IPL mess : Why so surprised? - Gideon Haigh

[straight.drive]

India is a corrupt country.. wats so surprising abt that? :hmmmm:

Most of our institutions are riddled with corruption. But there has been a lot of progress. Eventually we will solve that problem. There is no reason for being pessimistic of our country's future.

[asterix]

Whatever happens,is for good only..I'm sure IPL will come back better (I hope not bigger, Can't follow 94 matches)..

[99.94]

The IPL was just made for match fixing. The game can change so rapidly that just one good over can put you in the box seat, there are billions of dollars involved in betting and the corruption in India doesn't help either.

[achilles]

The IPL was just made for match fixing. The game can change so rapidly that just one good over can put you in the box seat, there are billions of dollars involved in betting and the corruption in India doesn't help either.

You are making serious allegations. If you have proof, approach the Indian police. If no, :finger:. So maybe the Australians can skip this league, "just made for match fixing" and which you have no proof about (ICC maintains this tourney was clean, may I add), next time round and play in the Big Bash instead like the Pak boys. :two_thumbs_up:

[SJS50]

Other than his offensive and undiplomatic (to put it mildly) remark about the IPL mess showing "the country at its corrupt and dysfunctional worst" which has all Indians protesting, and with some justification for sure, what is wrong with the bulk of what he is saying? And he is not the only one. Others have said it too but the voices have been few and far between for most people have stakes in this mess. Pradeep Magazine, one of India's finest cricket writers wrote this in January this year . . .

It is all in the name of national pride

On a day when everyone is wishing the world to be a happy place to live in and making an effort to erase uncomfortable memories of the year gone by, should one go fast forward or stay in the rewind mode? For an optimist, the choice is easy if he believes that in analysing the ills of the past lie lessons for a better future. In our responses to the world around us, we always react in a manner which to me suggests that as a nation we suffer from an inferiority complex. A confident person looks within if something goes wrong and does not make shrill pronouncements in his defence and blame the “outsider” for his failings.

We know we are a very corrupt nation and all those who mouth platitudes are, in reality those who siphon all the profits meant for public good.

You may ask what has all this to do with Indian sport? Almost everything I would say. Take for example the debate which surrounds the hosting of the Commonwealth Games. We are being told that India’s prestige as a global power is at stake if we fail to present the perfect Games. All the answers for the delay in projects is found in increasing the outlay of government expenditure. By the time the Games end — hopefully without any glitches — we would have ended spending around Rs 2000 crore! This is a kind of money which would have helped Delhi not just build a chain of roads and flyovers but also solve its chronic electricity and water problems. For a 12-day extravaganza, which is not going to help Indian sport in anyway — remember the ‘82 Delhi Asiad — we are all willing to create an illusion around us, fuelled by politicians and the organizers, that there is a link between the Games and our growth as a nation. Maybe this is not the right time to raise this debate as we are now stuck with the Games but, should that also mean that don’t try to find out whether the money being doled out is being spent for the purpose it is meant? Isn’t there a need to probe this nexus between contractors, builders and those organising the event? After all, the money spent comes from the taxes we pay and we have every right to know where and how each penny is being spent.

Cricket is the worst culprit when it comes to exploiting these nationalist sentiments. When the going is good, the Indian board takes advantage of all the state benefits by projecting itself as an organisation which is not there for profit-making but is doing a service to the nation. And when the going is bad, it closes ranks and tells the world that it is a private body and neither its accounts nor the unbridled use of power can be checked. The kind of money, which the Indian Board is making today will be the envy of the best corporate. Yet most of those in its administrations would want us to believe that they are doing it for the love of the game. From central ministers to opposition leaders, from top bureaucrats to corporate czars, are all involved with cricket administration because they “love” the nation. And when a disaster like the Kotla fiasco happens, no one is willing to take the blame. Instead of feeling embarrassed, officials squabble in full public glare without an iota of remorse.

The only way out is to subject their finances — the millions they make and spend — to a government audit. If nothing else, we will find out who cheats whom in the name of national pride

.

And more recently, after the muck hit the ceiling, Magazine wrote . . .

What does one write about a crisis that one had foreseen? Ever since the IPL was launched three years ago and accepted by the masses as a brand, which enhanced India’s prestige in the globalised world, the voices of dissent were largely ignored or even told to shut up.

and Shekhar Gupta, Chief Editor of Indian Express group wrote . . .

Riding on the success of the IPL, Modi had become one big sports and entertainment phenomenon, a kind of Jerry Maguire and Hugh Hefner rolled into one. In the process he and his IPL bent, twisted and often rewrote all rules of sports administration and even conventional business.

