Apparently, the BCCI are waiting

2 minute read

Have you been following this India-South Africa brouhaha over the last few weeks? Just because something’s reported as if it’s not massively childish, doesn’t mean it isn’t massively childish.

Basically, there’s a whole load of politics going on, which is sod all to do with cricket and everything to do with business, power and influence. However, a Test series may well be sacrificed in the crossfire.

Reading about this farrago is an exercise in futility because you can disregard pretty much everything anyone says about it. Most official comment isn’t even a bastardised version of the truth, it’s usually just a completely irrelevant lie presented as if it’s ‘the issue’. Quite who this official reading of the situation is aimed at is anyone’s guess because no-one really believes it.

The BCCI have some sort of roulette wheel featuring heady-sounding job titles which they spin at times like this to see who will be called upon to talk vacuous nonsense to the media. This week, it landed on ‘secretary’ which is a bloke called Sanjay Patel. It doesn’t matter who he is or what he does though. The BCCI has whole battalions of these guys. We presume that they grow them somewhere in dank, clay soil which doesn’t get much daylight.

Sanjay Patel said:

“Certain things have to be put in right perspective. Let me inform you that BCCI in normal circumstances would have done anything [for the tour to proceed]. But the protocol of finalising any series is joint declaration. But that declaration was originally done without the BCCI’s approval. So we are waiting.”

This is such a colossal waste of words.

Patel paints the BCCI as being an organisation which would do anything to ensure a cricket tour took place, which it isn’t.

He claims the problem is due to ‘protocol’, which would be absurdly trivial if it were true – but it isn’t. The BCCI claim that their gripe is that South Africa announced the series prematurely before everything was finalised. There may well be some truth in that, but you can be equally certain it’s not the full story – it’s no more than one sentence in the middle of chapter eight.

Finally, he says that the BCCI are waiting, without saying what they might be waiting for. We can only presume they are waiting for the day when Gondwana reforms in the shape of a giant boardroom table around which every remaining human will gather, wearing a suit and sunglasses. They will then discuss whether or not to take a vote for a thousand years before finally deciding that they need to launch an internal investigation into why no vote has taken place.

No-one, at any point, will question what the vote might be about. No-one, at any point, will achieve anything.