A time to act, not pull punches

HANSIE CRONJE'S King Commission `fixation' on Mohammed Azharuddin is a moment vividly etched in our telemind. ``The game is up!'' we said, as down, for the final count, went Indian cricket. And it is as the King Commission swings into replay action in South Africa (ironically on Gandhi Jayanti day: October 2) that Indian cricket, too, is supposed to get its winning act together in a setting daunting as daunting could be. For a full four months (by the October 3 stage) would Sourav Ganguly's India have had no international cricket exposure - since we, almost gratefully, crashed out of the Dhaka Asia Cup on June 3. Before that, by March 27, we had bid adieu to Sharjah, little knowing that, at the very start of the new `accounting' year (by the end of the first week of April itself), the odds were going to shorten, crashingly, on this game flushed with funds.

Thus, after a span of six off-field `eventful' months following Sharjah, we will we be going into the Kenya Mini World Cup with a touch of scheduling genius - just as the King Commission has resumed, willy-nilly, the business of bringing the game into further disrepute! `Kenya' (starting October 3) is going to be an ICC knockout happening. And it is in a stupefied state that our men enter the ICC's Mini World Cup fray. The state of mind in which Sourav and his men are going to find themselves on October 2 (the eve of this Mini World Cup) is best summed up by this quote from Rudyard Kipling:

``If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you/If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you/But make allowance for their doubting too./If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss/And lose, and start again at your beginnings/And never breathe a word about your loss./If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds' worth of distance run/ Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it/And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!''

Man enough to face the grim Kenya situation Sourav, Sachin and Rahul could hope to be only if (following the August 19-20 Working Committee meeting at Bangalore) the Augean stables are, at long and lingering last, finally cleansed by our Cricket Board's general body meeting, starting September 29. One crowded hour of inglorious life it is otherwise going to be, the Board must remember, from October 2000. Toronto's being turned into a non-happening could work out to be a blessing to count for Indian cricket, if our Board gets a move on (right now following its Working Committee meeting) in anticipation of its momentous September-end AGM. A new coach handpicked for Kenya - alongside a ruthless chopping of not-so-clean old hands - could create just the Nairobi climate needed for Indian cricket to venture to make a healthy new beginning. As in the case of Kapil Dev, there is no way Indian viewers can, from this match- point, see Azhar and Ajay being in the nimble trouble-free frame of mind needed to put their best foot forward during a Mini World Cup - in which the `knockout' already awaits India, going by the May-June Asia Cup formbook.

Now that the Cricket Board and the Union Sports Ministry have each had their provocative public say, both need to remember that Kenya is a world event on which the ICC stakes its pride. India could ill afford a mindlessly lacklustre Dhaka-style showing in the Mini World Cup, so that the Cricket Board and the Union Sports Ministry have to ensure that it is ``a halfway house'' from this flashpoint. Once the Kapil Dev issue is settled, Azhar could not be far away. After that, Ajay Jadeja automatically loses out - somewhere in between - so that the Cricket Board and the Sports Ministry are quits in the matter of the peculiar ``Code of Conduct'' that has governed their interaction. ``There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'' And the national tide against Kapil, Azhar and Ajay has been such as to be taken at the flood. If only our Board bigwigs (before Toronto itself) had awakened to the grim inevitability of this Shakespearian line of reasoning, Indian cricket could, by now, have started to look at least as settled as the game, now, is viewed to be in Pakistan. For Pakistan, after its players paid the Justice Qayyum price, has just got on with the game, reasoning, rationally, that the play is the thing in the evidential circumstances. No doubt India, as the epicentre of the cricket earth-shaking controversy, found itself, almost inextricably, caught in the third eye of the storm. Still there is this abiding feeling that things could have been handled with far greater savvy to pave the way for the litmus test to lie in the centrepitch - rather than behind the sightscreen.

Now look at the scale of contest we have on the cards we held so needlessly close to our chest! What if, in the ICC's Kenya Mini World Cup, we have to run the gauntlet of Pakistan? It is, don't forget, a knockout tournament, so that anything, just anything, could happen towards its end. How does the Union Sports Ministry, here, view the remote-control possibility of an India-Pakistan semifinal or final? Will word go out, all over again, for us not to play Pakistan in the cricket field?

Look at the Khyber Pass into which cricket has been pushed by one far-reaching Toronto decision. No doubt we played alongside Pakistan in a triangular, Down Under, even after Kargil. But, this time in, there has been no categorical assurance forthcoming from the Union Sports Minister, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, that the government directive applies only to a bilateral Indo-Pak meet in cricket - that triangulars are still par for the game course.

In any case, after having participated in a Kenya ICC tournament involving Pakistan too, what is the position when we go, after that, to Sharjah? It is to be an India-Pakistan-Sri Lanka triangular on `The Playground of the East', so is this Sharjah tournament, now, okay by the Sports Ministry? Or will the Cricket Board, in the aftermath of Toronto, find itself in a tight `offshore' situation yet again? For after Sharjah comes a tour of India nobody (in this country) wants right now, but which everybody has to make a day-and-night point to watch on TV! India here play Zimbabwe in five one-day internationals plus three Test matches! What prompted the Cricket Board to grant this extraordinary eight-match tour status to minnowy Zimbabwe must remain a point for debate. For Zimbabwe should not have been the kind of `soft' opposition to be encountered as an aperitif for the tour of Pakistan still technically on the anvil.

After this nation's thus having participated in tournaments involving Pakistan in Kenya and Sharjah, will the government stick to its guns and say that there could be no movement by our cricket team, beyond the Wagah border, in the near warlike conditions still prevailing? For, if these conditions are warlike, they were warlike and will remain warlike. So do we cut off all diplomatic cricketing relations with Pakistan in the name of Amarnath? A tour of Pakistan by India might look a piece of chimera right now, but you never know which way the snowball rolls in Kashmir.

Having said that, one tour of India that is a certainty is Steve Waugh's Australia arriving here, in February 2001, for three Tests and five one-day internationals. This is, by far, the best scale of competitive series we could hope for, it there is to be no tour of Pakistan. In fact, the face-off with Steve Waugh's Australia, in India, could become even more interesting if, perchance, the end-2000 tour of Pakistan materialises against all odds. Pakistan tour or no Pakistan tour, there is a lot of cricket in the offing. And, for this cricket to be combatively meaningful, it is not just essential but vital that our Cricket Board takes its pick of players only from those mentally attuned to giving cent per cent in the middle. In fact, it could be argued that, for Sourav, Sachin, Rahul, Kumble and Srinath to perform at their mentally relaxed best, all-important it is, here and now, for certain tarnished performers to be shown the backdoor.

The `Saharap' on the knuckles that the Cricket Board was administered by the Sports Ministry had this message inwritten in it - that the tainted be painted into a corner.

It is imperative that Sourav's India goes to Kenya with an eye to the future, rather than a mindset mired in the past. For this, the Board has to be seen to act rather than play-act, pulling no punches in preparing to counter the anti-mood likely to prevail at its September-end AGM. The leading lights of the Cricket Board have only to view the Sydney Olympics telepicture (starting September 15) to divine what competition in the world of sport, today, really means. One look at the small screen here and they should know exactly who they have to jettison in an effort to make India a global player again - under Sourav Ganguly in the Mini World Cup.

RAJU BHARATAN

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