India's disastrous tour to England brought to the fore the fact that the governance of the game had been hijacked. It was a reality that had been put on the backburner for ever so long. As long as India won, everything was acceptable, even shoddy governance. But once faced with the humiliation of being whitewashed in every form of the game, reality struck home. The short-term goal of putting commerce before sport was thoroughly exposed.
But this isn't a recent phenomenon. It has been developing over the years and has to do with the emergence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India as a dominant force in world cricket. There is not one major decision that is possible with the "sanction" of the BCCI. And the BCCI and its manners are the centre of Gideon Haigh's book Spehere of Influence - Writings on cricket and its discontents, which so ably puts in perspective through a collection of his essays, not just the doings of the Indian board but of the ills that plague cricket, especially off the pitch.
Haigh is also strongly critical of the International Cricket Council having become a toothless body. He puts his spin on institutionally rampant cronyism and questions the administration of the world's top brass. His other targets include the slide in Pakistan cricket, Allen Stanford, spot-fixing and even the rise of the lucrative Indian Premier League.
However, even as Haigh trains his guns at the cricketing boards and the shenanigans who run the game, his affection for the cricketers is quite clear. In fact, a section in his book is dedicated to the 'Giants of Asia', where he pays a tribute to Kapil Dev, Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Muttiah Muralitharan, and Sachin Tendulkar. You name a controversy and a comparison in world cricket and Haigh has an opinion on it and a piece on it in his book.
At times though you do long for a more involved piece in the book, which is only available in the introductory part of the book title 'What Just Happened'. It is a brief history of the cricket as it stands now.
The book begins with a detailed recapitulation of the key events in the emergence of India as cricket's unipolar superpower and goes o to make sense of cricket's new order, namely the spread of Twenty20 and of private ownership, the eclipse of international cricket's other formats and of the ICC, the tribulations of Pakistan, the prodigies of Lalit Modi and the false promises of Allen Stanford.
The book is not only an education to those who are less than well-versed in cricket administration, but also brings out the struggle to save cricket's soul.
Sphere of Influence - Writings on cricket and its discontents by Gideon Haigh is published by Simon & Schuster.
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