How cricket ceded power to cricket's Godfather

When the stakeholders, the strategists and the savants have had their say over the reconstruction of the ICC by India, Australia and England, it has been telling that many have used the ‘tent’ analogy. Cricket needs India, or more specifically its strongman Narayan Srinivisan, on the inside urinating out, rather than the outside, urinating in.

The quote was attributed to Lyndon B Johnson, who was describing FBI director J Edgar Hoover. Hoover favoured intimidation and threats to get what he wanted. No-one ever took him on.

Srinivasan appears to enjoy similar immunity. In June he emerged unblinking in front of the flashbulbs at a press conference in Melbourne to make his first statement as president of the ICC, completing the most audacious powergrab in cricket history.

The cricketing family had ceded power to Srinivasan, who looked every inch the Godfather with a sporting check jacket and goldfish-bowl sunglasses, and his co-horts Giles Clarke of the ECB and Wally Edwards of Cricket Australia. Together they called themselves ExCo (Executive Committee), a trinity which will pocket the bulk of a potential £2.5billion worth of ICC revenue in the next eight years, while the rest will feed on scraps. Associate members will lose about £182 million.

Mike Brearley called it the greatest crisis since Packer. Other luminaries such as Clive Lloyd and Ehsan Mani, the former ICC president, pleaded with the other nations to stand up for themselves. But just when they should have been up in arms, they could barely lift a finger.

Srinivasan now holds the purse strings, threatening the fabric of the sport: its integrity. The financial carve-up may leave everyone bar India, Australia and England knocking on the door of the poor house, but cricket’s reputation as a sport which was at least run with a modicum propriety is in doubt. It’s not just about the money.

It’s about good governance. The rules and regulations. The checks and counterchecks. The conventions which give an organisation the best chance of making the right decision. It is not a side of sport which inspires the fan in the cheap seats to rouse a roar from his craw. Bad governance is the opposite. It can infect the faithful with apathy, leaving once clicking turnstiles to rust in rigidity. Srinivasan and his cabal appear to come up short.

Ehsan Mani perhaps describes it best. “Fifa is doing better with its governance now than cricket. Who is Sepp Blatter? I’m not sure whether it’s Srinivasan or Clarke.”

Clarke is probably not in Srinivasan’s league. He did team up English cricket with Allen Stanford, the disgraced Texan financier who was convicted of a £4.4 billion fraud for the grotesque Twenty20 for $20 million game but having smoothed Srinivasan’s path to the top, he may only be the Indian industrialist’s poodle.

Srini, as he is called, has been barred from running the BCCI by the Supreme Court of India for his role in the Indian Premier League spot-fixing scandal. The franchise his company – India Cements - owns, the Chennai Super Kings, have been implicated and his son-in-law, the team manager Gurunath Meiyappan, has been found guilty of passing on team information to bookmakers. An investigation is ongoing.

It says a lot about ExCo’s attitude towards respectability that a man considered not fit for office with his home board, by no less than the highest court in India, should be allowed to assume control of the world game.

“I absolutely believe in innocent until proven guilty,” Mani says. “He’s under suspicion and the most decent thing to do is to only assume charge once he has had his name cleared. You put the credibility of the game first but this is just how it’ll be run in the future.”

Srinivasan, however, does not do humility. In front of a disbelieving media in Melbourne, he claimed that he removed himself from the presidency of the BCCI. It was some swank because he appealed the decision - twice.

Before even the involvement of the Supreme Court, a BCCI inquiry had found Srinivasan had no case to answer with regard to the spot-fixing allegations. So why did the court get involved? Srinivasan had either chosen, or approved the names of, the two retired judges who cleared him.

It gives a clue as to how the ICC will be run under Srinivasan. At the BCCI, he reduced the role of the all-important secretary to that of a rubber stamp. Sanjay Jagdale, one former incumbent, admitted he “didn’t really have much to do with Indian cricket”. Srinivasan was involved in every decision and appointment, no matter how minor.

Ravi Shastri, the former allrounder turned commentator, says Srinivasan is “misunderstood”. “Great man,” he says. “Gets an unfair press because he does things his way and makes no bones about how he wants those things done. He’s involved every calls and people in BCCI need that. He’s the best prepared, the most knowledgable.”

Inderjit Singh Bindra, the closest Indian cricket has to a moral authority, former BCCI president and principal advisor to the ICC president, compared Srinivasan to Jagmohan Dalmiya, his former mentor, who used to stalk cricket’s powers of corridor with similar menace.