He was getting away with it because “everybody” was in it. There was nobody left to raise a question

. . It was in that heady phase that I tried to draw attention to certain emerging problems that, I said, may bedevil Indian cricket in times to come (‘Conflicts of cricket’, National Interest, June 20, 2009). It drew immediate protests and disapproval, not merely from the usual suspects but also from many

well-meaning cricket enthusiasts who felt that I was nit-picking, unable to accept the success of so innovative a venture

without the usual, chronic Indian Express scepticism. And what were some of the things I underlined about these emerging conflicts of interest? That, for example, the same person (N. Srinivasan of India Cements) was secretary of the BCCI and also the owner of Chennai Super Kings. Further, that K. Srikkanth, as chief national selector, one of the most powerful men in India, was also the brand ambassador of Chennai Super Kings. That using the clout of the IPL, the BCCI had been able to acquire powers over the media that even Indira Gandhi did not have during the Emergency. She censored you, but she did not appoint permanent editors at our newspapers. The cricket board, on the other hand, has contracted Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar, two of India’s finest cricketers, and any channel that may win the broadcast rights for any cricket event where India is playing has no choice other than having these two on the commentary team, giving the Board the incredible power to have its own people cover its own activities. As the hubris and arrogant display of disregard for “log kya kehenge” (what will people say), this has been equalled only now by the shareholders of Rendezvous, including that “marketing whiz” from Dubai, Sunanda Pushkar, getting 25 per cent equity in the Kochi franchise, “undilutable in perpetuity”! That is not a privilege even the founders of Infosys gave themselves. I was not being a spoilsport last year. I was only raising the red-flag that a brilliant success in rolling cricket, Bollywood, big bucks and Indian city-folks’ desperate need for outdoor fun and entertainment was now in danger of becoming a clubby, patronage-driven, cabal-owned property that could bring disrepute to cricket, and India. The central point was, and is, that the laws of conflict of interest must be sacrosanct in sport and business, as they must be in public life.

One does not need to enumerate here all the muck that has come out of this sordid saga.What is important is to understand that the issue is not Modi or Tharoor but that this was something waiting to happen for all the warning signs were ignored by people with vested interests and the public who simply loved the highlighted product and was unwilling to look at the shadows behind the light. We can call Gideon Haigh names for saying our country is corrupt or we can look at the gist of that article and see what we need to set right, and it is a lot. I give the same advise to my Pakistani friends who are equally agitated at articles about terrorism and what is happening in Pakistan. They too pick up at words and sentences that show their country in poor light but focussing at those words is just another form of denial, however much we hate that word. We have a problem with cricket administration in this country and it dd not stop with Tharoor's resignation, it should not stop with Modi's suspension and final dismissal. It is beyond IPL in fact. It is built into the way BCCI is being run by the heady coalition of p[olitical and corporate interests. As the real stake holders in the game, you and I should take our heads out of the proverbial sand and ask some serious questions as really serious stake holders do at the Annual General Meetings of corporations. Today the cricket fans can be made monkey's off by the media, which is just another interested party, or make use of the media to bring their concerns in the open and keep them there till the maters are resolved. It can be done but the buck stops with us. You and me.

[Roshanrocks]

lovely post bySJS50 :hatsoff: as always i enjoy reading your posts.

[achilles]

SJS50... I agree. There is no fault in criticizing our country. But all that these senior journalists do generally, is rant. I have seldom seen these esteemed individuals (no sarcasm, they are great) suggest solutions to the issues they raise. They'll come on tv shows with a one-point agenda: Pull the individual or the board down as much as possible. Their arrogance doesn't permit them to listen and analyse other view-points except their own, so it doesn't help the viewers on tv and the reader in a newspaper, who are misled just because someone articulately negates a valid opinion. They tell us what we want to hear. Peter Roebuck is probably the greatest example which I can think off, mouthing off against the Aussies, when sentiments were high. And he became a bit of a star in India. It is therefore necessary at times for us as individuals to filter the content that comes at us.

[Chandan]

SJS50... I agree. There is no fault in criticizing our country. But all that these senior journalists do generally, is rant. I have seldom seen these esteemed individuals (no sarcasm, they are great) suggest solutions to the issues they raise. They'll come on tv shows with a one-point agenda: Pull the individual or the board down as much as possible. Their arrogance doesn't permit them to listen and analyse other view-points except their own, so it doesn't help the viewers on tv and the reader in a newspaper, who are misled just because someone articulately negates a valid opinion. They tell us what we want to hear. Peter Roebuck is probably the greatest example which I can think off, mouthing off against the Aussies, when sentiments were high. And he became a bit of a star in India. It is therefore necessary at times for us as individuals to filter the content that comes at us.

