New Delhi: In a major twist, Team India head coach Ravi Shastri’s position (appointed till the 2021 World T20 in India) could come under the scanner and he will need to be re-appointed at the post as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) Ethics Officer DK Jain has served notices to all the three members of the cricket advisory committee for guilty of conflict. The three two members of the CAC are Kapil Dev, Anshuman Gaekwad and Shantha Rangaswamy. Hurt at being served a notice, Shantha Rangaswamy has already sent in her resignation from the CAC.
The Ethics Officer sent notices to the three Saturday and has asked them to reply by October 10 after MPCA life member Sanjeev Gupta alleged that the trio is ‘conflicted’ as per the Lodha Panel’s proposal of one man, one post.
A board functionary said that Sunday that Ravi Shastri would unnecessarily have to face the embarrassment of undergoing the process of appointment again if DK Jain finds the CAC members to have conflict of interest.
“The appointment of Shastri as the head coach will obviously have to be done once again if the CAC committee members who appointed him are found to have conflict of interest. A new committee will then have to be formed and the whole process has to be re-opened and re-done keeping the newly registered BCCI constitution in mind as it clearly says that only a CAC can appoint the head coach of the Indian team,” the functionary explained.
The functionary further said that the same could also hold true for WV Raman — women’s team coach — as his appointment was also sent to Jain for the latter’s opinion after the Committee of Administrators (CoA) was divided on the trio of Kapil Dev, Anhsuman Gaekwad and Shantha Rangaswamy forming an ad-hoc committee to pick him as the coach.
“One needs to see what Jain’s verdict is in the WV Raman matter because in that case also, the same trio as ad-hoc CAC had appointed him as coach even as the two-member CoA was divided. Back then, it was a 1:1 verdict with Vinod Rai agreeing to the trio appointing the coach and Diana Edulji making it clear that there was no place for an ad-hoc CAC in the BCCI constitution that was reworked as per the proposals of the Lodha Panel,” the functionary informed.
Interestingly, Diana Edulji had opposed the idea of giving the trio the go-ahead to pick the coach not just ahead of Raman’s appointment, but also before Shastri’s re-appointment. She had said that the Ethics Officer should be asked to give them (three members of the CAC) a clean chit against any conflict before they are handed the job. But while the decision was split 1:1 in Raman’s case, it was 2:1 in case of appointing the men’s team coach as Ravi Thodge had joined the CoA.
IANS
