Man proposes, Covid-19 disposes, and there, as of now, isn’t any way you can get away from it, try as you may. Curiously, though, precisely what the lethal virus impacts can be suggestive more of a guided missile than a random salvo, thanks to agenda-driven human intervention.
Or, so seem to suggest some famous former cricketers of Pakistan as they try to come to terms with the mothballing of the Twenty20 World Cup and the Asia Cup by the International Cricket Council and the Asian Cricket Council, respectively.
This contrasts sharply with the manna-from-heaven dispensation that now sets the Indian Premier League, previously suspended on account of the pandemic, to go ahead now that the global showpiece event is off the game’s annual schedule, leaving the competitive window open.
Pakistanis, understandably enough, find it just as galling that the putting off of the Asia Cup, shifted from their country allegedly to placate India, got scuppered too, Indian board chief Sourav Ganguly stepping well ahead of the continental institution to make the announcement and thus driving it home that what India wants, happens.
“Everything is geared to India’s needs” is the charge, backed up with cloakand- dagger insinuations, with India’s IPL-related financial compulsions not exactly an official secret anywhere in the world. Well might we be dismissive of all this, gloating over the advantage our bankrolling of the game yields, but whether the ICC thus loses its vestigial credibility is not a subject that can be glossed patriotically over.
Rashid Latif, of course, has been far less strident than Shoaib Akhtar but the duo echo a protest whose overall impact could be global and extremely serious in the longer term. It’s not just about the India-Pakistan tug of war inside the ICC over a cornucopia of trifles but it extends, as Akhtar has pointed out, to the future of the international game, which is where it gets really serious.
Akhtar says that the ICC is essentially presiding over the game’s destruction. When you have a new ball at either end – ruling out reverse swing ~ with all those fielding restrictions in force ~ you are making it a batsmen’s picnic where bowlers show up only to cook the food. The erstwhile speedster has made the point in the past, illustrating the lack of balance in the contemporary game.
It can’t have been lost on the ICC, but the malaise is far from being eradicated. The impression is perhaps inescapable that few things other than squeezing money out of cricket matter to its high-ups as they, let’s face it, live off it. Neither can they bite the hand that feeds them, especially at a time when a survival-conscious world, knocked boots and brains by a mystery disease that so far has defied all efforts at containment, could do with any consignment of largesse in exchange for supplication.