You want solutions achilles? Well, it has been provided by many including me, here on ICF. If you have patience, read this article: Indian Cricket: The Way Forward It was written originally 5 years back and posted on ICF after the WC debacle in 2007. It is still relevent. Read the article and follow the leads from there to its other parts.

[EnterTheVoid]

Chandan, can you name one cricketing administration, at any level, that invests in the game purely for the love for the game.

[Chandan]

Chandan' date=' can you name one cricketing administration, at any level, that invests in the game purely for the love for the game.[/quote'] Sree, I don't know about any at this moment. But remember, all these boards were established just to develop the game of cricket in that country and commercial interests came decades after that. If a board is run professionally, with lot of emphasis on development of cricket through building infrastructures, cricket academies and having a strong domestic cricket structure, I would not mind their commercial interest in the game at all. Afterall, if they won't earn substatiably, how will they function and invest in the game? And this is where I dislike BCCI the most with its honourable posts and not for profit tags. Why can't they have paid professionals in their offices? Why can't they have an audit system where annual earnings and expenditures are mentioned in detail? Why is there so much of eye-wash?

[EnterTheVoid]

Sree, I don't know about any at this moment. But remember, all these boards were established just to develop the game of cricket in that country and commercial interests came decades after that. If a board is run professionally, with lot of emphasis on development of cricket through building infrastructures, cricket academies and having a strong domestic cricket structure, I would not mind their commercial interest in the game at all. Afterall, if they won't earn substatiably, how will they function and invest in the game? And this is where I dislike BCCI the most with its honourable posts and not for profit tags. Why can't they have paid professionals in their offices? Why can't they have an audit system where annual earnings and expenditures are mentioned in detail? Why is there so much of eye-wash?

I agree but cricket administrations run the game as a business and not as a sport, and who can blame them, after all, at the end of the day, its the capital thats needed to invest in infrastructure, pay wages etc. So in that sense, BCCI is well run in that they make so much profit Sure, you can say its because of the proportion of cricket watching population in India but till the late 90's, to the best of my memory, Australia and England were the ones who really raked it in. The BCCI top brass are no mugs. Take TV viewer ship for example: Telecasting IPL matches on YouTube seems so ingenious but is it really, given YouTube's popularity, does it not seem the next logical progression. But it begs the question, if its so obvious, why hasn't it been done before. What I am trying to say is that there are some sharp thinkers in the BCCI but their main aim is to make as much money as possible, and like yourself, I too am left wondering why more isn't spend on improving the game. For a clear example, look no further than the quality of stadia in India. Eden Gardens' could be India's MCG, but it looks anything but, old and dilapidated.

[Chandan]

What I am trying to say is that there are some sharp thinkers in the BCCI but their main aim is to make as much money as possible' date=' and like yourself, I too am left wondering why more isn't spend on improving the game. For a clear example, look no further than the quality of stadia in India. Eden Gardens' could be India's MCG, but it looks anything but, old and dilapidated.[/quote'] Thats true, but it isn't the sole problem I have with BCCI. Look at the domestic cricket of India and how it is neglected with terrible facilities, bad pitches, bad conditions etc etc. A domestic cricket is the breeding place for the international teams. That is where the real cricketers come from in the international team! But because of IPL, the entire domestic season was reduced to a joke where captains had no option but to go only for the first innings lead in Ranji matches, and we are wondering why we can't produce strike bowlers who can take wickets!! Challengers was scrapped; Deodhar trophy, only meanigful tournament for the 50 over version, was reduced to a 4 match in 4 day joke. Tell me did CA scrap any of its domestic tournaments for Big bash? Will county cricket give up its 40 overs cricket for T20 tournament, will their FC tournament suffer at all because of their bigger and better T20 domestic tournaments? Why? Because CA and ECB earn money but do not lose the perspective of the game. BCCI, in its blindness to earn money, is destroying cricket in India.

[Chandan]