“He says Haroon Lorgat should not be in charge of the South Africa board and he is suspended. He says DRS is not acceptable so it is not acceptable. He knew he could control everything. He told me he wanted to be the next Dalmiya, who was the Godfather. But Srini is far more dangerous. He has more resources. All the paperwork [for BCCI] is done by his India Cements employees.”

Mani says Srinivasan and ExCo has ridden roughshod over corporate governance. “They’ve totally disregarded the ICC code of ethics when it was all put into play,” he says. “The code is very clear that no member could have a conflict of interest, no member or group of members could act in their own interest. This is all spelt out in the old code which has now been scrapped.

“In a five-man committee, it’s whatever these three decide. According to ICC papers and the new revamped articles they’re setting up is that ExCo is the sole committee, the only committee that can make recommendations to the ICC for financial distribution, constitutional, personnel, anti-corruption, ethics and integrity matters.”

There are crashing conflicts of interest and alarming errors of judgment aplenty. Srinivasan, as owner of the Super Kings and BCCI president, is financially reliant on the success of the IPL, a tournament which in turn relies heavily on the other ICC nations’ biggest stars. There was also the bizarre appointment of Peter Chingoka onto the new governance committee. Chingoka, the Zimbabwean, has been banned from travelling to the EU for his ties to Robert Mugabe. Before his resignation from Zimbabwe cricket following allegations of financial misconduct, ExCo deemed him fit for their new era.

“It’s an attitude we can do what we wish,” says a former ICC board member. “What anyone thinks or feels, it doesn’t matter. It’s only putting an individual on a committee. It’s nothing. They’ve done worse. The Future Tours Programme was agreed by all members in June 2011. It was binding. But ExCo said it wasn’t and ripped it up. The Woolf report [a paper which demanded ICC independence] was ignored.

“Srini’s not scared to blackmail. The message is clear. ‘If you don’t do as I say, this is what I’ll do’.”

There is also an issue with ‘do as I say, not as I do’. When it comes to anti-corruption, what hope does the sport have of being clean when its head is being investigated for fixing?

“The anti-corruption unit should be totally independent,” says Mani. “Now it is answerable to Srinivasan. His BCCI right-hand man Sundar Raman sits on the anti-corruption review. It is not credible.”

There is also a stark warning from Tim May. May resigned last year as chief executive of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations because he was “sick of operating in a landscape where things were determined by threats and intimidation”.

May, who lost his position on the ICC cricket committee to Laxman Sivaramakrishnan because of BCCI “intimidation”, says players will find it harder to be honest and fair.

“Everyone’s a product of their environment and their culture so if you’re in a sport and the governance of that sport is not principally sound, honest or without integrity then that filters down to the culture that you exist within. It can suggest if the administration is corrupt, the players will then question when the administrators lecture them, or have put before them various behavioural codes. ‘How come we have to meet higher standards than you?’.”

For now, Srinivasan leads. But for how long? Srinivasan, Clarke and Edwards will share the role, each doing a two-year term before the cycle begins again. But wherever Srinivasan has been in cricket administration – the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association and the BCCI – he has changed the constitution to allow him to hold a position for longer than ever before.

What is to stop him deciding an Indian should run the game in perpetuity, having successful argued his country should have the most say as it earns the most money?

“He can do what he wants,” says Mani. “He has all the power and all of the self-interest. He can bully and intimidate. No-one stands up to him. There is no good that can come from this.”

Srini looking at the stars

If the world game is looking for a chink in Narayan Srinivasan’s armour, then search no more. The ICC chairman is extremely superstitious and is understood to employ a personal astrologer.

Such is Srini’s faith in the mystic arts that he has used an astrologer to advise on team strategy for his franchise, the Chennai Super Kings, in the Indian Premier League. Vastu Venkatesan, an astrologer based in Chennai, also offers insight to help Srinivasan run his business empire.

During IPL 2013, Venkatesan advised Srinivasan on Chennai’s batting order and what to do if they won the toss to give Chennai the best chance of winning the toss. Team officials were also ordered to wear specific coloured t-shirts to improve chances, pictures of deities and goddesses had to be hung up in the dressing room while the opposition should be given “red towels” for bad luck

Before the final against Kolkata Knight Riders, Srini’s astrologer told him that “special prayers” had to be said for MS Dhoni as there were “not friendly” omens for the India captain. It didn’t work. Chennai lost.

This article was first published in The Cricketer magazine