When economy was liberalising, the above mentioned companies didn’t quickly adapted to the changing dynamics. Ultimately, they succumbed to the challenges thrown by post liberalisation scenario and now exist in an ordinary fashion. The same can happen to BCCI, if they didn’t acclimatize to the changing scenario and that too quickly and competitively. The change is Essel Group’s Indian Cricket League (ICL) which is aggressively making significant headways day by day. It looks like a ditto remake of Kerry Packer’s action-packed thriller, which gave rise to one-day cricket.
The fear of losing out the battle to the competition has already started developing in the minds of BCCI. At the moment, BCCI is neither teaming up with ICL nor its taking the competition in a healthy manner. In fact it is implementing all types of unfair and unethical tactics to put a break on ICL’s cruise by blacklisting players, selectors and whosoever associated with path-breaking ICL. For Subhash Chandra, mentor of ICL, it will be a remake of his own successful flick of 1990s in which he broke the monopoly of Doordarshan in the television space. Well, the dawn of cricket liberalisation is not about to begin, it has already started.
Dawn of liberalisation
It’s already 1-0 in an on-going tight match between ICL v/s BCCI. On September 6, 2007, BCCI received a first sign of its crumbling monopoly. The Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission ordered Director General of Investigation and Registration to probe the allegations that BCCI has threatened players of life-time ban if they play for ICL. If found guilty BCCI would be asked to roll back its steps. Analysing the situation on a macro level, BCCI has been the only buyer of cricket talent and wants to do so in the future. Doesn’t this remind you of Pre-liberalisation era where phenomena like monopoly, black marketing and all existed? It’s strange that the board has been able to do so for such a long time in a country where cricket is only next to a religion and billion of hopes are attached to it. Rahul Mehra, the only lawyer who has won a case against BCCI says “This is not the first instance, this had happened in 90’s too.” MRTP secures that no individual organization has monopoly. With BCCI threatening to take away the benefits from players joining ICL, all this will have major impact in the court. It’s going to be a battle of egos. 75 years of cricket or not, BCCI’s threats are illegal. These are grey areas, very crucial indeed because nobody has threaded these paths before, so it’s going to be very interesting to wait and watch how the court handles it. BCCI has gained its monopoly from the grass root level, under its aegis all local teams are registered and non members are left at the outskirts. MRTP is indeed a very welcome change.”
The gargantuan task
The gargantuan task that stands in front of Chandra is how he will recreate stars out of retired players, new kids and one who have been washed-off from spectators’ heart because of their run of the mill performance. Even more worrying factor for Chandra is who will watch the game without the main league stars and ultimately without stars and without watchers who will bet on ICL and provide sponsorship.
Chandra should not forget that even at Ranji level lot of senior members and stars are playing but it is yet to make a mark in the hearts of spectators and sponsors. Thus, a big question mark remains on ICL’s capability to magnetize the spectators. One more challenge is that to develop a passion in the sport. It will become all the more difficult with a team comprised of various nationalities. Audience will be confused on the front – which side to take? For this ICL needs to do take lessons from the failure of Premier Hockey League and success of EPL, English Cricket County and other highly successful leagues. In some cases leagues have generated more money and followings than the respective official board. Well, ICL won’t face a much problem in magnetizing the sponsors since there’s already huge media hype around the league. Capitalising the same for a sharp business man like Subhash Chandra won’t be an elephantine task.