Gunner_maina, I'm posting an article by an Indian journalist here on this whole IPL saga, And achilles, He mentions solution to the problem as well. Just read. PIGS DON’T FLY - Why the IPL won’t reform itself MUKUL KESAVAN The porkers at the five-star trough have taken a strategic time-out from feeding. They’ve raised their snouts from superior swill, the better to bite the hand that fed them. The real spectacle of the last fortnight wasn’t the sorry cricket served up by IPL 3.0, nor even Lalit Modi’s fall from grace, but the sight of supple stakeholder pigs turning on a dime. News channels that gloried in partnering IPL franchises, Modi’s henchmen at the BCCI, the hitherto house-trained members of the IPL’s governing council, have rediscovered reporting, re-grown spines and unearthed scruples; these pigs have wings. The seamless transition from being Modi’s creatures to becoming his critics and the willingness of journalists, commentators and anchors to buy into this new narrative of Wicked Modi and the Duped Establishment tell us something about the damage that the IPL has done to Indian cricket. Notice that every criticism of Modi is qualified by praise for his creation. The IPL, we’re told, is a great ‘property’ and the way to fix the mess is to have the BCCI or the governing council or the tycoons who own the franchises take over its governance. It’s worth pointing out that the WWF is a great television property too. It is also wrestling as showbiz and, ultimately, as charade. I don’t mean to imply that the IPL’s matches were fixed; there’s no evidence to suggest that. Dhoni’s victory celebration in the semi-final match against the the Deccan Chargers and Tendulkar’s willingness to play with an injured hand testify to a genuinely competitive tournament. But once you define Twenty20 cricket and the IPL as a form of showbiz — the cheerleaders, the gold-trim uniforms, the filmstar owners, the mid-over commercials, the commercial crassness of the strategic time-out, the stadiums wall-papered with advertising — its main justification becomes the money that makes it a gilded marvel. When the buzz about a game becomes its success in monetizing everything from post-match parties (where guests pay 40,000 rupees a pop to mingle with tired players) to sponsored sixes, what you’re seeing is cricket’s transformation from one sort of heavenly body into another: from a sun that burns with its own fire to a planet that preens in the reflected glory of money. And is money a bad thing in an era of professional sport? The short answer is no: more money in cricket is a good thing provided that the process of professionalization is responsibly managed. That means making changes conservatively and, crucially, resisting the impulse to trade in the integrity of the game for revenue. Take football: television channels have been campaigning for decades to divide football into four quarters instead of two halves to make more time for commercials. But football’s administrators have consistently refused on the ground that this would change the nature of the contest. And this despite the fact that football with its continuous flow has no natural interruptions for commercials unlike cricket which gives the broadcaster a commercial break at the end of every over. And yet India’s cricket authorities allow television channels to air commercials that encroach upon actual play and, in this edition of the IPL, to run commercials between the individual deliveries of a single over. Forget other sports; look at the difference between Set Max’s telecast of the IPL and Channel 9’s coverage of cricket in Australia. Channel 9 is technically innovative, happy to sell individual bits of cricketing merchandise like signed bats and team photos, but respectful of the rhythms of the game. Set Max chops the natural unit of cricket, an over, into little bits, shrinks the screen to allow ads along the margins in the course of play and introduces the zooming, distorting perspectives of an overhead ‘spider-cam’ notable mainly for its trick of making live cricket look and feel like a video game. Can you imagine Fifa placing its biggest bets on seven-a-side football? Or the USPGA hustling the Augusta National Golf Club into scrapping the Masters and replacing it with a six hole Pro-Am tournament, which then becomes the centre-piece of America’s golfing calendar? Or the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club deciding that it would woo a mass audience of young teens and daytime soap watchers by making Wimbledon a single set tournament played on astro turf by players dressed in gold lamé shorts? Of course you can’t. But you don’t have to stretch your imagination in the case of cricket because that is, in fact, what the BCCI has done to the game. The IPL under Modi made it clear that it wanted larger ‘windows’ in cricket’s calendar for this mickey-mouse version of the game and the BCCI was happy to let the Indian team’s test match calendar shrink into near-nothingness. (I wanted to laugh when Pataudi said that the IPL’s revenues would help prop up test cricket: you can’t help test cricket when you don’t play test matches.) We can’t put this down to Modi vs the Good Guys: there are no good guys in the BCCI; the whole cricketing establishment, starting with Sharad Pawar, was complicit in this Disneyfication of cricket. It’s worth remembering that international tennis and golf attend closely to the bottom line, the market and the natural appetite of players for money: Wimbledon’s winners will make a million pounds each this year and Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson don’t play golf for love. The difference between the establishments of tennis, football and golf on the one hand and the Indian cricket establishment on the other is that the first three have an understanding of their sports that transcends money while the BCCI doesn’t. They’re acutely aware of the fact that history and continuity are critical to a game’s sense of itself, that without them, in the long term, there’s no game left to sell. Modi and Pawar and Dalmiya are all operators of one sort or another; it’s unfair, almost, to expect them to love the game for itself. But here’s the really bad news: the people who you would expect to have this transcendent sense of the game were so coopted by this carnival of greed and vulgarity that they did nothing to prevent the IPL from becoming monstrous. Sunil Gavaskar and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, charter immortals both, served on the IPL’s governing council and never once raised the alarm or asked an inconvenient question. By Pataudi’s own admission in a television interview, he was so taken with the IPL’s success that he and the other governing council members ignored conflicts of interest, allegations of corruption and murmurings about Modi. In effect, Modi used Pataudi and Gavaskar; he used them in much the same way as the proprietor of a dodgy business might cajole famous men on to his board of directors. By serving as mantelpiece ornaments and seeing and saying nothing, they made the IPL respectable. In the course of his interview with Barkha Dutt, Pataudi was disarmingly frank about having been asleep at the wheel and he regretted, more than once, his inaction. His contrition might have sounded more persuasive if it had been accompanied by his resignation. A governing council that exercises no oversight should either dissolve itself or be dismissed. It has become something of an orthodoxy in newly liberalized India to maintain that the government ought not to step in to sort out a mess like the IPL because State intervention makes bad things worse. This is often true, but given the complicity of everyone in Indian cricket in the IPL’s murk — from coopted immortals to sham-honorary administrators to gelded commentators — a process of reform from within is unlikely. Pigs don’t fly in this dimension. Instead of taking over the BCCI, the government of India should appoint a Grand Inquisitor whose sole purpose ought to be to terrorize the BCCI into purging itself and its spawn, the IPL, of evil. At worst this might result in a constructive downsizing of the IPL; at best, if the GI is properly inept, the patient might die. For right-thinking people who love cricket, this has to count as a win-win solution.

