Four months ago, when Indian cricket should have been introspecting for its failures in England, the BCCI had two clear options – one, to bite the bullet, conduct a thoroughly honest review of everything wrong with Indian cricket and introduce correctives to fix the inherent systemic flaws; or two, to remain firmly in denial as if they never happened.

Indubitably, they chose the latter. It was the easier choice – sit back and avoid a redressal of glaring issues staring at Indian cricket today. Also, in that same meeting where the proposal of a review was mooted, the BCCI’s suits discussed the fate of a now-terminated IPL franchise. If you still wonder where their priorities actually lie, your question pretty much has an answer.

The embarrassment of the England series would have been the perfect backdrop to conduct a review, which if happened, would have asked some of the toughest questions facing our administrators – their own failures as those responsible for the game in the country. It would have meant that some of their heads were on the line, and quite possibly, for the first time their authority or incompetence could have been both questioned and addressed (whichever side you’re on). Instead, they chose the easy way out.

Even if they didn’t want to put the hard yakka by conducting this review, the BCCI officials should have blindly gone the way Cricket Australia did with the Argus Review. Instead, they just stated the obvious: “We just won the World Cup and were World no.1 in Tests before this tour” – music to the ears of Indian fans, they hoped and prayed. It worked up to a point, it must be said for as a people, we’ve always been about results and nothing else. Then England came to India to be whitewashed in the ODIs. Then followed a convincing win over West Indies, and Indian cricket was back. Or so they exclaimed.

It was business as usual for the BCCI, the Indian fans and the cricketing ecosystem in general, until disaster struck twice in Australia, rather shamefully at that. If India’s tour of England was a “bad dream gone wrong”, this was quite “the nightmare” that should have awoken Indian cricket from this slumber of denial. Instead, two hours after they succumbed to the raging Australians in Sydney, the BCCI quite oblivious to the events down under, released the fixtures of their pet priority – the Indian Premier League. Sadly, batting collapses and field positions aren’t quite ruining Indian cricket, but the lack of vision on the part of the BCCI is surely taking the game downwards.

CAN INDIA REVERSE OR ARREST THIS SLIDE?

Ask the BCCI about systemic flaws and you’d get answers like, “The system worked brilliantly when we won the World …To put it bluntly, the answer is no. A sense of cluelessness comes over every BCCI member who is asked about the team’s performances. There are excuses aplenty, ranging from the passable to the absurd that somehow seem to justify and attest some credibility to everything that happens, be it defeats or wins. Ask them about systemic flaws and you’d get answers like, “The system worked brilliantly when we won the World Cup. You didn’t have to write anything about it then?”, and when you tell them that you did write about it pat comes the reply, “But we were also World no.1 then”. This is the cocoon of deniability that we’re faced with, the belief that any and every decision that the BCCI takes is in the best interest of Indian cricket, when on the contrary, it isn’t.

When England happened, the common rage on the street was poor planning. What was this planning about? Presumably, scheduling, injury management and player burn-out. Sure, issues that need urgent correctives and remedies. Not just all of that, but planning also involves a certain degree of preparedness and to some extent prophecy. It involves sending several bunch of players to a country to get a decent amount of exposure in those conditions before he’s deemed to be considered for the national side. But importantly, the process also involves the detailed identification of such players. The BCCI, post-Sydney has come up with statements where it intends to arrange for more A tours to England, Australia and South Africa.

Finally, better late than never and all that. But personnel? In the last two-three years, these ‘A’ tours have become quick reward trips to players who excelled in the IPL, or in some cases, with deep familial relations to those involved in the selection process. In the next selection for the Emerging Nations Tournament in Australia, pick a side you believe will emerge as the core of a future visiting national team to Australia, not sloggers and bowlers who can’t bowl beyond four overs. And this isn’t too difficult to implement straight away, is it?