The Politics of Cricket: BCCI’s Chokehold Over the Sport and the Fate of Many Nations
This article is the first part on the politics of Cricket. Read the second article here.
When people think of great sports dynasties and teams that held their respective sports within their fists, the 2000s New England Patriots, the 1990s Boston Celtics, and the 1950s New York Yankees come to mind. But perhaps, one of the greatest sports dominances over any period of time exists in a sport many give little consideration to, cricket. The West Indies, the international cricket team representing a coalition of primarily English-speaking Caribbean nations, lost zero test series (a format of cricket in which two nations play out a grueling 5-day game lasting from early morning to night) from 1980 to 1995, a streak that to this day brings about memories of cricket’s golden era to long-time followers of the sport. The 15-year stretch also saw the emergence of cricket legends who all currently sit on all-time rankings published by the International Cricket Council (ICC), such as Vivian Richards and Richie Richardson. Today, though, the West Indies is ranked eighth out of only 10 teams eligible for rankings in the test series format, a position embarrassing to the dynasty of the 1980s and 1990s. Three crucial questions can be taken from this anecdote, whose answers hold broader implications for the overall political environment of the entire Asian continent: what happened to the West Indies team, why are many other smaller and poorer teams following the same path as the West Indies, and how is India at the very center of the politics ruining the sport of cricket?
Unbeknownst to many in the United States, cricket is the second most watched and followed sport in the world based on a number of factors, including but not limited to viewership, sponsorship deals, internet popularity, and number as well as strength of professional leagues in the world. Throughout history, there has been a consistent system of rotating cricket powerhouses on the international stage, similar to how various football countries have experienced their own golden eras. The West Indies, India, Pakistan, England, Bangladesh, Kenya, and even Zimbabwe have all enjoyed their own periods of brilliance as well as periods of vulnerability in the sport. However, today the richest countries — namely India, Australia, and New Zealand — are rapidly pulling away from the others, leaving them so peripheral in the world of cricket that their own fan-bases and interest in the sport are dying. Take the West Indies, for example, whose cricket agency Cricket West Indies has struggled financially as a result of declining interest in the sport over the past several decades and has at some points had to take loans just to pay players and staff. India, the current rulers of the cricket world, has in comparison been able to bathe themselves in cash as a result of their golden apple contest the Indian Premier League (IPL). Given this, the next logical step naturally becomes to evaluate to what extent, if at all, India controls the sport in the first place.
The Board of Cricket Control India (BCCI), is the administrative body of cricket for the most populous member of the ICC. It manages the international team, organizes trips abroad, hosts series and tournaments at home, and most importantly hosts the IPL, the largest premier league in practically every category in the world. The clout and financial banking gifted to the BCCI as a result of its connectivity to a massive Indian population fully invested in the sport of cricket has translated to bargaining power and authority in the international arena unrivaled by any other cricket-playing country, which has had considerable impacts on the power dynamics of South Asia and the sport of cricket altogether. Though cricket following is on the decline in many cricket-playing nations, the sheer population advantage of India has almost single-handedly kept viewership of the sport to maintain its 2nd place behind soccer. With such power comes responsibility, but the corruption plaguing India’s general governance has seeped its way into BCCI leadership by virtue of widespread nepotism.
On paper the ICC is the principal authority of cricket tasked with resolving matters such as rules discrepancies, disputes between cricket-playing nations, and subsidies for underprivileged cricket boards; but in reality, the BCCI either performs these functions entirely or to some extent. First and foremost, the BCCI generates 70 percent of the ICC’s entire revenue, primarily through their hosting of the IPL. Indian fans, within India and abroad, far outnumber fanbases of other cricket-playing nations, thereby producing immense sales in team merchandise, ticket sales, and enterprise endorsements for the BCCI. Secondly, BCCI’s sheer decision-making control over the Indian national cricket team, which in and of itself as institution boasts a name-brand unlike any other cricket team be it by country or by domestic league team, enables it to dictate financial proceedings for the entire ICC. For example, in what became known as the 2008 Border-Gavaskar Trophy Series incident, during a significant and popular biannual competition played between India and Australia, verbal exchanges during a heated match between Indian Harbhajan Singh and Australian Andrew Symonds followed with Symonds claiming that Singh called him racial slurs during the match. After an investigation, the ICC verified the integrity of Symonds’s claim and decided to punish Singh with a three match ban, a rather light sentence for such despicable behavior and unsportsmanlike conduct. Immediately following the decision, India threatened to pull out of the series altogether knowing the revenue and global attention the series brought the ICC, to which the council was forced to respond with a withdrawal of the ban, instead compromising to give Singh a negligible fine instead.
