Matter as much of credibility as 'visibility'

BACK TO `Tom Brown's Schooldays' in which Thomas Hughes came up with that classic definition of cricket: ``It's more than a game: it's an institution.'' Back to the future of our Cricket Board as an institution. An institution that should have been seen to be scrupulously correct - in its approach to nixing match- fixing - once the CBIce was broken. For the Cricket Board has the luck of Kapil Devil here. In the sense that the Union Law Ministry (headed by the cricket-conscious Arun Jaitley)- at once rewardingly and fulfillingly - chose to uphold the BCCI's autonomous status, a status under live threat up to that pungent point.

As an autonomous institution - noted the Law Ministry - it was entirely up to the Cricket Board, following the CBI report revelations, to act deterrently. From this vital stage therefore (in which it fortuitously regained its game-administering authority), the BCCI should, instantly, come to have been viewed - by a public it had `culture-shockingly' let down on the small screen - as getting to imaginative grips with R. K. Raghavan's document going off with a loud report. Instead, what the Board was seen to do was to cloud the issue by suddenly bringing, into the telepicture, its own detective in the shape of ex-CBI chief K. Madhavan (due to submit his report today: November 25). How could Madhavan sit in super judgment on Raghavan? A million- dollar match-fixing query that the Board should have been asked, on the spot, to answer.

In other words, if K. Madhavan has a sleuth's role here, let us be clear that it begins only where the report of R. K. Raghavan ends. Yet that is not the BCCI trend of events in evidence, since the CBI report hit the headlines. R. K. Raghavan (in the `Conclusions' section of his report) made certain trenchant observations concerning the Cricket Board's style of non- functioning. Is K. Madhavan strictly in a position to initiate any sort of meaningful action on these valid strictures, seeing that he has been engaged, for the job, by the Cricket Board itself? If he is not, that means things are as they always were in the Board - there is one Scotland Yardstick for the players, another for the officials.

We do not quarrel with these class divisions in our cricket hierarchy any more. For we cricket buffs well know that we are, by now, helpless in the matter. We appreciate that the Board officials are a cricket law unto themselves. For all that, we prefer this Cricket Board to a government takeover - with all its attendant Kalmadi compulsion to win a cricket gold medal for India in the Commonwealth Games! True, this Board is still flawed at the grassroots so far as the game and its conduct go. But there is at least the certainty, with this Board, that things are not going to get worse.

The best thing to happen, from this Board's point of view, was Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa's being moved from the Union Sports Ministry in the nick of time - like in the case of his deputy: Shahnawaz Hussain. For Dhindsa had begun to entertain grand delusions about his niche in Indian cricket. There was disturbing talk (during the inroads that Dhindsa's ministry made into the game) of the Board's autonomous edifice being eroded. Now, with Uma Bharthi reassuming her perch as saffronised Sports Minister, the most that could happen has already come about - India's tour of Pakistan stands cancelled! Let us accept that as the rub of the green on the Wagah border, where the government calls the shots. This is the cricket-ground reality in the prism through which the game is viewed by the Centre.

Centrestage, meanwhile, remains K. Madhavan. No rational thinker could approve of the media focus that K. Madhavan has managed from a CBI report that is already a caveat, in itself, on Indian cricket. With those two central ministers (both at the Board's gullet) off the sports scene, it was natural, I suppose, for the BCCI to project K. Madhavan in a mantle that would buy it what it needed most when the CBI report hit the stands - time. Here is where I say that K. Madhavan should himself have chosen to view his function in a more self-effacing light. What one logically expected, in the tortured circumstances, was the former CBI chief's going about his job as discreetly as possible - in the teeth of the media's being, predictably, after him for spot quotes. Do not tell me that K. Madhavan is not a pastmaster in the art of warding off loaded queries fired at him by the paparazzi-accompanied media. But the end-impression that K. Madhavan left was that he rather enjoyed the `visibility' that the media spotlight meant for him!

