You Can't Take Cricket Out of Me

Former BCCI president N Srinivasan on CSK’s two-year ban in IPL, perception of him being authoritarian and his chances of making a comeback.

- Rajiv Singh

In April 1979, N Srinivasan was abruptly removed from the board of India Cements, a company co-founded by his father TS Narayanaswami and his friend Sankaralinga Iyer. For the next 10 years, reckons Kalyani Candade in her coffee table book, Defying The Paradigm, Srinivasan, vice chairman and managing director of Indian Cements, fought silently and persistently from the outside. “Even when I was told that I would never enter India Cements again,” Srinivasan recounts in the book, “I was neither disheartened, nor dismayed not frightened.” He eventually staged a comeback in 1989.

Srinivasan, now 74, faced similar ignominy in the four decades since that incident. He was ousted as Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president in March 2014, following a probe into the Indian Premier League (IPL) spot fixing scandal in which Gurunath Meiyappan, his son-in-law and former Chennai Super Kings (CSK) team principal, was found guilty of betting. The following year, Srinivasan was removed as ICC chairman. Though the Supreme Court-appointed Mudgal Committee, tasked with looking into various aspects of the functioning of the BCCI, cleared him of match-fixing allegations, the CSK owner was not reinstated as BCCI president due to the 70-year age cap recommended by the Lodha panel.

What has not changed is Srinivasan’s defiance. “It’s (age cap) not fair because in so many walks of life there is no restriction. Then why only for cricket administrators,” quips Srinivasan, who rolled out state T20 championship—Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL)—after CSK was banned for two years in 2015. “You can take me out of cricket, but you can’t take cricket out of me,” he adds.