[Gunner_Mania]

Chandan - The answer to your first question - Where I disagree with Gideon Haigh - is the bit I posted in the OP. India NOT EQUAL to IPL. As far as I am concerned IPL is not representative of India as a country. The organisers of IPL, which happens to be an arm of the BCCI is a private business / corporate entity - just like any other entity from Corporate India if you like. It is a business, which has created a brand for its product the IPL and selling it to the whole world. It uses every means at it disposal - fair & unfair, ethical & unethical - to sell its product. It also uses well known faces to promote the product's brand image, faces that we trust. Suddenly all those unthical, unfair means and tactics it used to sell its product is blown out in the open and the people who trusted the brand feel cheated. Somebody needs to sort this mess & fix the issue and manage the brands popularity. If this is not possible and the complete brand needs to go away so be it. A classic case to pick in the real world would be Satyam - a similar rags to riches story & toutetd as one of India's IT bigwigs. What Satyam was to Indian IT industry IPL is to Indian cricket. What needs to be done with IPL is exactly what was done with Satyam. Ramalinga Raju's corruption bought about the downfall of Satyam - Nobody then said, Satyam is a corupt company ergo India is a corrupt country. This is my disagreement with Gideon Haigh. I'll respond to the other posts in a few minutes:)

[Chandan]

Chandan - The answer to your first question - Where I disagree with Gideon Haigh - is the bit I posted in the OP. India NOT EQUAL to IPL. As far as I am concerned IPL is not representative of India as a country.

GM, Of it isn't. But no one was saying a word when IPL was depicted as a symbol of Shining India, its economic power and what not. Modi kept on spouting rubbish and everyone kept lapping it up. So why disagree now? Just because Haigh is pointing it out?

The organisers of IPL, which happens to be an arm of the BCCI is a private business / corporate entity - just like any other entity from Corporate India if you like. It is a business, which has created a brand for its product the IPL and selling it to the whole world. It uses every means at it disposal - fair & unfair, ethical & unethical - to sell its product.

That is where the whole problem starts. IPL is not registered as a private body as most of the private companies are. It still uses BCCI's "non profit" tag here and gets all the stadiums without paying any price and all the facilities which is reserved for a sports federation. Why doesn't it pay all these prices to govt, along with crores of tax which it is clearly evading getting under the body of BCCI?

It also uses well known faces to promote the product's brand image, faces that we trust. Suddenly all those unthical, unfair means and tactics it used to sell its product is blown out in the open and the people who trusted the brand feel cheated. Somebody needs to sort this mess & fix the issue and manage the brands popularity.

No one will sort this mess and BCCI will conveniently sweep the entire matter under carpet like it has done since so many years. There are so many irregularities that to fix this mess, you migh have to relaunch the whole thing doing away with what is there at present, and that will NEVER be done with so many political figures involved in this mess too. Brand is popular already, and its audience gives too hoots to all the corruption around it or the mess or the harm it is doing not only to cricket but country's image as well. They just want a cricket match in the evening played by all the renound cricketers and will keep watching it, even if it is declared openly that the matches are fixed.

