BCCI's high-handedness must stop

In the Mumbai Mirror, Deepak Narayanan likens the IPL to a big family seen in Indian TV soaps, with the powerful patron, successful uncle, bratty teenagers, earnest youngsters, uncared-for step sons, and even an exiled producer. As with those families, irrespective of occasional rifts, he proclaims that the show will go on.

As it often happens with longrunning soaps on TV, the mistake many viewers make is they try and judge this IPL family by the standards that apply to real life. They get angry when one of them gets out-ofturn favours, they are appalled by the high-handedness of some of the elders, they are stunned by the spineless acceptance of arbitrary decisions. In the real world, this would be unacceptable behaviour, the experts fume, forgetting that this isn’t the real world.

In the wake of Sahara's pull-out and the India team's slump, the BCCI has to buckle down and chart a roadmap for the game rather than get entangled in legal battles, writes Sahan Bidappa in Deccan Chronicle.

On a number of occasions in the past, many of the IPL franchises have openly questioned whether the board respects the rights of all the league's stakeholders. At one stage, Royal Challengers Bangalore owner Vijay Mallya, who has served on various committees in the board, had gone to the extent of asking if the franchisees were merely slaves of the BCCI.