The Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) chief Vinod Rai had last month lashed out at the BCCI for proposing that India and West Indies will play a day-night Test match in October without keeping them in the loop. But the move hasn’t gone down well with former Australia skipper Ian Chappell.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) chief Vinod Rai had last month lashed out at the BCCI for proposing that India and West Indies will play a day-night Test match in October without keeping them in the loop. But the move hasn’t gone down well with former Australia skipper Ian Chappell.

Writing in the Hindustan Times, Chappell said that the ruckus within the BCCI gives the true picture of cricket administration at present. “The confusion surrounding the BCCI’s attempts to program its first Day/Night Test mirrors perfectly the state of cricket administration worldwide. The fact that cricket’s most prosperous - and therefore most powerful - administration, the BCCI, is beholden to a Committee of Administrators (CoA) is a black mark on the game.

To then have the CoA overrule the BCCI’s attempts to play a Day/Night Test against the West Indies on the basis that any decision should include consultation with “the players, the administrators and the fans”, is even more damning. At a time when cricket needs clearheaded decision making and long-term planning, confusion seems to be the prevalent emotion.

Consider the following.

Test cricket is a game in dire need of nurturing and one solution is to play matches under lights. So far the Day/Night Test experiment has proved worthwhile but it needs the support of its biggest stakeholder. India’s current progress on programming a Day/Night Test appears to be more akin to ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.”

BCCI secretary Amitabh Choudhary had consulted India coach Ravi Shastri, BCCI CEO Rahul Johri, the acting President CK Khanna, treasurer Anirudh Chaudhary, ex-India wicketkeeper Saba Karim and operations manager Gaurav Saxena but kept the CoA out of the communication process. And that didn’t go down well with Rai who lambasted the board members in his mail.

“You seem to have discussed with all the stakeholders, who in your scheme of things constitute four persons sitting in the (BCCI) cricket centre — a very misplaced viewpoint. Even if it be cricket of which all of you certainly have greater knowledge than me, (I’m excluding Diana (Edulji, former India women’s team skipper), who has greater knowledge than all of you! I represent the viewing population. They are your greatest stakeholder,” he wrote.

Rai also said the body clock of the players needed to be kept in mind, even though the players happily play day-night ODI games and late-evening T20 games.