The Long Handle

The decline in Indian cricket news

Excessive legalese to blame

Andrew Hughes
Andrew Hughes
20-Dec-2014
"It has come to the board's attention that readers of Indian cricket news are gaining an education in law, free of charge"  •  AFP

"It has come to the board's attention that readers of Indian cricket news are gaining an education in law, free of charge"  •  AFP

There was a time when Indian cricket news was about cricket. India would play cricket, often they would win, sometimes they would lose. Occasionally someone would slap someone else, or there would be a cricket-related diplomatic incident, or a famous Indian cricketer would announce he wasn't going to be playing cricket any more. Of such cricket-related goings-on was Indian cricket news made.
But in recent months I've noticed a marked decline in the quality of Indian cricket news. There seems to be a drastic reduction in the number of photographs of Indian batsmen holding their bats aloft and a dramatic increase in pictures of middle-aged Indian men looking worried on their way to court.
Indian cricket has become tangled in the deep wild woods of the Indian legal system, and having failed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind it, Indian cricket can no longer remember how it got there. Consequently, Indian cricket news is crammed full of court-hearing dates, legal precedents, and a bewildering number of references to paragraph something or other of sub-section whatever.
Hacking through this thicket of tedious news is not easy, mainly because I don't understand either legalese or the administration-ish languages vital to understanding what is going on that are as obscure as anything you'll find in the Lord of the Rings.
In fact, so ignorant am I of Indian legal goings-on that it may well be illegal for me even to mention any of this, let alone to dabble in any mild satire, and if it isn't illegal for you to have clicked to reach this page, it is almost certainly illegal for you to read these paragraphs.
But if this legal curse is ever to be lifted so that Indian cricket news can go back to talking about cricket, we'll need to get to the bottom of it. So having ploughed through several pages of this stuff, exposing myself at every turn to the risk of sudden unconsciousness, it appears that everything boils down to a conflict-of-interest problem.
Is it right for one individual, no matter how dashing, suave or manly, to be simultaneously involved with an IPL team and with the board that administers the IPL? Is it okay to be the owner, chairman, chief executive and chief selector of the Goa Gorillas, whilst at the same time chairing the Stationery Requisition Committee at the BCCI?
No, no it isn't okay.
So that's that sorted out. But not quite. Those on the other side of the argument are involved in a display of ingenious intellectual contortions more tortured than a CIA detainee. They say that there wasn't any conflict of interest at the IPL and that even if there was, it wasn't very serious, and anyway, it's all far too complicated, so why don't we just forget about it and go watch some cricket.
And what exactly is a conflict of interest anyway? Let's say you're the owner of the Ahmedabad Aardvarks. You want the Aardvarks to win every game. That's your interest. Let's say at the same time as owning the Aardvarks, you're also chairman of the BCCI. Even when you're being chairman of the BCCI you still want the Aardvarks to win. Your interests are exactly the same, whatever office you're sitting in.
This precise argument hasn't been made yet, but we can expect it any time soon. We do know that counsel representing Mr Srinivasan has suggested the BCCI could have an ethics commission like that used by FIFA. When you are looking to FIFA for a lead on morality, you know your organisation is in trouble. It's like asking Vlad the Impaler to help you draw up an ethical policy for the treatment of prisoners.
Legal matters, of course, take a long time, because, like builders, lawyers charge by the hour. But come on, enough already. It is wrong to own a team and belong to the organisation that runs the competition in which that team competes, and it is extra wrong when that competition is a multibillion dollar competition with a global audience. So please, Indian cricket, can we just cut to the chase, hand out the lifetime bans and get on with talking about how Indian batting hasn't been the same since Sachin Tendulkar retired?

Andrew Hughes is a writer currently based in England. @hughandrews73