The good news

	Are the cameras more important than the spectators? © Hampshire Cricket

So much good news in a single morning. The Afro-Asia Cup seems on its way to the rubbish tip: nobody wants to play in it and, not unnaturally, no one wants to telecast it. Why don't the organisers drop Doordarshan a line? They're usually good to broadcast any junk that's got ODI written over it.

There's more: the Hindustan Times reports that the Zee deal with the BCCI is dead and the first casualty is the lunatic 'home' series of ODIs that India was going to play with South Africa in Ireland. Ireland! Apparently the BCCI's idea of home means a series where the BCCI's chosen telecast partner gets to keep the ad revenues. This is Lalit Modi's definition of a home away from home.

It's all part of the BCCI's plan to replace spectators with television cameras. I can see it now: portable pitches (held together with glue), third-country venues, empty stadiums, and cross-eyed players wondering if it's Tuesday and Tangiers or Wednesday and consequently Riyadh?

But unfortunately for this excellent scheme Doordarshan kept taking its mandatory pound of flesh or share of feed and Zee couldn't bear it any more, specially after losing boatloads of money telecasting the epic India-West Indies-Australia tri-series staged in that well known nursery of cricket, Kuala Lumpur. Anyone remember who won or what happened? Thought not. But here's the good part: HT claims that Zee lost fifty crores! Isn't that wonderful? It couldn't have happened to a nicer company: people who hope to make their money by getting Dravid and Co. to play Mickey Mouse matches in Malaysia, deserve all the grief they get.

Perhaps all the cruddy ODIs that had attached themselves to the venerable hull of Indian cricket like barnacles will drop off now. Rahul Dravid and his team mates have been begging for a let up in their schedules for years now: maybe they'll get a break now. It's the only way that this cash-cow milking Board was ever going to provide relief: via a massive commercial cock-up.

In its greed and its contempt for the game and its players, the BCCI merely follows the lead of the ICC, the game's apex organization, which invented the Super Test to fill its coffers and, en passant, to devalue the most precious currency of the game, Test cricket. Luckily everyone hated it and it is unlikely to be repeated, (though its statistics need to be expunged from Test records for the damage to be undone).

The Hindustan Times also reports a rumour that ESPN-Star's new channel might step in to telecast the Afro-Asia Cup if Zee pulls out. I hope they do: the more money our sports channels lose by telecasting ersatz farce, the faster they'll learn the lesson of this morning's news—that the game will be purged of dross by a cricketing inversion of Gresham's law: "When there is a legal tender currency, good money drives bad money out of circulation."