The BCCI has also exerted pressure, even successfully, on the ICC to remove or reprimand officiating crew members that the BCCI disfavors, mostly because of their allotment of decisions against India. Unlike most sports, officiating in cricket works in such a way that the umpire’s perception of whether a wicket would be struck (constituting a “strike” like in baseball) by the ball in cases where the batting player’s padding equipment blocks the ball from reaching the wicket plays a crucial role. This is because in certain cases where the margin of “out” vs. “no out” is within a certain amount, even technological evidence suggesting a decision contrary to the on-field umpire’s become unimportant. Thus, the umpire’s perception, regardless of what actually may have happened, is more important in cricket than in most other sports so as to legitimize the umpire’s jurisdiction and mitigate the overuse of “challenges” by teams against an umpire.
This opens the door to an insignificantly greater number of false officiating calls though, which for decades cricket teams have accepted as inherent to the style of cricket rules and regulations. However, the BCCI with the power they enjoy over the ICC has made use of their dominion to compel the ICC to remove umpires who may have made controversial decisions (not always completely verified as false) against India. For example, Daryl Harper, a member of the Elite Panel of ICC Umpires who boasts an impressive 96 percent correct decision rate in matches involving India, had his contract terminated by the ICC and was forced to retire following heavy outspoken criticism of him by the BCCI following a couple of controversial decision during the India-West Indies series in 2011. Similarly, umpire Steve Bucknor was forcefully removed from officiating the 2008 Border-Gavaskar Trophy Series following the BCCI’s pressuring of the ICC for a controversial decision during a Sydney test cricket match. Granted, both Harper and Bucknor had made incredibly questionable and poor umpiring decisions throughout the course of the matches for which they faced criticism, all of which came during key times in the match and undeniably became a driving factor as to why India lost both of those matches despite deserving to win. Further review following the matches confirmed the that their on-field decisions were incorrect and both umpires acknowledged the blunders they had committed; but neither incompetence nor unfortunately timed umpiring errors can justify institutional pressure to single-out and force officials to retire or be removed from their profession altogether.
Lastly, India has held a concerning amount of power over ICC policy and decision-making. For years since its founding, the ICC had two member-states with complete veto powers - its founding members England and Australia, represented respectively by the English Cricket Board and Cricket Australia. However, with the rapid rise of cricket in Asian nations, new standards stripped England and Australia of their veto authority and allocated equal voting powers to all ICC member-states. Today, this attempt at democratization of the world’s largest cricket organization has failed miserably thanks to the BCCI’s dominance. Tony Greig, a South African cricketer and commentator, told BBC in a 2015 interview that in procedural matters, the BCCI actually informs certain countries how to vote regularly. He name-drops Zimbabwe and Bangladesh (likely out of loyalty for the role India played in Bangladesh’s independence movement against Pakistan, India’s geopolitical rival in South Asia) in particular while adding that there are one or two other countries as well. Apart from imposing itself over the voting privileges of other ICC member-states, the BCCI also dictates ICC policies that would typically be decided through democratic processes in other ways without even meddling in the votes of other member-states.
