The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the world’s richest cricketing body. There is no doubt about that.
With the wealth that the BCCI has at its disposal, it is expected that the Board will have no problem in spending money on the basic things that are associated with it – such as their website www.bcci.tv.
But cricket fans in India were in for a shock on Sunday evening when they tried to access the website. They landed on a page of register.com, registrar of websites.
The official website of the BCCI was down for a brief period because, according to reports, the Board had failed to renew the domain on time.
The domain name was put up by register.com for public bidding, receiving seven bids with the highest of $270 before it came back on.
The domain was valid from 2-2-2006 to 2-2-2019. The updation date however happened to be 3 February 2018.
The incident came as an embarrassment as the senior national men’s team was playing the second ODI against South Africa at the Centurion at the time.
The BCCI website is an important source of live scores across age categories besides putting up key documents regarding the functioning of the board.
In September, the powerful board bagged a $2.55 billion for granting the IPL media rights to Star Sports. The board also gets the maximum revenues from the ICC, $405 million.
According to The Indian Express, the website’s registration details show that the registrant is Lalit Modi. In 2013, Modi was banned for life by BCCI.
The site was back on at the time of writing.
(With PTI inputs.)