Cricket Mata Ki Jai: Jingoism Lost in Ahmedabad on Sunday https://thewire.in/sport/cricket-mata-ki-jai-jingoism-lost-in-ahmedabad-on-sunday That India lost in the final was karmic payback for the BCCI’s sins against the game, and also for the Ahmedabad crowd’s unwillingness to be sporting and civilised...
most cricket fans worldwide are thoroughly sick – fed up, pissed off – about India’s bully-boy dominance of world cricket. I don’t mean sporting dominance, which neutral fans can live with (as was the case with the West Indians of the Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards era, or Brazilian football in the time of Pelé). It’s the wholesale takeover by the BCCI of cricket’s financing, values, and calendar, giving them a grip over the game that is stronger, more ruthless and vice-like, more absolute and remorseless, more self-serving and mercantilist, than that once exercised by the game’s original overlords in England (who might, at some level, have been forgiven their assertion of ownership over cricket because they did, in fact, give us the game).
The BCCI has warped cricket, distorted it, making it so India-centric that other proud nations – some with better pedigrees than India’s – have been reduced to bit-part players, mendicants, petitioners for match-time. Everything is now about India: the crowds, the songs, the scheduling, the pitches, the money