MUMBAI: The mighty Indian
cricket
board, one that never fails to remind the world of its astoundingly deep coffers, of how it retains its dominance over other cricket playing nations and of how the country's all and sundry like to stay involved with its affairs, is staring into a very dark abyss right now.
For a board that has collectively sold cricket and commercial rights in excess of Rs 25,000 crore over the last one year, something as simple as scheduling of a domestic tournament has begun to seem like a task incomprehensible.
Consider this: The Deodhar Trophy, which got underway on Tuesday at the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, concludes on October 27, merely four days before Mumbai pads up for the first Ranji Trophy match of the season on November 1.
Six leading Mumbai cricketers —
Prithvi Shaw,
Dhawal Kulkarni, Shreyas Iyer, Ajinkya Rahane and Surya Kumar Yadav are part of the present Deodhar set up — representing the India A, B & C squads — and none have an idea yet what the first 15 of the Mumbai Ranji team is going to look like in a few days from now.
"First of all, we want to understand, who has chalked out this year's domestic scheduling. Is it the BCCI's operations team? Because we're given to understand that the Board hasn't done it. But who do we ask?" says a state association president.
The BCCI had brought the domestic schedule out in July this year with sources then saying that the process had been outsourced to a private company. "Did they consider that Vijay Hazare tournament has close to 160 matches already so Deodhar wouldn't mean much?" say BCCI member associations.
Vinayak Samant, Mumbai's coach this season, is sweating already over this schedule. Six of Mumbai's Ranji aspirants are playing the Deodhar. Around another five cricketers are busy playing a local tournament and hardly four to five cricketers who can expect to make it to the squad of 15 for Ranji are practicing for the actual tournament.
"Are the selectors going to watch Prithvi Shaw in Deodhar and decide if he's going to go to Australia to play the onedayers? There's absolute intellectual bankruptcy here, just in case nobody's noticing," say those tracking day-to-day cricket.
The bigger question here is that nobody at the BCCI is making him or herself answerable for this mess. The CEO is away from office, the CoA is busy filing compliance reports for the Supreme Court, office-bearers have no say and the Board's operations team has clearly not explained any method to this madness.
So, the larger question right now is 'who is running the BCCI?' Clearly, the men who should aren't. There's nobody out there to explain why a Deodhar Trophy and a Vijay Hazare Trophy have begun to coexist in such proximity, putting cricketers through purposeless tournaments that eventually makes way for a case like Shardul Thakur.
The Mumbai bowler spent hours bowling — on the field, in the nets — only to get ruled out for seven weeks because of a right adductor tendon injury. Thakur will, therefore, not be considered for the T20s and Tests Down Under. This, after a groin injury had already seen him sidelined during the Asia Cup — another ill-timed tournament.