Headlines about the future of the Indian Premier League (IPL) have been buzzing for the past week or so but one thing is clear: this is far from a steady ship. Team owners across the board are wondering what the actual financial gains are as they take stock after the first two seasons. And even clubs that have done well on the field are feeling the heat in the accounts department at their offices.
But the main worry is that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), under whose banner the IPL is conducted, terminated the contract of International Management Group (IMG) as the tournament's logistic partners. And the reason? They simply found the charges too high. But there are many connected with the IPL who feel the tournament would never have taken off had it not been for IMG's handling of logistics - and even the board members will concede that it took a super-human effort to shift the second edition of the tournament to South Africa once the Indian government failed to guarantee security to teams.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for IMG, and IPL commissioner Lalit Modi now finds himself on a sticky wicket. He was part of the board's working committee which took that decision but he also worked closely with IMG to make the IPL a success. There is little comment emerging from either side but Sharad Pawar, the former BCCI chief who was in power when the concept of the IPL was formed, wrote a strong letter to the board asking them to sort the issue or risk being locked up in legal red tape.
Pawar is more than a former president. He will soon be heading the International Cricket Council (ICC) and his influence on Indian cricket politics is too significant to ignore. So, IMG has a big supporter. On the other side there is Modi, whose contribution to world cricket is commendable. He can be arrogant but there is no denying that he made the cricket world sit up and take notice. The big debates we hear on the survival of 50-over cricket - and Test cricket for that matter - would not have seen the light of day had Modi's IPL failed.
It would be a travesty to see Test cricket's significance diminish, but 50-50 making way for T20 would not be such a bad thing for the game. Modi's success has made his fellow BCCI colleagues insecure as the truth is most administrators love the spotlight just as much as the players. That can be seen in the experience a journalist friend went through. His magazine wanted to interview a top Indian sports administrator and he put in a request to the communications department.
The PR men got back to say that the interview would be granted only if this "big shot" appeared on the cover. The editors, quite rightly, believed he was not worth it and so it never happened. Despite all this, in my opinion Modi has the ability to use his powers to solve the IMG row. First he must placate the team owners who have invested a lot of money in getting the best players to wear their colours and who want the tournament to be run by efficient hands.
Then there are the BCCI members who, as they do not respond well to hard talk, Modi must use all his persuasive powers to make happy. But, although he can be unreasonable, he can do it. I have experienced first hand his talent for defusing a dispute. It was Modi who put severe restrictions on the media who wanted to cover the 2008 IPL. These included some websites being declared unwelcome and newspapers being barred from using any images of the tournament online. A small group of journalists met Modi to take him to task. He was, in the main, unrelenting but we managed to convince him to delete a few of the other weird clauses.
Within an hour, he orchestrated a press conference at which he declared that everything had been sorted out. I was left wondering at how quickly a bed of roses had been created from such a thorny issue. Clayton Murzello is Group Sports Editor of Indian newspaper Midday cmurzello@thenational.ae