"As BCCI president, how can I have anything against the ICC? We are part of it. It is our own body."
The words are those of Jagmohan Dalmiya, reproduced from an interview in June 2003.
Dalmiya died last week while in his third term, including one interim stint, as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
The unanimous line, applicable during his life and on the occasion of his death, was that Dalmiya changed cricket.
He did more than that. He reinvented it as a modern sport, turning the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) holdings of £16,000 (Dh89,000) when he became its president in 1997 into US$17 million (Dh62.4m) when he left three years later.
He had already done the same for the BCCI as secretary through the 1980s and 90s.
It was he who taught boards they held the power in their relationship with broadcasters. It was he who yanked power away from Australia and England, although not irrevocably, it turns out.
It was he who spread the game, even if it was not quite driven by some altruistic itch to explore cricket’s frontiers.
And he did it all wearing a safari suit. Those words at the top, though, are as emblematic of Dalmiya’s contributions as any.
They were in response to a question about growing animosity at the time between the heads of the ICC and BCCI, Malcolm Gray and Dalmiya, respectively.
There was a personal angle. Gray lost an acrimonious ICC election to Dalmiya before eventually succeeding him.
But of far greater importance was the friction between the governing body and its most powerful constituent.
In this case, it was about the conflicts between the individual marketing contracts of India’s players and those signed up by the ICC for all players for their main tournaments.
It had led to India almost withdrawing from the 2002/03 Champions Trophy and the World Cup a couple of months later.
A year earlier, at the end of 2001, the BCCI and ICC had scuffled in the Denness affair.
ICC match referee Mike Denness had punished six Indian players after a Test in South Africa. The BCCI wanted Denness removed from the final Test. The ICC refused.
So incensed was the BCCI that it arranged with the hosts to play the final match without Denness as referee, an unofficial Test.
These were the first rumblings of a new order, a complicated order indisputably created by Dalmiya, an order that culminated in, and was formally enshrined by, the ascendancy of the Big Three, led by the BCCI.
In monetising and empowering both the ICC and BCCI, Dalmiya set them up in direct, perpetual conflict.
The BCCI realised its value, which led it to wonder why the ICC was in any way important or relevant.
It made sense that Dalmiya moved to the BCCI almost immediately after leaving the ICC, taking the power he invested in one to the other.
How could he, as he countered, have anything “against the ICC”? He was a part of it. He was a creator of the ICC he was fighting.
It was their “own body”, in the sense that the BCCI was a member, but it was also so with a greater sense of propriety. The BCCI was big enough to subsume the ICC within it.
Every BCCI administration thereafter grew not only in wealth but belligerence. When Sharad Pawar took over as president from Dalmiya, the ante was upped.
He brought in Lalit Modi, who took on the ICC openly. Eventually, in creating the Indian Premier League, he created a lucrative rival to international cricket.
By the time N Srinivasan arrived, it was easy to forget that the adversarial edge Dalmiya injected into the BCCI was collateral for his quest for greater subcontinent influence.
But you can trace a straight line from Dalmiya to Srinivasan, not least in an operational style that involved bullying, threats and bartering of favours.
Dalmiya’s return this year was disorienting mostly because he was no longer in the kind of health such a role needs.
The game was no longer the same, either.
What irony.
Here was Dalmiya, a prototype Srinivasan who elicited similarly alarmist reactions when in power, arriving as a reformer; to set straight Indian cricket on a path he first set, dousing the fire he started.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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