First slip, then cover-up

The right issue to debate is not whether IPL is responsible for the decline of Indian cricketers’ performance but if its riches so dazzled administrators that it devastated the management of our talent.

Representational image | Sydney Cricket Ground | Twitter/@scg

In the continuing season of cover-ups in Indian cricket, its establishment has worked single-mindedly over the past fortnight to suggest that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game and its management in India. It is being done with a degree of success, employing a combination of rented commentators, selected leaks and cynically tactical actions to create a smokescreen of confusion and disinformation. But isn’t that exactly what you would expect from an establishment where the same individuals can run the board, own IPL teams, employ selectors as their brand ambassadors and yet launch investigations into irregularities that allegedly happened under their own noses, on a scale unprecedented even in the scandal-ridden history of our public life?

Just two weeks ago you saw armies of tax officials raiding Lalit Modi’s and most IPL franchisees’ offices, some of them even smiling at the cameras and claiming incriminating evidence. What happens with such stories, we well know. If there were actually scandals involved in the conduct of the IPL, you can be almost sure they would involve so many people on all sides that this story would die a natural death or, like so many of our other scandals, go into a state of some kind of suspended animation: the scam can lie dormant, only to be brought alive when you want to run down an adversary.

Meanwhile, the establishment has closed ranks to cover their tracks over what looks like a systematic destruction of Indian cricket over the past 18 months. The latest is the shambolic notice issued to the seven poor fellows allegedly caught in a scrap in a pub. This, a watering-hole brawl after the team had played its last match in the tournament, cannot even be a cricketing sin. The tournament was over; so was the players’ job. They had every right to chill out as much as they would have to celebrate if they had won the tournament. They are adults.

The notice was issued not so much to bring some discipline and old-fashioned puritanism back to our cricketers’ lives, as to confuse public opinion, so the blame could be shifted, through sheer innuendo, on these out-of-control cricketers. Even if they were in a pub and looking for a drink rather than a Mexican meal as they claim, the players were well within their rights to do so, though they could have always avoided getting into a brawl. They had no more cricket to play for several weeks. But how come the same cricketing establishment had no problems when the same cricketers were not just encouraged or welcomed, but even compelled to attend wilder social evenings throughout the IPL when another match was to be played within 48 hours? I am not trying to take a view for or against partying in the middle of cricket. All I am trying to underline is the criminal hypocrisy and subterfuge of the cricketing establishment: if you attend my parties in the middle of my tournament, it is fine. If you are seen in a pub even after another tournament is concluded, I will send you a notice. More importantly, I will then blame you for all that went wrong in that tournament. Once again, through leaks and innuendo. The principle is the old one: Indian fans want somebody’s neck. Better yours than mine.

That is why we, the fans, should be smart enough to get over the second successive T20 World Cup defeat and look, instead, at the state of our cricket overall, how it has declined over the past 18 months, and figure out who is to be held responsible for it. Then we might indeed conclude that it cannot be just a bunch of thirsty players in a Caribbean pub, howsoever boisterous.

These 18 months mark the systematic decline, if not destruction, of much of the new talent discovered by the same establishment over the previous eight years when Indian cricket hit the proverbial sweet spot to climb a virtuous curve that took it to the very top in Tests, to number two in ODIs and brought it the first T20 World Cup. Count those that represented this new surge of talent: R P Singh, Munaf Patel, Ishant Sharma, Irfan Pathan, Sreesanth and Balaji represented the new surge in fast-bowling talent. Today, each one has lost several yards of pace, much of his bite or is simply carrying chronic injuries. Wasn’t it the board’s responsibility to nurse, and build this talent? The decline of Ishant, once hailed as a phenomenal talent, and with good reason, is an act of criminal negligence by a greedy, cynical board whose members got too busy feathering their own nests to bother about what was happening to the talent that brought them the riches and the fame to begin with.

Today all these younger people who led Indian cricket into its golden age are no longer even in the reckoning, while two tired, slowed-down, injury-prone men in their thirties lead your pace attack. The batting talent has not done much better. The struggles of Rohit Sharma, arguably the most talented batsman since the arrival of Yuvraj Singh, are a good example. You can hold forth on how he, Irfan, Munaf and many others who hailed from such humble backgrounds have not been able to handle the new fame and money. But if you run the cricketing establishment, you cannot escape your own culpability by giving patronising sermons. It was your responsibility to nurse and protect this talent.

That responsibility was junked in the dazzle of the IPL cash and fame. Lalit Modi showed the board’s administrators that there was so much to be made so easily through the golden goose he had just cloned in his cricketing equivalent of a DNA lab, that they no longer had to worry about performance and accountability. And once you have a mint in your backyard, you can buy or rent everything, lawyers, commentators, politicians and certainly even the media. That is why the right issue to debate is not whether or not IPL is responsible for the decline of Indian cricketers’ performance. Cricketers are simple, young, instinctive performers with stars in their eyes. The real question should be: did the IPL and its riches so dazzle our cricket administrators and sundry politicians and power brokers who control that establishment, that it so totally devastated the management of our own cricketing talent?

Concluding the first part of this argument last Saturday, I had promised to highlight this week the price our cricket is paying for the loss of some core values and maybe some core talent. Over the past decade, a world-beating Indian team emerged out of the betting and match-fixing scandal-burnt ashes of the game worldwide. The fire had burnt some of the more talented Indian cricketers too. But India was able to emerge stronger because we had a titanium-strong core of five hugely talented, committed stars whose integrity, national commitment and personal maturity could not be questioned, even if one of them made his Test debut at 16. It is Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid, Laxman and Kumble who kept Indian cricket together, and nurtured the new talent around them, with firmness, and generosity. They could not have gone on for ever, definitely not in the shorter forms of the game. The expectation that the next crop of seniors, Dhoni, Sehwag, Harbhajan, Zaheer and Yuvraj will fill that gap has been belied; and the cricket administration has not only failed to bridge the gap, it has only further indulged the weaknesses of many for short-term, selfish gain. The solution now may lie not so much in inquiries and skulduggery as in bringing this brilliant and unimpeachable core group into the management of our cricket, so they can help rebuild Indian cricket once again from a state that looks almost as bad as in the match-fixing ’90s.