All is obviously not well between the BCCI administration and the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrator (CoA) with the former feeling that Vinod Rai and company have been unnecessarily interfering in routine matters instead of focusing on implementing the Lodha Committee recommendations.
Things had started heating up ever since CoA Chairman Rai wrote to BCCI acting secretary Amitabh Chaudhary questioning the attempt to host a day-night Test against West Indies in October. And they came to a boil when Chaudhary was asked to ratify a new appointment decided by the Committee, media reports said.
In a fresh salvo fired on Tuesday, Chaudhary questioned the logic and procedure followed by the appointment and wrote, “Initially, I had considered but desisted from responding to your comments on the day-night Test match issue respecting your position. However, the instant matter where an appointment contract is sent for my authentication even though I have once again not been any part of the decision-making process on the appointment and the same having been done without even the concurrence of the office-bearers if not the general body, surprises me, more so when the said appointment is proposed on a post which was not only hitherto non-existent but is also not one of the positions recommended by the Justice Lodha Committee,” he was quoted by the Hindustan Times.
According to DNA, CoA has appointed Priya Gupta as GM (Marketing) at an annual salary of Rs 1.65 crore and has asked her to join before the start of the Indian Premier League. The report also claims that the selected person was not even part of the initial list of candidates.
No problem with players’ body clock
Responding to CoA allegations of not considering the body clock of players and that “policy decisions were taken without the consent of stakeholders”, Chaudhary reminded Rai that except for India and Bangladesh all other Test playing nations were playing day-night Tests.
“I was actually only trying to take a step forward in executing a policy decision which had been unanimously taken at the BCCI Working Committee meeting held on 24th June 2016. (In the meeting) day-night matches with pink ball were introduced for the first time in Duleep Trophy with the express and stated purpose of using the said experience to have one of the home Tests in 2016-17 season converted to a day-night Test,” Choudhary wrote in the letter.
He also pointed out the calendar of the Indian team in which they play white ball cricket under lights to dismiss concerns of the impact such a move would have on the players’ body clock.
“With the cumulative ODI/T20I/IPL figures of only five top players such as MS Dhoni — 566 (318/89/159), Virat Kohli — 414 (208/57/149), Rohit Sharma — 413 (180/74/159), Shikhar Dhawan — 260 (102/31/127) and Bhuvneshwar Kumar — 202 (86/26/90) mounting to a mammoth 1,855 matches, an overwhelming majority of which were night matches, the issue of body clocks of players is adequately addressed,” he said.
