India - bully or benefactor?

"India, your sport needs you".

This imaginative and evocative choice of words from Lawrence Booth is significant because, through these lines in the 2012 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, world cricket and those that run it have formally acknowledged the substantial role the BCCI plays in shaping world cricket's commercial fortunes. In the same breath, however, the line appears to place the blame for the falling fortunes of every format of cricket other than T20 squarely on the shoulders of the BCCI.

The reactions to Booth's piece are almost predictable.

The BCCI has so far met it with the deafening silence that it reserves for such exhortations.

Cricket media at large has hailed it as a well-meant plea requiring a responsible and mature response from the BCCI while concluding that the latter is too obsessed with the IPL and other commercial interests to care.

And there is the inevitable argument that seeking leadership from the BCCI at a time when it is cricket's biggest financial stakeholder is just convenient because the request comes from the same entities which failed to exercise the very same responsibility and maturity when they ran the sport before the BCCI emerged became cricket’s biggest financial powerhouse.

World cricket is on the cusp of major change. This change is visible in a number of ways. The World Cricket League competitions now resemble a geography lesson - names like Denmark, Singapore and Tanzania are beginning to find their way into cricketing summaries. The T20 format and the success of the IPL have combined to give impetus to a number of similar leagues like the Bangladesh Premier League while the Big Bash League has become shinier and more visible. And the emergence of disturbing trends like spot fixing has brought into dramatic focus the increasing financial stakes in the game and their sometimes insidious side effects for the health of the sport.

Booth's comments, coming as they do when cricket is having to do what it does not always do too well – coping with change – underscore a somewhat worrying aspect of how cricket is run currently.

While there is no denying that the BCCI carries substantial financial clout in world cricket, the fact remains that cricket still is, and should be, run by the ICC – that is its primary role. Cricket boards like the BCCI, ECB, CA, CSA and others are all stakeholders, but the ICC should run the sport.

Hence, declaring that it is the responsibility of the BCCI to make sure that Test cricket is in the best of health amounts to abdicating responsibility for the state of the sport – a responsibility which is as much the ICC’s for cricket as it is FIFA’s for football. At the same time, turning to the BCCI and India, often portrayed as the bad and the ugly of world cricket, when cricket is seemingly in crisis, smacks of opportunism.

There is, though, one aspect of cricket where the role of the BCCI has dramatically altered the cricketing landscape – and that is through the IPL. It is easy, and convenient to dismiss the IPL as a money-centric, tawdry spectacle.

But as with any sporting event, spectator turnout remains the biggest barometer of the success of the event – and this is an area where the IPL does rather well. Most matches appear to be well attended, and in some cases, sold out and there is a generally impressive mix of spectators.

The commercial success of the IPL contrasts sharply with the tragicomic caper that was the Stanford Super Series – which remains one of the shadier chapters of cricketing history, as the ECB cavorted with the man now accused of Ponzi-scheming his way through several billions of dollars, money that was made up mainly of small savings entrusted to Stanford’s companies. The success of the IPL is also ironic – in that the BCCI, one of the early cynics of the T20 format, has managed to successfully sell the format, while England and the ECB, the inventors of the format, appear to have suddenly lost interest in it.

Booth appears only too willing to buy into one fallacy about the IPL – that is to believe that India’s love of the T20 format has something to do with the fortunes of the Test team – as evidenced from such clichés as “T20-based nationalism” alongside “the disintegration of India’s feted batting line-up”. Considering that the rise of the IPL preceded the fall of India’s test batting line up by some distance, such a perspective, coming from a man who has supposedly witnessed the IPL at close quarters, is disingenuous. Additionally, Booth insults the intelligence of the Indian cricket fan by insinuating that successes in the ODI format, like the World Cup help alleviate the pain of recent Test failures – and in doing so displays his ignorance of the how Indian fans feel at the 0-8 results the England and Australia series have produced. Hopefully Booth has not extended that further to suggest that with Dravid retiring, and Tendulkar and Laxman likely to follow suit, India will cease playing Tests altogether!

The central argument of Booth’s piece is apparently that the emergence of the T20 format, with the IPL its most visible manifestation, has damaged Test cricket, an outcome which he expects the BCCI to set right. However, the BCCI’s commitment to Test cricket shows itself in several ways.  The BCCI has shown willingness to commit to the FTP, and the BCCI regularly schedules Test series against all the marquee names – South Africa, England, Australia – on a home and away basis. Besides this is the rather unusual fact that the BCCI remains the only board which has recently begun offer home Test series free-to-web – admittedly only the India-WI series so far – in addition to the IPL and the main domestic tournament, Ranji Trophy.

So does the BCCI really have a role to play in the future of Test cricket, which goes beyond merely being a stakeholder? The numbers appear to support that contention – after all, India continues to be the biggest market for cricket at present.

But whether the BCCI would be really willing to do that would be determined by factors beyond its control. And the starting point, it would appear, would be to attempt to engage the BCCI in a more positive and constructive manner, rather than seeking to consistently portray it as the big bad bully of world cricket – a perspective which is all too easy to find on the web nowadays, and all too convenient an excuse in world cricket.