The BCCI’s quarrel with the World Anti-Doping Agency sums up the way cricket has been disciplined by time. From timeless matches to the five-day Test, to the one-day International, to the compressed frenzy of the Twenty20 game and now an anti-doping regime that makes cricketers account for their near future by the hour.

The Wada requires athletes and sportsmen to submit a schedule for three months that specifies an hour in the day when they can be randomly tested for drugs. The Indian players have objected, arguing that they play cricket nine months of the year and don’t want their leisure time to be invaded by Wada. The other objection that’s been tabled is that Indian cricketers in general and men like Dhoni and Tendulkar in particular, have security needs that could be infringed by rigid, advertised schedules.

Wada has made it clear that there will be no exceptions made for cricket. Every other cricket team, despite reservations, has signed up for the anti-doping regime, but the BCCI has asked the ICC to reject Wada’s demands and create a drug-testing regime custom-made for cricket. Randhir Singh, secretary-general of the Olympic Council of Asia, has made a statement saying that he thinks the BCCI should fall in line and his reasons are unexceptionable: why should cricketers expect special treatment when hugely paid athletes in most other sports abide by the same rules? Similarly the sports minister, M.S. Gill, has urged the BCCI not to hold out for special treatment.

Gill and Singh and Wada have decent arguments to make and, what’s more, some great names to back them up with. Tiger Woods is possibly the best paid, most famous sportsman in the world and he’s strongly in favour of testing. “I think we should be proactive instead of reactive. I just think we should be ahead of it and keep our sport as pure as can be. This is a great sport, and it’s always been clean.” Woods specifically said that he was happy to be tested anywhere at any time without notice. On the face of it, then, Wada’s regime is a good thing and the BCCI and the Indian players are doing what they do best: being spoilt prima donnas, moaning and asking for special favours.

But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Cricket isn’t the only sport that has resisted Wada’s increasingly stringent testing regimes. In March this year, football’s two most powerful bodies, UEFA and FIFA, rejected Wada’s new code and asked the organization to reconsider its rules given the special nature of team sport. Football’s administrators argued that there was a basic difference between the individual athlete who trained privately, on his own, and footballers who trained collectively six days a week and were easy to locate. Like the BCCI, they asked for an exemption for players for the off-season “in order to respect their private lives”.

And it isn’t only football: the administrators of team sports like basketball, ice hockey and volleyball have all asked for clarifications. It’s also important to understand that the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, isn’t rejecting drug testing per se. Twenty-five thousand tests are carried out in football every year and on an average, roughly ten players have tested positive annually. Blatter is asking for modifications to the new code that came into effect from the beginning of 2009. The problem is that the code was agreed in 2007 at a conference that FIFA attended, which puts FIFA in roughly the same position as the BCCI: they’re trying to renege on a code that they signed up for without reading the fine print.

Cricket does drug testing too. Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug, Nandrolone, and were suspended from cricket by the Pakistan Cricket Board. The problem is that the drug testing is done by national boards that are vulnerable to pressure. The treatment of Akhtar and Asif is a case in point: the first tribunal’s suspension was set aside by a second tribunal and the pair got away without serving a suspension. Wada was deeply unhappy and took their objection to the court of arbitration for sport in Switzerland with, interestingly, the blessing of the ICC, which said it wanted cricket cleansed of drug taking, but the action came to nothing because the court declared that it didn’t have jurisdiction over the PCB. But Wada was vindicated by the fact that the PCB’s leniency encouraged Asif to err again: he tested positive in 2008 and is currently serving a year’s ban.

Abhinav Bindra, India’s only Olympic gold medalist, said in an interview this week that Wada’s regime was easy to follow. He had declared himself available at home between seven and eight every morning because he was generally at home during that time and, he added disarmingly, it was the time of day when it was easy to produce a urine sample. When there was a change in his daily schedule, he logged in to the Wada site and entered the details of the change and specified an hour when he’d be available. I’m not sure that Bindra’s testimony will change many minds in the Indian cricket team. This is partly because the rhythms of his stock-still sport have about as much to do with a cricketer’s routine as a tree’s habits have to do with a cheetah’s daily round. Also someone like Sehwag or Ishant Sharma probably thinks of Bindra as a bespectacled nerd who likes fiddling with computers and tinkering with schedules.

It’s wrong to generalize but I think the reason Indian players are holding out when every other cricket-playing country has fallen in line, has nothing to do with being perverse or arrogant. I think they’re genuinely appalled by the thought that they have to schedule their lives three months in advance. Indians don’t do schedules well: they don’t plan their holidays a year in advance, they don’t write their appointments down in a diary, they don’t think it’s wrong to default on a deadline and if the art of the last minute was an Olympic sport you’d only see Indians on the medals podium. Mithali Raj, the Indian batswoman (I’d say ‘batsperson’ if it didn’t suggest an ungendered vampire) had the most succinct take on this Indian view of the world. “During competitions, you are in one place and know your itinerary. When you are at home, you don’t know about the next three hours, forget about three months… We plan things spontaneously, be it a movie or a dinner.”

So while I’m convinced that cricket needs drug-testing (specially in the IPL epoch when the monetary pressure for cricketers to recover from injury is so enormous), it isn’t clear that Wada’s new Big Brother regime is the only way to go. It’s certainly contrary to the Indian instinct to extemporize leisure. Wada was founded in Switzerland: it’s commitment to clockwork schedules seems to follow from the notorious Swiss keenness on order and precision. Federer, unsurprisingly, is a big supporter of Wada’s code. Good for him. But this isn’t how the world works in our latitude; it’s unnatural to expect Messrs Dhoni, Sehwag and Tendulkar to simulate the Swiss. The BCCI should stick to its guns: as foreign transistor radios used to be once, Wada’s drug code needs to be tropicalized.