1,000th ODI meant nothing to BCCI?

Team India celebrate the wicket of West Indies’ Brandon King during the first ODI at Motera, near Ahmedabad on February 6. Pic/PTI

My belief that the current set of administrators of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) care very little for the average cricket follower is reinforced by the fact that the Board didn't come up with anything worthwhile to commemorate the 1,000th one-day international played last week in Ahmedabad.

"What could they have done?" is something I can hear as this is being written, and to those voices I say options abound. A coffee table book. An e-book. An ODIs-related competition for fans, which could have run during the television coverage of the match. A documentary… the works. Did none of these ideas occur to the marketing gurus of the establishment and their bosses?
Sure, we are in the midst of the pandemic, but players are hitting the turf, so are umpires and match referees and spectators are either watching on television or following the progress of matches on their smart phones. They all exist, but that little bit extra which the BCCI could dish out is non-existent.

Surely, the BCCI should have known that the 1,000th ODI was coming up after the three-match contest in South Africa. ODI cricket, T20 popularity notwithstanding, means much to the followers of the game. Those games encompassed two World Cup wins (1983 and 2011), a mini World Cup triumph in Australia in 1985 and a Champions Trophy triumph in 2013 which came nearly 11 years after sharing the trophy with Sri Lanka.

The one-day format played a big role in popularising cricket in India. Post 1983 and 1985, the game grew and grew. Plus, hosting the 1987 and 1996 World Cups sealed it in a sense.
A book to do justice to the 1,000th ODI milestone would have been ideal, but the current administrators have been sadly unable to see the potential for literature in this moment. This was not the case with administrators of another era, though.

I wonder how often the BCCI's Golden Jubilee Commemoration Volume 1929-79, published in 1980, is referred to, at Cricket Centre, Churchgate. It's a neatly produced book, priced at R20, with messages and articles penned by some of the biggest names in cricket and journalism - Sir Donald Bradman, Clive Lloyd, Ted Dexter, Tony Cozier, EW Swanton, John Woodcock, KN Prabhu et al.

"India has reason to be proud of the splendid service rendered to the game and your country by many distinguished administrators and players," wrote Bradman. Former West Indies captain John Goddard, who led his team on these shores in 1948-49, wrote about how it took one month to get to India and played cricket across October and March.

Another splendid and useful publication produced for the Board's golden jubilee was a book containing all Test match scorecards from India's inaugural Test in 1932.

The Duleep Trophy has ceased to be an important domestic tournament, but a fine book on it and the Irani Cup edited by PN Sundaresan, was published by the Board in 1980. It was sold for Rs 15 and although all those scoreboards are available on the internet, what are not are descriptions of the matches. It lived up to what the then BCCI president M Chinnaswamy wrote in the Foreword: "The enthusiasts of cricket the world over should find this book both useful and interesting."

The BCCI has profited from having some top-notch historians and writers serving them - Sundaresan, Anandji Dossa (who like writer KN Prabhu should have been a recipient of the CK Nayudu Lifetime Achievement Award), Sudhir Vaidya (not too late to honour him) and Mohandas Menon, who have burned the midnight oil compiling Board annuals year after year.

In 1980, the Board also published 45 Years of Ranji Trophy edited by Sundaresan, who, in Sportsweek's World of Cricket 1980, provided a glimpse of Dossa's contribution to his book on the national championship: "I prepared the scores and summaries of the matches and sent copies of the same to Anandji. Back they came to me, enriched with notings of incidents and other details, not to speak of corrections in names of first-class players and scores."

Prof Ratnakar Shetty, who served the BCCI in several capacities, writes in his newly released book, On Board, how Boundary and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter, which was first published in February 2008, was "abruptly terminated in 2014."

The BCCI newsletter was distributed to the media as well. This was one way where all the good work that the BCCI was doing could have been projected to the public.

I hear the newsletter was discontinued on the orders of a top BCCI official, who felt continuing with it would lead to the media asking more questions about the 2013 spot fixing scandal.
Thankfully, that official is no longer in the inner ring of cricket administration.

But driving past the 1,000 ODIs landmark without a pause proves that the BCCI does still have men like him among its ranks.

mid-day's group sports editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance. He tweets @ClaytonMurzello

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