If this is not possible and the complete brand needs to go away so be it. A classic case to pick in the real world would be Satyam - a similar rags to riches story & toutetd as one of India's IT bigwigs. What Satyam was to Indian IT industry IPL is to Indian cricket. What needs to be done with IPL is exactly what was done with Satyam. Ramalinga Raju's corruption bought about the downfall of Satyam - Nobody then said, Satyam is a corupt company ergo India is a corrupt country. This is my disagreement with Gideon Haigh. I'll respond to the other posts in a few minutes:)

That is not possible GM, and take it from me that nothing will be done. BCCI is a shining mirror for GoI and will work exactly like our Govt does. Satyam had a very small problem compared to IPL and it could be fixed. In my opinopn, irregularities of IPL is near impossible to fix. I'll tell you what will be done. BCCI will hang Modi out to dry after 15 days and declare that all the problems were caused by that man. Now since he is not there every thing will be fine, is what BCCI will claim. Every mess will continue till someone else blows the lid off!

[Gunner_Mania]

Thats true, but it isn't the sole problem I have with BCCI. Look at the domestic cricket of India and how it is neglected with terrible facilities, bad pitches, bad conditions etc etc. A domestic cricket is the breeding place for the international teams. That is where the real cricketers come from in the international team! But because of IPL, the entire domestic season was reduced to a joke where captains had no option but to go only for the first innings lead in Ranji matches, and we are wondering why we can't produce strike bowlers who can take wickets!! Challengers was scrapped; Deodhar trophy, only meanigful tournament for the 50 over version, was reduced to a 4 match in 4 day joke. Tell me did CA scrap any of its domestic tournaments for Big bash? Will county cricket give up its 40 overs cricket for T20 tournament, will their FC tournament suffer at all because of their bigger and better T20 domestic tournaments? Why? Because CA and ECB earn money but do not lose the perspective of the game. BCCI, in its blindness to earn money, is destroying cricket in India

I don't know about the CA, but the ECB is not very different from the BCCI. They also did run behind Stanford's billions, but unfortunately for them the bubble burst too soon. There might be no English team participation in the T20 Champions League this year, because they were caught out by the dates. The counties have invested heavy money and brought players because they are all eyeing that lucrative prize money that is on offer on the T20 Champions League. They will make sure that the County season works around the CL dates next year. if the IPL goes bust, expect the ECB to be the first to grab that model and bring it to England. They already rue the fact that they let the IPL model go to India & Modi. The IPL model is here to stay. It will not go away. IPL4 will happen - perhaps stripped of all its extravaganza. I will be stick my neck out and stay that in 5-10 years if not earlier, the IPL model will even transcend to one day International games.- not the DLF maximums, & the Karban Kamaal Catches - but Franchisees/ Club leagues model.

[Chandan]

I don't know about the CA, but the ECB is not very different from the BCCI. They also did run behind Stanford's billions, but unfortunately for them the bubble burst too soon. There might be no English team participation in the T20 Champions League this year, because they were caught out by the dates. The counties have invested heavy money and brought players because they are all eyeing that lucrative prize money that is on offer on the T20 Champions League. They will make sure that the County season works around the CL dates next year. if the IPL goes bust, expect the ECB to be the first to grab that model and bring it to England. They already rue the fact that they let the IPL model go to India & Modi. The IPL model is here to stay. It will not go away. IPL4 will happen - perhaps stripped of all its extravaganza. I will be stick my neck out and stay that in 5-10 years if not earlier, the IPL model will even transcend to one day International games.- not the DLF maximums, & the Karban Kamaal Catches - but Franchisees/ Club leagues model.

That doesn't say much GM. I haven't studied the professional management model of ECB, but if they ran after Stanford money, at least they didn't muddle their own set-up, which BCCI has clearly done. And leagues trying to compete in CL, if such a league comp is going on, is not wrong at all. And none of the countries can grab IPL model because firstly, they won't get so many investers in cricket and secondly, you agree or not, these boards look after cricket much better than what BCCI does. Why should they wait for IPL to go bust to grab IPL model formula? They all wanted to start their own Premiere Leagues but failed to do it because of the reasons I mentioned. IPL will happen. It is not going any where. All the corporates, who've invested truckloads of money in it will ensure that IPL happens and of course our corrupt politicians will help them in it as they too are benefitting hughly, until...until something else goes wrong and someone blows the lid off. And this franchise model will never take 50 over format, because here one match only will eat away one day. So they'll be satisfied with T20s.

[Gunner_Mania]

Chandan - I read your 3 part article on the Way forward. It is brilliant. I have no disagreement with you whatsoever that in the fact that BCCI needs to be comme more professional and accountable. My only area of disagreement probably would be that I don't hold BCCI solely responsible for the mess that is Indian cricket. I believe every state cricket association are also culpable. The reason I believe though is because Indian cricket is run top down i.e. like the Congress Party all decision are made by the High Command aka Board President. How many of our state associations are bothered with the state of domestic affairs. Why don;t a few of them get together and take the control out of BCCI's hands on running the domestic shows or turn around and say right, whoever makes sure that more focus is given to the way domestic cricket is run gets my vote, but no none of them will do it. Sorry I am not good at getting my thoughts across in writing, but to sumamrise what I am saying is just as any Captain is as good as his team, the BCCI will only mirror what its State Associations are. The change neds to happen at the lower level. The BCCI is rotten and it will not cleanse itself on its own, something else has to force it to change.

