Thakur's Exit Could Pave The Way For A Better Game

Tim Wigmore on how the Supreme Court’s decision to remove two of cricket’s most powerful men can herald a positive change.

- Tim Wigmore

Cricket governance is an arcane world and nowhere more than India. To which most fans would say: so what? After all it’s the cricket, not the internecine squabbling off it, that is the point of the game.

The trouble with this attitude, though, is that it ignores the huge hidden power of administrators to shape the game – sometimes for good but, in recent years, more often for bad. The men (and they are almost always men) in suits have not been scrutinised enough, and in so many ways – from the continued lack of structure in Test cricket, to the proliferation of context-free two-Test series and ubiquitous bilateral ODI series to the ludicrous contraction of the World Cup and the shameful hoarding of money and power by Australia, England and India – cricket has suffered.

In an ideal world, then, sports administration could be left unreported and ignored, but such a utopia is as absent in cricket as in the rest of the globe.

Which brings us to the week’s news from India. Essentially, the two highest office-bearers of the Board of Control for Cricket in India have been removed from office by the Supreme Court. It is the culmination of a year of bitter squabbling, after the Lodha Committee, which was established by the Supreme Court, advocated a comprehensive overhaul of the workings of the BCCI to make it fit to govern, above all by eradicating conflict of interest. Remarkably, Anurag Thakur, who was the BCCI’s president – and therefore the most important administrator in the entire world – was simultaneously an MP for the governing BJP: a flagrant conflict of interest. As ESPN Cricinfo editor Sambit Bal put it, the BCCI was run like “an archaic oligarchy”.