For instance, the ICC in 2008 with the support of a majority of member-states decided to officially adopt the Decision Review System (DRS), an officiating technology that would virtually eliminate man-made errors by umpires when called to action by either a challenge from a player or a direct request from the umpire itself. At the time, the BCCI was staunchly opposed to its adoption since it excluded certain officiating facilities such as the Hot Spot that India was in favor of maintaining rather than replacing. As a result, the ICC retracted its decision and folded to the demands of the BCCI to instead make the implementation of DRS non-mandatory and up to the discretion of member-states hosting cricket series and matches. A year later, the ICC incorporated Hot Spot technology into DRS protocols and the BCCI began to loosen its stance on the system. When the ICC attempted to make DRS mandatory again in 2012, though, the BCCI again harshly refused and sent the proposal back to irrelevance. Only in 2016 did the BCCI finally consent to testing the DRS system in a series against England at home, after which DRS slowly became a staple of international cricket officiating.
What has perhaps been the most ridiculous moment of BCCI despotism over the cricket regime is the true potential cricket as a sport holds around the world. Cricket debuted at modern iterations of the Summer Olympics in 1896 in Athens, Greece and also took place (albeit through only a single match as a result of disinterest) in 1900 in Paris, France. St. Louis, Missouri, hosts of the 1904 Summer Olympics, declined to include the sport and since then cricket vanished from the Summer Olympics in spite of cricket-playing countries like the United Kingdom and Australia hosting the event several times from 1904 onwards. With growing support for its inclusion, several efforts were made in the early 2000s to reinstate cricket in the Summer Olympics but the BCCI nearly single-handedly vetoed the ICC’s ability to negotiate the inclusion of the sport in the Summer Olympics. Though logistical issues over drug testing were cited, monetary motives likely prompted the veto since cricket in the Summer Olympics would mean that the BCCI would have to one, give over control of Indian cricket players to the Indian Olympic Association for an indefinite period and two, lose revenue from the marketing and viewership that the BCCI would have generated from the Indian national cricket team playing in series abroad and at home during the Summer cricket season if they were not busy with the Summer Olympics.
The only solution to the tyranny of the BCCI in the cricket world would be the continued and sustainable emergence of other cricket nations. New Zealand has recently seen great success as a cricket-playing country, even defeating the favorites in India in the finals of the most recent iteration of the World Test Championship. However, New Zealand itself enjoys a position of privilege as one of the larger and more entitled member-states of the ICC; furthermore, it has shied away from any opportunity to resist political foul play by the BCCI. A more promising look exists in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan. While domestic corruption plagues Pakistan’s ability to meaningfully participate and take leadership roles within the ICC bureaucracy as well as global cricket market, it nonetheless holds great potential in terms of sheer population, cricket fanbase, domestic cricket league, and cricket talent.
Bangladesh, though, presents the most optimistic epitome of smaller cricket nations growing in size and success, which when coupled with a sustained trajectory, may challenge the BCCI and equalize the playing field. The little country practically surrounded by India in terms of geography surprised the cricket world when it overwhelmingly defeated the reigning test cricket champions, New Zealand, in January 2022 with resounding performances by both their batsmen and bowlers. Though Bangladesh would go on to lose the next match in similar fashion and end the series with a 1-1 draw, the one flash of potential in the first match itself gave light to cricket fans around the world who miss the days of cricket where countries other than just India, Australia, and New Zealand put on shows of cricketing brilliance and entertainment. Bangladesh also performed relatively well in the ICC U19 Cricket World Cup, where it lost only to England (who would go on to the finals and lose to India) during the group stages. Finally, Bangladesh has overcome challenges in executing the start to a smooth Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) season. Many believed that the COVID-19 pandemic, which had damaged the likes of domestic cricket leagues even in India, would certainly hinder Bangladesh from running its BPL. However, the BPL is currently in fine form and most importantly, serves the rhetorical purpose of giving the country a breeding ground for local talent that the team can use when assembling its lineup for the upcoming ICC T20 Cricket World Cup. Though there are both disturbing and encouraging signs in the cricket world, only time will tell whether the BCCI continues its conspiracy-like domination of the cricket world.
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