[The Outsider]

Other than his offensive and undiplomatic (to put it mildly) remark about the IPL mess showing "the country at its corrupt and dysfunctional worst" which has all Indians protesting, and with some justification for sure, what is wrong with the bulk of what he is saying?

Even that part I don't find offensive. Because read in context with the entire paragraph, he is just making a point that if you use the blitz and glitz of a tournament to make a statement about the country as a whole, then be prepared to listen to generalizations about India based on the dark side of the tournament. If you did not have a problem earlier, you should not have one now.

We can call Gideon Haigh names for saying our country is corrupt or we can look at the gist of that article and see what we need to set right, and it is a lot. I give the same advise to my Pakistani friends who are equally agitated at articles about terrorism and what is happening in Pakistan. They too pick up at words and sentences that show their country in poor light but focussing at those words is just another form of denial, however much we hate that word.

This has become a very recent phenomenon, perhaps driven by internet to a certain extent. As soon as an 'outsider' makes a criticism a plethora of 'nationalists' and 'patriots' start jumping up and down to save their 'honor'. There is hardly anything wrong with what Gideon has said, but the responses he gets will invariably be along the lines of how his jealousy of IPL's success, his skin color not able to see the mystical rise of India etc. are coaxing him to write all this. The defense mechanism any criticism of anything remotely related to one's identity triggers is unbelievable. Just on this board, I happened to read some comments on the thread where Miandad commented on IPL. Admittedly, his comments are garbage, but the amount of hatred and vile spewed by posters against all Pakistani posters was mind boggling. There was a Pakistani poster making some good points about commercialization of IPL - something which is regularly discussed amongst Indian fans - and he was shot down, not with arguments pertinent to the discussion, but with an entire thesis of Pakistan's history and support of terrorism, and jealousy of India. It just feels like there are a lot of angry people in this world and use the internet to vent out their frustrations, rather than use it as a constructive instrument of discussion or even of fun and laughter. Just more anger and more vile. Most commentary by outsiders, unless it is sycophantic in praise draws responses like, 'Look at the jealous Pakis', 'The English and Aussies are jealous of India's power' etc. etc. At that very point any meaningful discussion becomes impossible.

[SJS50]

