It's Jay's World

Speakers soon began heaping up cricket’s challenges: the paucity of strategic thought, the gross inequalities, the confused and distended schedule. There was lots of good stuff, in a spirit of goodwill. But the elephant in the room was….well, not in the room. Or maybe, as Osman Samiuddin put it, the room was in the elephant. The two days of discussion were finally reduced to a terse communique.

Which says something. We might well perceive a game in crisis. But as far as the BCCI is concerned, there’s nothing much to worry about. They’re minting it. They’re winning stuff. They run the joint and call the tune. Crisis? What crisis? How can the game be in disarray and the system be ‘broken’ when it works so well for the world’s biggest cricket economy? That’s no burning platform; that’s a barbecue pit. Shah, meanwhile, is having the time of his life, cocooned in ICC-funded comfort and luxury, feted wherever he goes by a conga line of suckholes, wondering why people can’t be more interigent, rike he is.

There’s no mystery about where such elite shamelessness and impunity comes from - it’s inherited. His loathsome dad responds to a mass calamity with a ‘shit happens’ shrug. So Shah’s treating cricket as a vehicle for self-aggrandising photo ops is only to be expected. But that’s no reason for the rest of us to collude in the fantasy that cricket is best led by a monomaniac political scion, and that the ICC’s other directors aren’t abasing themselves into the bargain.

This article first appeared on Gideon Haigh's Substack, Cricket Et Al and has been republished with permission.