Cricket Board gags all and declares all’s well

DNA Analysis

It was a meeting that promised to redefine Indian cricket, but at the end was only seen to make a silly point.

Compromise and not cricket was clearly the issue when the six-man review committee of the BCCI finally met Sourav Ganguly and Greg Chappell, chief players in Indian cricket’s biggest controversy.

Neither has been asked to leave, and while both parties made pleasant conciliatory sounds afterwards, experts reckon the truce may be uneasy. Ganguly has to still improve his form and fitness while  Chappell still has to win the faith and respect of everybody in the dressing room.

BCCI president Ranbir Singh Mahendra said that Ganguly would remain captain till the next team is chosen, and it remains to be seen whether there is some missive to the selectors — when they sit to pick the side for the series against Sri Lanka — which the review committee did not disclose on Tuesday.

At the official level, the committee’s approach to defuse Indian cricket’s biggest crisis was patronising and simplistic. The captain and coach, who have been bowling bouncers and beamers at each other across multimedia platforms for the past three weeks, were told to bury the hatchet and get on with the game. “We want Indian cricket to move forward,” was the homily dished out by BCCI president Ranbir Singh Mahendra speaking on behalf of the committee which included Jagmohan Dalmiya, SK Nair, Sunil Gavaskar, S Venkatraghavan and Ravi Shastri.

Perhaps the patch-up was inevitable because Indian cricket, which not only translates into a billion eyeballs each time the team plays, but also runs into hundreds of crores of rupees, has taken a severe beating in recent months. The next two months, it must be remembered, are crucial -- for the elections to the BCCI and sundry financial deals that are pending.

After the melodramatic lead-up, the outcome of the meeting was anticlimactic, the only real suspense of the day being Gavaskar’s participation in the meeting. The Little Master’s father had taken unwell in Pune and it was speculated that Gavaskar might skip the meeting. But he turned up on the dot of time.

The fact that the meeting took four hours suggests that the debate on the whys and whats of the dispute was intense. But while Chappell spent 90 minutes explaining his email (and a larger analysis of the Zimbabwe tour), and Ganguly spent the better part of an hour rebutting all the charges, their depositions only served as addendums to the BCCI's primary agenda of resolving the controversy without actually taking a decision.

Mahendra, who attributed the crisis to 'miscommunication', hoped that Chappell and Ganguly would be able to forge a working relationship. Considering that the captain had lodged the first complaint against the coach in a post-play conference and that Chappell's email was not only sent to five BCCI officials, but was also made up of 2615 words, from where the miscommunication came was never explained.

There was very little logic in the day's play, as it were, except that the Review Committee used tour manager Amitabh Choudhury's statement that Ganguly had not faked an injury in Zimbabwe as a rebuttal of the most serious tangible allegation made by Chappell. Most other charges were subjective and impossible to prove.

The Committee did not deem it important to take official cognisance of the views of other team members to substantiate or reject Chappell's charges. Instead, Mahendra announced a gag on them, the captain and coach to discuss this matter in public, suggesting that this line of inquiry is now unlikely.

What will come under scrutiny, the BCCI president said, is the performance of the captain, coach and the players. That, it could be argued in many ways, is precisely where this saga began. But by then, he and other committee members were perhaps patting themselves for a job well done. At least for now.