The Surfer

I would have liked to talk to them about how batsman Raees Ahmadzai was carried across the border to Pakistan in the 1980s as his family fled from the Soviet invasion. About how he and the others learned to play cricket in a refugee camp using balls made out of old torn up shirts and stumps made out of shoes. What I ended up discussing with the team's captain, Nowroz Mangal, was whether or not Pizza Hut's Chicken Supreme was Halal. We decided probably not. Margheritas and Sprite all round then.

Opener Karim Sadiq’s mates call him ‘Kabul ka Sehwag’ for his big hitting, and it is obvious who Sadiq’s cricketing hero is. “In January 2004, the Afghanistan Under-19 team toured India, and in a game at Mohali I scored a century, hitting six sixes. The Indian boys started calling me ‘Kabul ka Sehwag’, and the name stuck,” he grins. “I have videos of all Sehwag’s knocks in my laptop.”

Let us hope a full inquiry into the allegations surrounding Modi acts as a cleansing exercise not just for the IPL but for the dangers of corruption in Twenty20 cricket throughout the world. Cricket cannot allow itself to be tainted in this way.

Once in the BCCI, Modi led the witch-hunt against Jagmohan Dalmiya, and having had him suspended, champi- oned the need to press crimi- nal charges and have the police go after the former ICC chief. Why, Modi famously threatened to “lock up Dalmiya and throw away the keys". Such bravado would have been empty had it not had the backing of a heavy-weight like Sharad Pawar. A seasoned politician and no stranger to fingers being pointed, perhaps Pawar might have cautioned Modi that what goes around comes around, but either he never did, or it fell on deaf ears.

Respectable brands, be it Hero Honda or Citibank, were part of the IPL. They have been supporting the IPL since its inception. Who, if anyone at all, is going to be accountable to them and the monies they’ve invested in building this property? While a lot of us may say that the IPL in its present avatar was Lalit Modi’s brainchild, the truth of the matter is everyone else other than Lalit Modi nourished the baby. It was powered by the belief and the monies of a Hero Honda or for that matter a Citibank. It came to fruition because a Mukesh Ambani or a Vijay Mallya believed in the brand proposition and its eventual worth.

It is absurd to let the IPL collapse because of managerial impropriety, as nihilists and the lynch-mob would suggest. The biggest casualty in this sordid drama is not who will lose out to whom in national politics, financial deals or the ego battles between pompous cricket officials but public trust. The cricket lovers of India are the biggest stakeholders in the game in India, and they are anguished.