Johannesburg – Cricket South Africa hope to send a delegation to India by the end of the week for a meeting with the Board of Control for Cricket in India to discuss India’s tour to this country later this year.
Cricket SA will contact the BCCI on Monday hoping to set up a date for the meeting, but there may be some confusion over who exactly the delegation – likely to be made up of CSA president Chris Nenzani and chief executive Haroon Lorgat – will meet following the BCCI’s annual general meeting which took place in Chennai on Sunday.
As expected, Narayanaswami Srinivasan was voted in as president and normally he would be the person with whom CSA would meet. However, Srinivasan will be president in name only, at least until the Indian Supreme Court make a decision about a case relating to Srinivasan and the BCCI. That case concerns Srinivasan’s son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, who was charged with match-fixing during this year’s Indian Premier League.
Meiyappan is a senior official with the Chennai Super Kings, which is owned by India Cements, a company owned by Srinivasan. “I have won unopposed but I am not taking charge,” Srinivasan told Indian media on Sunday. “I have asked the new office bearers to take charge. I am awaiting the Supreme Court order. There are a lot of things on me now.”
Cricket SA have continued to maintain a stony silence on their interaction with the BCCI since Lorgat met with Sanjay Patel, the BCCI’s now permanent secretary on the sidelines of an International Cricket Council conference earlier this month. Lorgat described that meeting as “constructive”, though Patel was later quoted by Indian media as saying India’s tour to South Africa hadn’t been discussed by the pair at all.
India are due in South Africa for a tour comprising three Tests, seven ODIs and two T20 Internationals, but that tour looks like being massively curtailed after the BCCI announced last month that they were scheduling a two-Test series with West Indies, at the same time as the tour to South Africa was due to start. In addition, they also brought forward the dates of India’s tour to New Zealand, meaning that if India tour here, they will only be able to fit in two Tests and three ODIs, the minimum requirement of the Future Tours Programme.
Srinivasan, and other high ranking members of the BCCI are understood to still hold a grudge against Lorgat from the time when he was the ICC’s chief executive. Among the moves that supposedly angered the BCCI was Lorgat’s stance on the Decision Review System, restructuring the ICC’s administration according to sound business practices and a more equitable distribution of funds to aid the sport’s growth globally.
The Star