cricket

Board of Control for Cricket in India

Anurag Thakur

Brijesh Patel

Mumbai Cricket Association

About 20 stateassociations held a meeting in Delhi to discuss the way forward for the(BCCI).The meeting, an initiative of the former BCCI president N Srinivasan, was attended among others by son of Amit Shah (Jay Shah), brother of(Arun Thakur) and son of late Jagmohan Dalmiya (Avishek Dalmiya).Rajeev Shukla,and Anirudh Chaudhry are some other stalwarts to have made it to the meeting, which saw the presence of some legal luminaries who were invited to make a strong case for the state units at the Supreme Court hearing on August 8. Interestingly enough, Srinivasan himself could not make it because of delay in his flight. He attended the meeting through video conferencing.The general consensus among the state units is against the policies of the Committee of Administrators (CoA) who, they thought, were not Lodha-compliant. There was opposition to the election timeline proposed by the CoA and it is now a big question if the elections will be held as per original schedule. The state units are to hold elections in August."The Amicus curiae's intentions may be right. But does the election timeline have Supreme Court approval? There has to be a clarification on this," said a state unit official who was present at the meeting yesterday.There was also discussion over the CoA decision to delink the secretary from the selection committee meeting. The administrators had decreed that the chairman of the selection committee can convene the meeting and it stopped the secretary (Amitabh Choudhary) from presiding over the recent selection committee meeting.Among the associations that attended were some from the North-East region, Punjab, Baroda, Gujarat, Bengal, Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Saurashtra, Andhra, Orissa, Haryana and Maharashtra.Evenmembers were, it is learnt, present at the meeting."It was a meeting to stay united. The discussions were about CoA policies some of which were not Lodha compliant."The states want to make a strong representation at the Supreme Court and no state unit is against the Supreme Court or its order."The point is can you have a judge if a surgeon is absent. Our objections are against the decisions of the CoA," Shesh Narayan of Hyderabad Cricket Association, who also attended the meeting, said.