It all seemed so sunny and rosy that October day in 2019. Ganguly’s installation as BCCI president prompted a wave of optimism, even celebration. The first India captain to head the board in 65 years, the changemaker to help Indian cricket emerge from the cloud of the match-fixing affair in the early 2000s. He’d be someone who would call a spade a shovel, who could bring in the winds of change the BCCI needed. Someone who could make the administration a player-forward entity, and not one focused on fattening its already large bank balance. Or perhaps, everyone was a bit naïve.
Because that optimism, as noted above, lasted only a few weeks. Then it went downhill and, bar a handful of pluses, never really recovered.
It has been three years without any sign of the contracts.
You could put these down to bureaucratic delays; the red tape that hinders all Indian sport. And maybe the president is not the person to blame for organisational inefficiencies; maybe none of these things were really a priority for the BCCI. And it is also true that, unlike during Ganguly’s captaincy, where he had the backing of the BCCI president then, Jagmohan Dalmiya, he didn’t really hold much power in this post.
Yet he was president. The buck stopped with him, and part of the president’s role – as is the role of the head of any large organisation – is to be statesmanlike, deal with the big things, project an image of calm and control. In this, the optics were poor.
Ganguly was president. The buck stopped with him. Part of the president’s role is to deal with the big things, project an image of calm and control. In this, the optics were poor
Before the dust could settle on this unseemly public exchange between Indian cricket’s two most high-profile personalities, Kohli was gone as Test captain too, after India’s series loss in South Africa. Ganguly remained, and the spin doctors worked hard to put the focus on Kohli starting things off by quitting the T20 captaincy just before the T20 World Cup in the UAE. That is not unfounded, but at the end of the day it was a matter of management – people management, headline management, ensuring the issue was resolved behind closed doors.
Ultimately, though, the old guard that installed Ganguly – former BCCI presidents N Srinivasan and Anurag Thakur, along with former board secretary Niranjan Shah, and former IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla – pulled the plug on his tenure.
And though their influence, direct or indirect, three years later, suggests the BCCI now is more of the same old, there has been a perceptible change in the board. What used to be a collection of people from across the political spectrum is now mostly a one-party affair. The secretary, Jay Shah, is the son of the home minister; the new treasurer, Ashish Shelar, is a BJP legislator from Maharashtra; the new joint secretary, Devajit Saikia, is a close aide of the Assam chief minister, also with the BJP; the IPL chairman is BJP minister (and former BCCI president) Anurag Thakur’s brother.
But it will be a different Ganguly. Will he still carry the aura of the captain who led Indian cricket boldly out of its darkest abyss? Or has the BCCI president, whose brand endorsements evoked constant snickering, severely tarnished the one brand that really matters to him – Brand Ganguly?