Sports India

If you had followed the rise of Jagmohan Dalmiya as a cricket administrator, from the relative anonymity of a middle-level club on Kolkata’s Maidan to the exalted corridors of the International Cricket Council, you will have known that no one can quite bend it like him.

Promises, appeasement, threats, the lure of money… he has used them all as he coaxed, cajoled or browbeat his way to what he wanted. It’s just that some ten months ago, he would bend more than he could mend.

The leak of Greg Chappell’s now famous e-mail on Sourav Ganguly, which most believe was done at Dalmiya’s behest to gain advantage in the murky build-up to the BCCI elections last year, has come back to haunt him as he prepares for another tumultuous elections - this time on a turf where he has long been considered the unquestioned king. Ganguly’s e-mail, obliquely referring to Dalmiya as the man who ruined his career , must have come as the biggest shock for the former ICC president.

It was his proximity to Ganguly that had always assured his support in a cricket-crazy state even as he roused a groundswell of opposition both within the BCCI and the ICC. Now the two of them stand on either sides of the battleline.

Ganguly may have woken up late, but it’s Dalmiya who must be spending sleepless nights now.

Despite Chappell’s declared dislike of Ganguly’s work ethos and the former India skipper’s own lack of form, the ‘Prince of Kolkata’ is a huge sentimental favourite in these parts and his falling out with Dalmiya could well be the beginning of the end for the latter. It is not just about Sunday’s CAB elections, which Dalmiya, the clever fox that he is, may still be hoping to pull off with the caucus that is still around him, but about the erosion of the remaining traces of credibility in the absence of Ganguly’s protective shield.

The former India skipper may be thousands of miles away, plying his trade for English county Northants, but Dalmiya has been left to fight Ganguly even before he can fight police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee for the CAB president, a post he has held for the past 14 years. Ironically, Dalmiya and his running mates in the elections have been left with no option but to discredit Ganguly and project him as being ungrateful. Yet, they dare not utter a word against the blue-eyed boy of Bengal cricket.

It just not adding up for the master of the numbers game.

On Monday, he had another ‘problem’ to put his mind to. The City Civil Court here appointed a retired judge as the independent observer for the elections. The last time a court made such a move, during last year’s BCCI elections, Dalmiya showed a healthy dislike for such ‘intervention’.

It’s an irony that the e-mail, the world’s modern mode of staying connected, should so signal in Indian cricket the ultimate breakdowns in communication. The one some 10 months ago had flagged the final rupture in relationship between Ganguly and Chappell. Now, another has had the former India skipper splitting with his ‘mentor’.

It was inevitable. Don’t blame the technology.