The saving grace of the Champions Trophy was that the Indian team would have probably won the tournament without the luxury of chilling in Dubai while other sides travelled between venues as economy class teams tend to do. Rohit Sharma pulled off the front foot, Varun Chakravarthy kept alive the heterodox wrist-spin pioneered by Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Anil Kumble, Virat Kohli revelled in his best format, Hardik Pandya loped about like a limited-overs-Lindwall, and together they made the game seem easy.
The team won its matches so comfortably that it was hard to argue that it was India’s digs in Dubai that made the difference. Pundits and players did point to the unfairness of travel schedules that kept other teams waiting upon the results of India’s Dubai matches while India settled into the familiarity of their solitary venue, but respectable commentators like Glenn McGrath and Kartikeya Date argued that there was no special advantage conferred upon India. The conditions in Dubai and in Pakistan weren’t radically different and given the geopolitics of the subcontinent, India’s participation in the tournament depended on a neutral venue. In the words of Francis Bacon, if the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad would have to go to the mountain.
There’s something to be said for taking the pragmatic view. India is the largest market for cricket by orders of magnitude; had the ICC taken a hard line and excluded India from the tournament, it would have cost the Champions Trophy both competitive credibility and, more importantly, broadcast revenues. The Indian State will not allow the BCCI to send a team to Pakistan for reasons that are above the ICC’s pay grade and till such time as India relents, international cricket must organise itself around India’s red lines.
And so it has, but you don’t have to be particularly discerning or sensitive to see that this is an unattractive status quo. India circulated a ‘suck it up’ memo and the cricketing world duly sucked it up. Had India been a cricketing minnow as it was when the first ODI World Cup was staged in England, the Champions Trophy would have proceeded without its participation. In 2025, though, India is cricket’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and it must be obeyed.
The unloveliness of the situation is aggravated by the fact that India’s cricket administration is an appendage of Indian politics. Jay Shah, who used to be the secretary of the BCCI (and is now the chairman of the ICC), happens to be the son of India’s home minister. This makes it difficult to cast the BCCI as an autonomous sporting organisation forced into its Pakistan boycott by a hectoring State. Consequently, it’s hard to dress up India’s special treatment in the course of the Champions Trophy as anything other than cricket’s gorilla successfully flexing its muscles.
Does this matter? To the extent that India wants to be cricket’s hegemon, it does. Hegemony consists of making other people do what you want them to, voluntarily. It’s different from the bald exercise of power where clients are nakedly coerced. It’s the difference between Donald Trump rubbing the noses of America’s allies in the dirt to bring home to them their status as clients as opposed to Europe’s post-War leaders enthusiastically hailing America as the leader of the free world of their own accord.
An example of hegemony from the world of cricket would be the fact that England hosted the first three editions of the World Cup without protest. Thanks to England’s status as the home of the game and the long experience of its cricket administrators in exploiting this status, staging the new tournament in England three times in succession passed without serious opposition or comment. It wasn’t till India’s nascent television market emerged that it was hosted elsewhere, in India as the Reliance World Cup.
India’s cricketing supremacy, which will likely be permanent given the size of its television audience and its single-minded passion for cricket, is currently more Trump-like and transactional. It could just be that the guardians of Indian cricket are new to their roles as cricket’s supremos, but their sense of entitlement is ugly.
An example of this was the trophy presentation ceremony when Australia won the ODI World Cup in 2023. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, did the honours at the Ahmedabad stadium that bears his name. He came wearing a blue waistcoat that matched India’s cricket colours in anticipation of an Indian victory. When the Australians won unexpectedly, Modi handed over the trophy to Pat Cummins with a perfunctory pleasantry and walked off with the Australian prime minister leaving Cummins by himself on the rostrum.
This thin-skinned entitlement makes isolated incidents fodder for conspiracists. For example, Javagal Srinath’s decision to allow Harshit Rana as a concussion substitute for Shivam Dube in the fourth T20 international against England was a mistake. Dube is a batsman who can bowl a bit and Rana is a bowler who can bat a bit. This was not, on the face of it, a like-for-like substitution. The fact that it was allowed by an Indian match referee made it look worse.
The refusal to acknowledge error, the lack of grace in the face of defeat, the determination to punish Pakistan, the willingness to create a cricketing top table with England and Australia at the expense of teams like South Africa, the West Indies and Sri Lanka are unforced errors. The BCCI is cricket’s economic superpower: players, pundits, commentators and spectators from other cricketing nations will attend its durbar unbidden, drawn by the crowds, the cash and the competition.
A hint of humility, some generosity, would be useful. I remember the time Bishan Singh Bedi had his county contract abruptly terminated by Northamptonshire after he accused John Lever of unfairly using Vaseline to swing the ball in the Delhi Test in 1976. Bedi maintained that the BCCI, intimidated by an ICC then dominated by England and Australia, didn’t stand up for him. Having suffered the sharp end of the game’s hierarchy, empathy should encourage India in its Jupiterian pomp to accommodate cricket’s smaller planets.
The BCCI might want to remember that globally cricket is a small sport. In the major cricketing nations outside South Asia, it is one sport amongst many, competing for eyeballs with football, rugby, Australian rules football and tennis. To remain a credible international sport, cricket needs the semblance of a level playing field. One of the glories of contemporary cricket is that a country like New Zealand can blank India at home; the BCCI is two hundred and fifty times richer than the New Zealand cricket board. If international cricket comes to be seen as the BCCI’s rotten borough, it will lose its credibility and with it, its precarious hold on the public imagination. India might be left to play with itself: India A vs India B, all the way down to Z. Or the IPL, perhaps, the year round. Kill me now.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
