Menon: BCCI losing support on DRS?

The Board of Control for Cricket in India says the system is not perfect, and it is expensive. Tendulkar has indicated he is no Luddite and is willing to accept it. Perhaps India worry that someone is set to make a lot of money from the DRS and it will not be their cricket board.

How did such an important issue get tangled up in these irrelevancies? Of course the system is not perfect, but then neither is an off break bowled by Harbhajan Singh, and if the Board had to wait till Harbhajan was perfect, who would have taken his nearly 400 Test wickets?

A physicist will tell you that any system that is predictive is inherently flawed because you cannot tell with precision where a free particle will go when unobstructed. Hawkeye tells you where the ball is likely to finish up in relation to the stumps. So does the umpire on the field. The difference is that Hawkeye is more accurate when it comes to events preceding the rap on the pads - it is certain where the ball pitched, what its velocity was, and the angle at which it struck the pads. Hotspot tells you if the ball took the edge. Over a period, greater the amount of information fed into these systems, greater will be the accuracy.

And that is all we can say at present. As the ICC World Cup has shown, the DRS increases the percentage of correct decisions. It is an evolving system, and over years will approach perfection (even if it doesn't actually get there).

Part of India's reaction is a result of their status as the only superpower in the game. Yet the BCCI, which has taken the subtlety out of the art of muscle-flexing, might be losing support at home. Cricket-lovers are getting tired of this grandstanding and chest-beating. Administrative muscle-flexing is as much a tradition in cricket as the tea break. When Britannia ruled the waves, England did the same thing.

They ran the game from a back room at Lord's as if by divine right. This entitlement was reinforced by the political reality and lesser countries could do nothing. England might have been more subtle, but the intent was the same. India assume that payback time is now, when they hold all the dollars. The International Cricket Council was democratised only in 1993 when the Ashes rivals were forced to give up their veto power.

Indians enjoyed the bullying initially. When he was President of the ICC, Jagmohan Dalmiya made everybody dance to his tune, and gave everything a nationalistic spin. He was doing it for the honour of India. Umpires were changed, suspect actions of Asian bowlers were cleared, a Test match was de-officialised, the World Anti-Doping Agency was told it could not disturb players for security reasons. Soon it became evident that the democracy India had fought for in the ICC was conspicuous by its absence in the treatment of the ICC and other boards by India.

The Indian board has to change its essentially selfish stance and recognise its responsibilities to the game itself. This is not to say that when they ran the game England were the epitome of virtue and large-heartedness. In fact, it was just the reverse, with its stink of racism, selfishness and exclusivity.

But somebody has to break the vicious cycle. India can still do it.