New Delhi: Former India captain Bishan Singh Bedi on Saturday tore into suspended Indian Premier League commissioner Lalit Modi, calling him a “spoilt brat” and a “bu****”, who has damaged the reputation of the game by commercialising it.
Bedi, going on the offensive against members of the IPL governing council and the Board of Control for Cricket in India, said greed had taken hold of their minds and they had all turned a blind eye to the IPL tsar’s questionable mode of functioning.
“Modi is a spoilt brat. Without knowing anything about the game, without knowing it at the grass-root level, look what he was running, a cricket tournament. And above all, during the final at DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, this b***** was tossing the coin in the presence of Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Look at the guts of this person,” Bedi said.
“To my mind, Modi has damaged the Indian cricket very badly. I must say, it was not the need, but the greed... They (BCCI and IPL governing council) knew it all along, but they did not have the guts to put Modi in his place. In a sense, they were colluding. They turned a blind eye to him and the tournament.
“I’ll tell you there was a clash of interests as far as N. Srinivasan was concerned. He is the secretary of the BCCI and his own team (Chennai Super Kings) won the tournament. And chairman of the selection committee, (Krisnamachari Srikkanth) is the ambassador of that team. You see they were colluding,” Bedi told a television news channel.
Likening the IPL tournament to a tamasha, Bedi said: “Cricket is something associated with uprightness and ethics and Modi brought all the sleaze and irregularities into it, which was against the spirit of the game.
“It’s crass commercialisation. That’s the word. This is crass and not the cricket. IPL and the controversy associated with it, it’s all a tamasha. Look at the World Twenty20, it lasts for 16 days and this IPL, it lasts for 60 days. It’s too much,” he said.
Bedi also asked the members of the governing council to take moral responsibility and step down voluntarily.
“Money and greed led to the downfall of IPL. It was inevitable. The way they were going, disaster was waiting to happen. And this involves… the governing council. They were watching all this without uttering a word. Why? They were involved. So these people should take the moral responsibility and resign voluntarily,” he said.
Training his guns on the three former India cricketers who were part of the governing body, Bedi said they were paid huge sums to join the T20 league and “that money is stopping them from resigning from their posts”.
“Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar and Tiger Pataudi should have resigned from the council by now. Gavaskar and Shastri were commentating during the whole tournament. Pataudi was doing nothing. You can’t allow your names to be misused by a person (Modi) whom you don’t know exactly.
“Money is stopping them, keeping them quiet. I’ll leave it to their conscience whether (or not) it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Bedi said barring BCCI president Shashank Manohar, the whole cricket board, who were part of IPL tournament, should step aside to clean up the monumental mess and set an example in front of future generations.
