No hubris fails to find its nemesis
The launch of the official BCCI website - aiming, its backers claim, to be the most popular cricket site in the world - has attracted comment from the Guardian in their media blog.
Martin Williamson
25-Feb-2013
The launch of the official BCCI website - aiming, its backers claim, to be the most popular cricket site in the world - has attracted comment from the Guardian in their media blog.
So far it looks rather less like a website devoted to cricket than to the BCCI. Top story yesterday was "Lalit Modi bags TV award", the IPL commissioner having won a coveted CNBC Awaaz Consumer Award - well, someone must covet them. Top comment piece was "In Praise of Sharad Pawar", a 1,685-word paean about the outgoing BCCI boss, "a statesman who is clear of thought, dispassionate and above all a true team leader" by his BCCI colleague IS Bindra.
This venture bears close watching, for the BCCI is offering not just a web portal but to exercise a significant degree of control over the coverage of cricket in India, to the exclusion of its established rival Cricinfo. They are moving fast: a Google search for "BCCI" still directs you to the old BCCI site which looks like it was banged together in an hour by a teenage slacker between puffs on a bong.
So far, though, there is little to allay suspicions that India's hegemonic pretensions in international cricket are less about the game than about the aggrandisement of its political and media elite. And as we are finding elsewhere, no hubris fails to find its nemesis.
Martin Williamson is executive editor of ESPNcricinfo and managing editor of ESPN Digital Media in Europe, the Middle East and Africa