Take here the simple matter of how the Board's cross-questioning of Mohammed Aharuddin was handled. Without holding any brief for Azhar, the man was entitled to a certain privacy while he was being grilled, all over again. If Azhar (for perfectly legitimate reasons) wanted to be interrogated only in his native Hyderabad, this was a personal request that should have been kept judiciously under wraps. Instead, what we found was no end of publicity being accorded to the issue of whether or not Azhar would, finally, put in an appearance before K. Madhavan. If the circumstances were extenuating enough for K. Madhavan to make the trip to Hyderbad for that interface with Azhar, no one in the media need have come to know of it. By contrast, what we had was the flamboyant Francis Bacon situation of: ``The people assembled: Mahomet called to the hill to come to him again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said: ``If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.''

An uphill task in refurbishing its image in the eyes and ears of a totally disenchanted public is what the Cricket Board faced in the aftermath of the CBI report. Instead of graciously accepting this document as the `Final Word' it was synthesised to be in that striking Don Bradman- Neville Cardus parallel drawn, the Board chose to act on the CBI report with all the media mileage it could muster. What was this if not an elaborate attempt to obfuscate the main issue?

The gut issue is that nothing, just nothing, has been right with the working of the Board in the decadent decade of 1991-2000. A decade in which cricket became sadly synonymous with another seven-letter word fatally attractive: glamour. ``Glamour is when a man knows a woman is a woman,'' tellingly observed Gina Lollobrigida. This glamour-puss's definition succinctly sums up the ocean change that came over our TV in the 1991-2000 span. A span in which even Rupert Murdoch felt constrained to note that there was a ``raunchy'' look to Indian television. Cricket was bound, as a gladiator-spectator sport, to be touched by all this. Thus did we witness the `Coca-Colonisation' of the game that led to its coming under a counter-`Pepsiege'! The game was being undermined, sedulously, by the meretricious market values determining its razzledazzle course through this decade now drawing to a close.

It is this aspect of the mindless trivialising of a deadly serious game by the Board (in far-offshore centres) that K. Madhavan should urgently be investigating. Instead, what we had is cameras being tendentiously trained on personalities who have already been extensively interrogated by the CBI. I hope the Board has an instinctive appreciation of how scandalised viewers felt to find, say, a grandnephew of Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji involved in such murky goings-on. By which all I mean is that the K. Madhavan report will carry conviction only if it ventures to go a step further than the CBI document has done in the matter of scrutinising the script of an extravaganza with villains galore, but only one hero: Sachin Tendulkar.

Even Sachin needs to be forthrightly asked to be more forthcoming in the scandalous matter of New Zealand's not being asked to follow on, when India had a whopping lead of 275 runs, during that Ahmedabad Test. This is a happening recent enough to be looked into in all its unsavoury twists and turns. If R. K. Raghavan's CBI report fell short in any direction, it was in the cursory manner in which it glided over this very serious follow- on matter. Why did Sachin, belatedly, try to explain away the indefensible - K. Madhavan should make it his cricketing business to find out.

My own information is that Sachin was on the point of taking his choice of ball (from the spheroids in the box) when the managerial decision not to enforce the follow-on was imposed upon him. What is all this hogwash about our bowlers' having been too tired to carry on, if New Zealand had been asked to bat again? Have our present day players heard of a certain Vinoo Mankad (in the June 1952 Lord's Test), who was on the field for all but four-and-three quarter hours of the 24-3/4 hours' play possible in the five days of that match? If indeed there were, now, in Sachin's team players who said they felt too weary to carry on to a follow-on, these men need to be weeded out here and now, for refusing to do their job by India. There has been nothing as outrageous as this, lately, even in Indian cricket - not asking the opposition to go in, again, when 275 runs ahead. It is something that cries to be probed in all its dubious detail, seeing how the innings-fixers were aware, the previous evening itself, that India (and not New Zealand) would be batting again.

We await K. Madhavan's report with interest. Not so much to see what it reveals as to feel what it conceals. Unless the report comes up with observations that mark a substantial advance upon what we already have on CBI record, the credibility gap between Madhavan's bat and Raghavan's pad will remain wide as wide could be.

RAJU BHARATAN

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