17th August 1997

Vengeance can be fun

Can Jagmohan Dalmiya, ICC President, change the face of cricket?

Close to 400 years ago, the East India Company arrived in India to teach the natives the tricks of (the) trade. Now the colony has struck back. In the 50th year of Independence - it's karma chaps, not coincidence - M.L. Dalmiya & Co., (regd. civil and structural engineers, Calcutta) has arrived at Lords to teach them how to run cricket. The Empire is having a coronary.

Jagmohan Dalmiya of M.L. Dalmiya & Co., is the new boss of the International Cricket Council (ICC), the game's governing body. To the men of Lord's, a world where England has always determined what constitutes cricket, this man must be heresy come visiting. He's known to wear safari suits (at least they're pin-striped), his hair looks like it's been hit by an oil-slick and he's referred to not as 'Lord This' or 'Sir That', but as Jagguda. Exactly why Ravi Shastri says, "The man from the East is the perfect man to run the game."

"If noses are distended in derision, it is done discreetly. This man, who emerges from 10-hour meetings still looking like an advertisement for 30-Plus (he's 56), was a year ago described by the BBC as "one of the six most powerful men in sport". It is a compliment muted by the fact that the list includes the once-jailed boxing promoter Don King and world athletics boss Primo Nebiolo accused of fixing events. To Dalmiya's reputation are affixed no such ugly warts, but men do not arrive in power without stepping on toes; and so, depending on who you speak to, he is described as a workaholic, a visionary, an upstart, ruthless, efficient, manipulative and dynamic. And so the question is: Is he an ambitious administrator running amok or can he truly change the face of the game?

Dalmiya's chameleon-like quality means that pinning him down is arduous business. His bio-data offers few clues: Born into a Marwari business family, his playing ambitions - he was an aggressive club-level opening bat - were interred when his father died. He embraced the family business, yet retained his link with the game through administration, eventually rising to become board secretary. If Dalmiya was ambitious, he was also prescient. Only by marketing Indian cricket successfully which he did, could India have aspirations to be a world power. And he certainly had aspirations.

Indeed, his defining moment, his deification within the subcontinent, would happen in 1993 with his (and I.S. Bindra's) struggle with the western-dominated establishment over the right to host the 1996 World Cup. To shake embedded institutions requires a gloves-off battle. Just fine with Dalmiya. Not only was this a style he is adept at, he was also operating from a moral high ground, armed as he was with the righteous indignation of a subcontinent ignored for too long. Myths would rise from meetings. How Dalmiya stood up and said, "When I was young I was told Britannia rules the waves, but now it seems that Britannia waives the rules." Then, when the bids were asked to be submitted at 10 am but only (this was odd) to be opened at11 am, Dalmiya and Bindra submitted theirs in a locked briefcase, refusing to divulge its combination.

The Cup was won. Three years later, Dalmiya was seeking control of the very establishment he had challenged. During the 1996 World Cup, irked by Australia and the West Indies' refusal to play in Sri Lanka and the ICC's toothless non-response, Pakistani delegate Ehsaan Mani and Joe Bugalo, chairman of the associate members, suggested that the subcontinent put forward a candidate as ICC head. Who would that be asked Dalmiya. The reply, "Why not you?" Another battle, where the nine Test countries (two votes each) and 22 associate members (one vote each) would vote ensued. Dalmiya rallied the associate members (17 of 22) around him and with the added support of four of the Test nations ensured a simple majority, but then he was told he also needed two-thirds of the Test nations' votes. Dalmiya argued that it was not in the rules, and he won. The battle was not over. It was then proposed that he accept the post of president, a new post and a useless one for he would only chair the governing body once a year, while a chairman ran the powerful ICC executive board. Again Dalmiya fought, today he is both president and head of the executive board.

By now Dalmiya had earned more labels, one former administrator even saying, "He is not just persistent, he is willing to do anything to have his way". Compromise too. Critics point out his agreeing to the rotation (instead of election) of the ICC president from now on, meaning he gets his way, but the next Indian comes 27 years later. "Rubbish," he says, "In India too the presidentship is rotated on a zonal basis."

Indeed, all the adjectives - ruthless, efficient, manipulative - ascribed to Dalmiya now appear to have a complimentary hue after all in the rough-house world of sporting politics, bringing rosaries to a meeting won't work. Says Sports Administrator Amrit Mathur: "Once upon a time Indians used to sleep at meetings at Lord's. Now Jaggu is keeping everyone else awake." As ICC head, Dalmiya wants to leave the fractious past behind. The subcontinent has made its point. Now for the ICC to gain ground, he says, "Consensus is my main thrust." With three years to make a prehistoric, powerless body into relevant organisation, he is already at work. Funds are primary for the ICC which - this must remain the sporting joke of all time - has less than 100,000 in its bank account. And this is where Dalmiya has a master plan. A World Cup of Test cricket to be held over four or five months. It will, he says, re-ignite interest in this declining game. Secondly, sponsorship, television royalty and perhaps profit sharing, will help finance his ambitious programme of spreading the game worldwide. A committee comprising Ali Bacher, David Richards, Ehsaan Mani, John Anderson and Dalmiya himself will present its findings in the December ICC session in Calcutta.

That is the beginning, for his briefcase is overflowing with ideas.

Cricket in Disneyland; a further classification of associate members into different levels (giving Bangladesh and Kenya one-day status); "a fairer distribution of cricket"; so that Australia doesn't get six Tests in England and Sri Lanka one. Already he has set up three committees: The first finance; second, developmental which will have five development officers; third, a two-tier cricket committee, one part technical (ex-players like Sunil Gavaskar and Bobby Simpson to decide on rules, pitches, etc), another, to administrate on over rates, fines, et al.

How Test nations who have always run their cricket, decided their fixtures and managed their money will react to his claim to control, will be worth watching. Dalmiya, ironically, is on the other side of the fence now. But the young man of 1963, who never even knew what a safari suit was when he first made his foray into cricket administration as secretary of the Rajasthan Club, hasn't risen to be cricket's worldwide boss by being short of answers. And if he's still got oil in his hair, well, he's got an MCC tie round his neck too.

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