument about India being a big country and the craze for the sport does not hold water here.
Only meritocracy should matter. Till the BCCI continues to have an appeasement policy we will continue to have problems with venues being unprepared, pitches being a problem and a general lack of planning.
This also stems from the fact that India does not have a set home international season like Australia and England. So you know that the Melbourne Test match will be the Boxing Day clash and Sydney will host the New Year’s match.
These two countries never travel out when their home international season is on. For Australia it is November-February and for England it is May-September. This also ensures that the schedules are under check and everyone knows what’s in store.
Even in South Africa, Durban is certain to host the annual Boxing Day Test (from 26-30 December).
But in India, everything is ad-hoc. India happens to be the money spinner for the world, but instead of protecting its own rights, the BCCI is letting its players play across the world. This is both an economic and cricketing disaster.
India needs to assert its season and only then will it have the schedules under control. If we are so aware of how long the IPL runs and from when, why can’t the same be achieved for an international season at home?
Footnote: The only international schedules in India which are known well in advance are from an ICC event. In the case of the World Cup it was known three and a half years in advance. But despite that the actual match tickets at venues did not go on sale till a month before the tournament started. That is another massive problem which has been created to ensure artificial scarcity. In the case of a bilateral series, the state associations do not know in advance and so don’t put tickets on sale. This creates a last minute rush and chaos, resulting in black marketing of tickets. Who benefits? Certainly not the fans.
