The Board of Control for Cricket in India was slow to rise to the challenge of the Indian Cricket League, but now it is fully roused. It dismissed Kapil Dev from the directorship of the National Cricket Academy. Then it threatened players that if they played as much as one game for the ICL, they would never be taken to play in the BCCI’s teams. Now there are strong rumours that BCCI will stage a tournament with the same twenty20 format as ICL. The Pakistan Cricket Board has threatened players of that country with the same banishment. Shafqat Naghmi, PCB’s chief operating officer, when he announced the punishment, said that more gentle persuasion would be tried on Mohammed Yousuf; but otherwise the PCB is in the same cussed mood as the BCCI. It did not have to end up this way, but now that it has, it will provide a more interesting spectacle of a joust between the well-fed landlord and the hungry businessman — between the elephant and the tiger.

Just why the BCCI chose to fight is clear: it saw its monopoly of access to Indian viewers about to be breached, and decided to defend its lucrative turf. Since Indian viewers cannot take their eyes off Pakistan when it plays India, the PCB gets the second largest share of the pie. Mr Naghmi gave a further reason for following in Sharad Pawar’s footsteps: that PCB wanted to protect the investment it had made in the players. But the decision to fight also shows that BCCI thinks it can win. That is open to doubt. Any player playing for or sure of getting into Ranji Trophy teams will have to think twice before joining ICL. So will every player with a good chance of playing for India. But as ICL’s initial recruitment has shown, there are plenty of players who are past playing for their national teams. There are a good many more whose chances of playing for India are insufficiently high and who would prefer immediate and certain earnings even if they are less than what playing for India would earn them.

Even if Indian and Pakistani players were deterred by BCCI’s sanctions, there would be many good players from Australia, West Indies, South Africa and England whose prospects in International Cricket Council fixtures are not good enough for them to be deterred. And ICL can make matches more interesting by making up teams of equal strength. Horse races are made more gripping by the fact that they are between equally good horses, that known differences between horses are counterbalanced by weights. Teams selected on player performance would provide more suspense than national teams. It should not be assumed that BCCI is incapable of learning, that it will remain pedestrian and will eventually be defeated. It does not matter who wins, BCCI or ICL, as long as it is a fair fight and the government keeps out of it.