A team of administrators has been appointed to the BCCI by the Supreme Court. The order may have come a tad late, but it promises a brighter future in the game’s administration. A whole set of “honorary” officials stand virtually eliminated thanks to the cricket czars they followed and who led them down the garden path. So much water may have flown down the Ganga since the first case was filed in the matter of conflict of interest in 2008, regarding N. Srinivasan’s company buying an IPL team, and yet the BCCI remained adamant that its autonomy was inviolable as it had money in bank. Such arrogance was bound to come a cropper, measured against the principles of fairplay.
Financial probity might become an absolute priority as the reputed former CAG Vinod Rai and the financial expert and IDFC chairman Vikram Limaye are in the panel along with a woman cricketer and a historian, who might be able to steer the BCCI away from all the mistakes it made. Even at this stage, the board, with the active support of the government, presumably because one of its MPs heading the board was toppled, is attempting to scupper the reforms through legal challenges. There are those — including that of Mr Srinivasan whose excesses and defiance of court orders led to this present problems in the BCCI — that allowineligible administrators to stay on in defiance of the Lodha panel reforms. All associations must fall in line with the reforms if the BCCI is to win back its autonomy.
