NEIL MANTHORP: You don’t mess with the BCCI

The World Cup promises to be an extravaganza of co-ordinated chaos, a celebration of the ability to throw an entire jigsaw into the air and watch as most of the pieces land in the right place and fit together.           

There were at least four false starts before the fixtures were finally announced two months before the first game, and then nine of them were changed a few days later. Tour operators around the world were despairing and are now scrambling to put packages together for the hardy, non-Indian supporters keen to travel, mostly from England.

But the tournament isn’t really about the fans on the ground because it doesn’t need to be. Indian fans will pack every stadium for their team’s games, and would do so many times over despite woeful conditions and lack of facilities. Many of the other matches will also be sold out. It just doesn’t make any difference if there is one, overflowing toilet per 1,000 fans and you can’t take your own water into the venue.

The vast majority of the revenue comes from television and digital rights and, to be sure, the production will be superb with more cameras and innovations than ever before. Nobody of significance will question the hosts and nobody will express any doubt that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the host. Although it is, of course, an International Cricket Council (ICC) event.

It wasn’t the case the last time the event was staged (mostly) in India in 2011 when Haroon Lorgat was CEO of the ICC. Being a career finance man, Lorgat was determined to do the job as professionally as possible, to maximise ICC revenue. It was, after all, an ICC event. 

This included a pre-tournament audit of all the Indian stadiums that were to host matches. What was the capacity, how many regular seats, how many corporate boxes and so on. In order to complete a proper budget and project net income, such information was essential and, ordinarily, standard.

This did not sit well with the BCCI and its state unions. After all, if the declared capacity of a venue was 45,000, and there were in fact seats for 49,000, a potential home union “commission” of about $350,000 was at stake if all the tickets were sold, which they would be — perhaps not all through official channels. Add an extra zero if there were a dozen VIP corporate suites unlisted on the official manifesto.   

BCCI umbrage to Lorgat’s audacity led to a reduction of fixtures on India’s next tour to SA, in 2013, to the bare minimum, when Lorgat had become CEO of Cricket SA. It was a payback which cost Cricket SA in the region of R400m. Fair play to the BCCI — it did warn Cricket SA that appointing Lorgat after his ICC tenure would not be in its best interests.

So you don’t mess with the BCCI. Not then and, increasingly, not since. Its control of international cricket was recently upgraded from total to complete when its share of ICC global revenue was increased to 38% with the next highest, just under 5%, belonging to the two other, former members of the Big Three: England and Australia. There is now, veritably, only a Big One.    

Some say it is easier to care about others when you too are in need of care. A few others, wealthy philanthropists, take the time to reinvest their finance into social causes. But for the most part, the world — the sports world anyway — heads in one direction. That being so, it is much more difficult to care when you don’t have to. And the BCCI simply doesn’t have to.

As Anil Kumble famously said during the Dilip Sardesai Memorial Lecture back in 2015, “with power comes responsibility”. He was talking about the BCCI’s increasing control over the destinies of the other major cricket-playing nations. Perhaps it contributed to his tenure as national coach lasting only a year despite a higher win percentage than any other.

The BCCI’s justification for claiming such a vast percentage of the game’s income is reasonable enough. It is in fact responsible for generating considerably more than 38% of it. What does it do to create such a mighty flow of cash? It is evidently not a super-efficient administrator or creative innovator and hasn’t won an ICC event since that World Cup in 2011.

Without rancour or bias, the answer is — nothing. Except have more people than any other country in the world, most of whom follow cricket, many passionately. They provide more eyeballs for the game than the rest of the world combined and they have more bums prepared to sit on seats encrusted with crow droppings than any other country in the world.

And, like every other cricket-playing country, the game in SA will be kept financially afloat for another three years by the Indian tour at the end of the year. And for that, we thank them profusely.