David Hopps in Jaipur
England’s tour of India looked in real danger of cancellation after Jagmohan Dalmiya, president of the Indian cricket board, angrily refused to recognise the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) deadline of noon on Friday, Calcutta time, for confirmation that India’s suspended batsman Virender Sehwag will not play in next week’s first Test in Mohali.
Dalmiya’s outburst came after his board had named Sehwag in the 14-man squad for the Test.
This announcement caused Lord MacLaurin, the president of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and one of Dalmiya’s most implacable opponents, to proclaim: “We will not play against a team with a banned cricketer in it.”
ECB officials were privately horrified to discover their own loose cannon wheeling himself into the firing line and advised that all diplomatic efforts were still being made to save the tour. MacLaurin’s threat, however, accurately captured England’s determination to pull out of the first Test, and most likely the series, should Dalmiya and the ICC not cobble together an unlikely truce.
India’s chairman of selectors Chandu Borde defended Sehwag’s inclusion in the Mohali squad. “Our job is to select solely on merit,” said Borde at a tense media conference in a brightly coloured Rajasthan tent at the Sawaiman Singh stadium. “You can’t drop a player who has scored 100 on debut. I couldn’t de-select Sehwag because Mr Dalmiya has given me no instructions to do so.”
The Sehwag Affair has escalated into the issue upon which Dalmiya and the ICC’s chief executive Mal Speed have staked their political survival, a battle for control of the game that is heading for a furious climax at an ICC executive board meeting in Colombo during March.
That Dalmiya must either back down or risk the Indian backlash that would follow the cancellation of an England Test series worth millions of dollars privately delights officials who, with good reason, identify his dictatorial approach as potentially catastrophic to the game.
But Dalmiya, a former ICC president, remains bent upon openly defying the governing body. “The ICC’s executive officer is asking for the announcement of the team,” he said. “I can’t tell him that. Who can dictate a deadline to anyone? The team will only be named on the morning of the match.” If that is the case England will not be at the ground, most likely not in Mohali, perhaps not even in India.
Dalmiya later took to Star TV to promote, throughout Asia, his desire to return ICC power to individual delegates where he believes he can hold sway, and block the modernising plans, due to be in place by next early next year, which would invest more power in a day-to-day executive.
“This isn’t a boxing match, we are reasonable people,” he said. “All we have to do is sit down and sort these things out. The ICC cannot pass decrees without talking to all its affiliate nations.”
That the game of cricket was once run by a white upper-class elite is undeniable. If those days have largely gone, they need to be entirely eradicated. But the equality of all cricketing nations will not be advanced by the likes of Dalmiya, whose business affairs are under investigation by Indian tax officials and who is obsessed with implanting India as the dominant cricketing power.
Neither are MacLaurin’s outbursts particularly helpful; he is a figure who encourages Asian fears about vestiges of white supremacy. Certainly it would have been advisable, when he chose to speak out on Wednesday, for him to have remembered Sehwag’s name.
In a transparent attempt to appease the Indian cricket board, the International Cricket Council on Thursday day announced that Sachin Tendulkar’s offence in the second Test against South Africa was cleaning the ball without the umpire’s permission rather than ball tampering.