PIGS DON’T FLY - Why the IPL won’t reform itself MUKUL KESAVAN The porkers at the five-star trough have taken a strategic time-out from feeding. They’ve raised their snouts from superior swill, the better to bite the hand that fed them. The real spectacle of the last fortnight wasn’t the sorry cricket served up by IPL 3.0, nor even Lalit Modi’s fall from grace, but the sight of supple stakeholder pigs turning on a dime. News channels that gloried in partnering IPL franchises, Modi’s henchmen at the BCCI, the hitherto house-trained members of the IPL’s governing council, have rediscovered reporting, re-grown spines and unearthed scruples; these pigs have wings. The seamless transition from being Modi’s creatures to becoming his critics and the willingness of journalists, commentators and anchors to buy into this new narrative of Wicked Modi and the Duped Establishment tell us something about the damage that the IPL has done to Indian cricket. Notice that every criticism of Modi is qualified by praise for his creation. The IPL, we’re told, is a great ‘property’ and the way to fix the mess is to have the BCCI or the governing council or the tycoons who own the franchises take over its governance. It’s worth pointing out that the WWF is a great television property too. It is also wrestling as showbiz and, ultimately, as charade. I don’t mean to imply that the IPL’s matches were fixed; there’s no evidence to suggest that. Dhoni’s victory celebration in the semi-final match against the the Deccan Chargers and Tendulkar’s willingness to play with an injured hand testify to a genuinely competitive tournament. But once you define Twenty20 cricket and the IPL as a form of showbiz — the cheerleaders, the gold-trim uniforms, the filmstar owners, the mid-over commercials, the commercial crassness of the strategic time-out, the stadiums wall-papered with advertising — its main justification becomes the money that makes it a gilded marvel. When the buzz about a game becomes its success in monetizing everything from post-match parties (where guests pay 40,000 rupees a pop to mingle with tired players) to sponsored sixes, what you’re seeing is cricket’s transformation from one sort of heavenly body into another: from a sun that burns with its own fire to a planet that preens in the reflected glory of money. And is money a bad thing in an era of professional sport? The short answer is no: more money in cricket is a good thing provided that the process of professionalization is responsibly managed. That means making changes conservatively and, crucially, resisting the impulse to trade in the integrity of the game for revenue. Take football: television channels have been campaigning for decades to divide football into four quarters instead of two halves to make more time for commercials. But football’s administrators have consistently refused on the ground that this would change the nature of the contest. And this despite the fact that football with its continuous flow has no natural interruptions for commercials unlike cricket which gives the broadcaster a commercial break at the end of every over. And yet India’s cricket authorities allow television channels to air commercials that encroach upon actual play and, in this edition of the IPL, to run commercials between the individual deliveries of a single over. Forget other sports; look at the difference between Set Max’s telecast of the IPL and Channel 9’s coverage of cricket in Australia. Channel 9 is technically innovative, happy to sell individual bits of cricketing merchandise like signed bats and team photos, but respectful of the rhythms of the game. Set Max chops the natural unit of cricket, an over, into little bits, shrinks the screen to allow ads along the margins in the course of play and introduces the zooming, distorting perspectives of an overhead ‘spider-cam’ notable mainly for its trick of making live cricket look and feel like a video game. Can you imagine Fifa placing its biggest bets on seven-a-side football? Or the USPGA hustling the Augusta National Golf Club into scrapping the Masters and replacing it with a six hole Pro-Am tournament, which then becomes the centre-piece of America’s golfing calendar? Or the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club deciding that it would woo a mass audience of young teens and daytime soap watchers by making Wimbledon a single set tournament played on astro turf by players dressed in gold lamé shorts? Of course you can’t. But you don’t have to stretch your imagination in the case of cricket because that is, in fact, what the BCCI has done to the game. The IPL under Modi made it clear that it wanted larger ‘windows’ in cricket’s calendar for this mickey-mouse version of the game and the BCCI was happy to let the Indian team’s test match calendar shrink into near-nothingness. (I wanted to laugh when Pataudi said that the IPL’s revenues would help prop up test cricket: you can’t help test cricket when you don’t play test matches.) We can’t put this down to Modi vs the Good Guys: there are no good guys in the BCCI; the whole cricketing establishment, starting with Sharad Pawar, was complicit in this Disneyfication of cricket. It’s worth remembering that international tennis and golf attend closely to the bottom line, the market and the natural appetite of players for money: Wimbledon’s winners will make a million pounds each this year and Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson don’t play golf for love. The difference between the establishments of tennis, football and golf on the one hand and the Indian cricket establishment on the other is that the first three have an understanding of their sports that transcends money while the BCCI doesn’t. They’re acutely aware of the fact that history and continuity are critical to a game’s sense of itself, that without them, in the long term, there’s no game left to sell. Modi and Pawar and Dalmiya are all operators of one sort or another; it’s unfair, almost, to expect them to love the game for itself. But here’s the really bad news: the people who you would expect to have this transcendent sense of the game were so coopted by this carnival of greed and vulgarity that they did nothing to prevent the IPL from becoming monstrous. Sunil Gavaskar and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, charter immortals both, served on the IPL’s governing council and never once raised the alarm or asked an inconvenient question. By Pataudi’s own admission in a television interview, he was so taken with the IPL’s success that he and the other governing council members ignored conflicts of interest, allegations of corruption and murmurings about Modi. In effect, Modi used Pataudi and Gavaskar; he used them in much the same way as the proprietor of a dodgy business might cajole famous men on to his board of directors. By serving as mantelpiece ornaments and seeing and saying nothing, they made the IPL respectable. In the course of his interview with Barkha Dutt, Pataudi was disarmingly frank about having been asleep at the wheel and he regretted, more than once, his inaction. His contrition might have sounded more persuasive if it had been accompanied by his resignation. A governing council that exercises no oversight should either dissolve itself or be dismissed. It has become something of an orthodoxy in newly liberalized India to maintain that the government ought not to step in to sort out a mess like the IPL because State intervention makes bad things worse. This is often true, but given the complicity of everyone in Indian cricket in the IPL’s murk — from coopted immortals to sham-honorary administrators to gelded commentators — a process of reform from within is unlikely. Pigs don’t fly in this dimension. Instead of taking over the BCCI, the government of India should appoint a Grand Inquisitor whose sole purpose ought to be to terrorize the BCCI into purging itself and its spawn, the IPL, of evil. At worst this might result in a constructive downsizing of the IPL; at best, if the GI is properly inept, the patient might die. For right-thinking people who love cricket, this has to count as a win-win solution.

Easily one of the finest articles written on the subject. :clap::clap::clap: