'But the more crucial reason for picking Borde was that Borde wouldn't play favourites' © Getty Images

If this thing becomes epidemic, Steve McClaren could feel pressured to declare his disinterest. I've heard reports that the search committee considered Tony Roche because he was available (Federer had fired him); there were even whispers that Gavaskar wanted Prakash Padukone all along.

There's another, less feverish way of looking at what has happened. There is an Indian method underlying the BCCI's choices which has escaped the deracinated sensibilities of the English language press. The search for the truth as everyone with an Indian passport ought to know, happens by elimination. It doesn't matter who says neti, neti ('not this', 'not this') —it could be the Board (this is what happened with Whatmore, his very name was an invitation to look further) or the candidate (Ford, Emburey)--so long as it is said a respectable number of times. With every rejection the possibility of stumbling upon the true coach increases. Far from Gavaskar or the members of the search committee being hostile to a foreign coach, they deliberately didn't offer it to an Indian for fear of aborting this process of negation. An Indian would have said yes.

This is what happened. Cornered by the unthinking scorn of ignorant journalists, the Board was forced to offer the job to Chandu Borde who said yes without knowing what he was saying yes to. When the news broke and journalists quizzed him about the details of the offer, he said he'd know when the official letter arrived.

Even here, though, the sensitive critic will notice the lengths to which the BCCI went to indulge its cricketers. Knowing that Rahul, Sachin and Saurav didn't want an Indian coach, the Board didn't appoint one: Borde was made Cricket Manager instead. Of course, this might have had something to do with Borde's age. 'Coach' has a hands-on ring to it: early morning fielding sessions, shorts, laptops, none of which is suitable for a distinguished gent about to turn seventy-three. 'Manager' seems the right title for Borde's likely duties: reminiscing with old men in MCC ties, visiting the Indian High Commission, telling his lads that they were lucky they weren't up against Truman, Tyson, Statham and Loader, being benevolent all round.

Mr Pawar, for all his modesty about being a hands-off President who leaves the running of the Board to his trusted lieutenants, knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled Chandu Borde's name out of a hat. One, he knew Borde would say yes which was important because vulgar public opinion, uninitiated in the neti thing, wouldn't brook another 'no'. But the more crucial reason for picking Borde was that Borde wouldn't play favourites. That had been the trouble with Greg Chappell. He'd had his pets and peeves and by the end of his tenure the team had been riven, with lurid stories of the skipper being on one side and the senior players ranged on the other. The Board couldn't let that happen again, so Pawar and Dungarpur chose someone who who was mature enough to know that the historical individual was unimportant: it was the eternal type that counted.

Borde has been ridiculed in the Hindustan Times by an anonymous Board 'insider' who claims that during his tenure as chief selector, Borde called the former Indian skipper, Gaurav Ganguly. These critics don't see that this is exactly what recommends him. Borde mightn't be able to tell Gambhir from Ganguly but he can see, in his mind's eye, the perfect opening batsman, the compleat number four. He might call that platonic ideal at number four Gundappa Tendulkar, but so what? Having seen Merchant and Mankad and Gavaskar and Srikkanth and Sehwag play over the decades, Borde can conjure up a composite, eternal opening batsman and by speaking of him as one person, inspire the incumbent opener, the current instance of that ideal type, to greater things.

We should also recognize that the Board's willingness to accommodate the senior players' aversion to an Indian coach extended to the support staff. Robin Singh, looked at closely, is sort of foreign: he grew up in the West Indies and his fielding ethic is completely alien. Venkatesh Prasad's foreignness is harder to discern but I suspect it was his un-Indian enthusiasm for swearing at opposing batsmen during his time in Indian colours that got him the job.

Without wanting to seem like an apologist for the BCCI, I think it's clear that the board made the best decisions it could in difficult circumstances. There are two suggestions the Board could consider.

One, it could do the daring thing and consult the Junior players about their preferences for coach. This would appeal to the Senior players because in the context of Indian cricket, it would be such a Foreign thing to do. Also, it would be logical: the likes of Ranadeb Bose and R.P. Singh need the coaching more than Sachin or Saurav do.

Two, the Board could do away with the idea of the constant coach and consider a relay of mentors. It has made some headway in this direction already: Shastri for Bangladesh, Borde for England. A roster of coaches, one for every month? It's worth looking at: in one stroke it would sweep away resentment, favouritism, entrenched prejudice, all the cankers continuity brings. The boys would be given BCCI diaries to orient themselves through the year. April would bring Amarnath and May, Madan Lal. The winter months could be reserved for non-tropicalized foreigners. And so on.

	Ford's gone. Emburey was never an option. Who is next? ©AFP

So we have a preparatory camp about to begin and no coach. Sunil Gavaskar appeared on television on Monday, 11 June, and observed that after Ford's withdrawal, the BCCI was "back to square one." Actually, it's worse than square one. At square one Dav Whatmore was a real possibility: now, thanks to the search committee's whims, he's ruled out as a likely candidate. This leaves the Board with a free choice between that hot coaching property, John Emburey, and the usual Indian suspects.

Unless we go to England with what we have in place. In his television appearance, Gavaskar said that he didn't know whether the BCCI would reconvene a meeting of the search committee or carry on with an 'interim' arrangement in place. Would that be Venkatesh Prasad, Robin Singh and Gundappa Viswanath as our bowling, fielding and batting coaches respectively? Perhaps we didn''t give the selection committee enough credit. Perhaps it knew what it wanted all along.

Prasad, Viswanath and Robin Singh were fine players and it's perfectly possible that they'll be successful coaches. I just wish the Indian Board would find a coherent (i.e. non-shambolic) way of arriving at decisions. Watching Niranjan Shah (Secretary) and N. Srinivasan (Treasurer) over the past week, making predictions, eating their words and bumbling bravely on, has been like living in one of those two-reel comedies from slapstick's golden age. More and more the BCCI comes across as a rich repertory company with a particular talent for farce.

	John Emburey: no more than average © Getty Images

Emburey?

It isn't just that he was coaching a minor counties side not so long ago. Nor that he was fired by Northants. Or that Middlesex, the team he subsequently coached, was relegated. These details don't make up a great resumé, obviously, but they aren't the only reasons why Emburey is such an unlikely coach for India. One reason his name is so perplexing is that he's an English spinner of a certain sort. John Emburey was once what Ashley Giles is now: a containing, life-denying spinner who could bat a bit. To consider an English spinner of this genre as one of two candidates for the job of India coach, is like shortlisting Madan Lal for the job of coaching the West Indies. West Indian fans would be entitled to look reproachfully at Holding and Bishop and Roberts and ask: why him?

But I can guess how his name got there. Consider this scenario, freely and speculatively adapted from real life. You're a member of the coach-hunting committee. You're hostile to the idea of a foreign coach but you know that given the unanimous player preference for one (and the fact that the name they've come up with has respectable coaching credentials) the team's likely to have its way. So to indicate that your opposition counts for something, you strike off one name (Dav Whatmore) because the secretary of the BCCI has had the temerity to pre-empt your deliberations the previous evening by indicating that he was the front-runner for the job. Then, to signpost your contempt for the idea in general you make a short list of two in which the second man is so undistinguished in coaching terms that the only thing that qualifies him for the job is that he's foreign. It helps your cause that in his playing life he was the kind of finger spinner who might have struggled to make it into a strong Ranji side. It's your way of saying to the team: "You're so slavishly fixated on the idea of a foreign coach that you'd pick a lamp post over over an Indian. So here's your lamp post."

Emburey.

	© Getty Images

Andrew Miller's piece on this website, 'Worse to Follow' about the late Percy Sonn, the president of the ICC who died a few days ago, makes you long for some golden mean between being mealy-mouthed about the dead and being malicious about them. We are told about Sonn's ineptness, the distrust he inspired and the greed-driven system he presided over. In between robust editorial comment, the piece has a couple of Sonn's colleagues say nice things about him in extenuation. It isn't till halfway through the article that you realise that Percy Sonn, so recently dead, is a narrative device, a way of warning cricket's fans that worse is to follow, that 'worse' being the possibility of the BCCI chief, Sharad Pawar, succeeding Sonn.

Why would this be bad? "With Pawar installed at the head of the ICC, the way would be cleared for the takeover of the ICC that has long been threatened by the frustrated Indians, who represent 70% of the game's income and whose early exit from the World Cup conveniently distanced them from most - if not all - of the tournament's myriad failings." This is a remarkable sentence: the first half is unexamined prejudice and the second half is incoherent.

India has held the presidency of the ICC before, when Jagmohan Dalmiya occupied that post, and the end of his tenure saw the ICC become a much richer body without becoming an Indian principality. So 'The Indians are coming' motif is silly. The second half of the sentence seems to be based on the odd proposition that the more successful a team was in the last World Cup, the more responsible it was for the tournament's shortcomings. If India is conveniently distanced from the tournament's failings because it got knocked out so quickly, the Australians who won the World Cup, must, on this argument, be closely associated with its failure. How does that work? (Perhaps the Indians knew, in their sly Oriental way, that the tournament was going to be a disaster and artfully lost early to avoid prolonged association.)

Miller thinks that Pawar's election would be a bad idea because Pawar is a politician with no feeling for the game. By implication, David Morgan, the boss of the ECB, emerges in this piece as the better candidate to succeed Sonn as the ICC's president. Morgan, in this reading, represents 'cricket's old world". There's no description of the content of the old world that Morgan represents, so some questions are in order. Would that old world be be Brian Johnston's world or John Arlott's? Would Morgan's world be the one in which England and Australia ran the ICC and the rest of us?

The genteel, unequal world of the MCC and the Imperial Cricket Conference isn't one that Indians feel nostalgic about. It contributed nothing to the development of the modern game. We have Packer to thank for the modern ODI and Dalmiya to thank for the money that underwrites contemporary cricket. For a discussion of the qualities most needed to manage the contemporary game, the 'old world' is not a good place to begin.

The president of the ICC is a figurehead: it is the ICC's member nations and, most importantly, its Chief Executive who make and shape policy. The responsibility for policy rests equally with the members of the ICC's board. If David Morgan or the ECB's representative on the ICC were on record as having opposed the Super Tests or the idea of the match referee (that absurd sinecure for retired cricketing cronies) or having spoken out against the idiocy of the Super-Sub, the invocation of Morgan's 'old world' attachment to cricket's traditions might have made sense. But no such information is offered. We are given 'frustrated Indians', 'old world' Englishmen and the nightmare of an Indian take-over.

Whether Pawar becomes the president of the ICC or not, the ICC will have to reckon with the BCCI's economic clout in world cricket. It will have to find a way turning Lalit Modi's talent for selling cricket for large sums of money, away from meaningless 'offshore' ODIs and into more constructive channels. If David Morgan is the man to do this, we should know what he brings to the table.

On the face of it, Morgan doesn't seem equipped to handle world cricket, the BCCI or even Pawar. His handling of the English tour to Zimbabwe in 2004 was indecisive and inept: he seemed a creature of cricket's bureaucracy rather than a strong future President. Martin Williamson, Cricinfo's Executive Editor, had this to say of Morgan in 2004:

"When leadership was needed, he was submissive. His position as a credible figurehead for English cricket is in tatters. An increasingly isolated figure, and one with little credibility remaining, his days are surely numbered."

I don't think Sharad Pawar is a good candidate for the presidency of the ICC. But I'd rather have him than someone whose candidacy is premised on thwarting an Indian 'takeover'. Pawar understands power and he controls, via the Indian market for cricket, a great deal of money. If there's someone who is obviously better, who cares for cricket, is a great administrator and has the political skills to defeat Pawar in an election, we should all have his resumé. Being English and 'old world' doesn't cut it. Richard Bevan, the chief executive of the English players' body, the Professional Cricketers' Association lamented the fact that the election of the president had become a political contest: "Our frustration is that we have ten Test-playing countries voting politically on some issues such as who will succeed Sonn." I have news for Richard: elections are political. You canvass voters and the one who gets the most votes, wins.

There's another way of picking the president, of course, that would take horrid politics out of the process. We could use the convention by which the president of the World Bank is appointed. The country that supplies the institution with the most money gets to pick its president, regardless of experience or merit or the reservations of other member countries. In cricket's case, that country would be India. Now I, like most Indians, think that's a really bad idea. In the same way as I think that an ICC president whose agenda was to marginalize the BCCI would be a fool. Because what Andrew Miller doesn't seem to understand is this: the Indians aren't coming…

They're here.

Talking about the awfulness of cricket arenas in India, Bishen Bedi has a lovely story about lavatory facilities at Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi's only Test stadium.

'I was captain and I was sick of outsiders using the players' loo. So I sat a couple of policemen in front of the lavatory door with instructions that only players were to be allowed in. We were batting, so I settled down to nap. Suddenly I woke to stomping sounds: the dressing room was crowded with soldiers in uniform. "What?" I asked. "Sir," said one of them, "permission to use the bathroom…the President..." It wasn't the President of the BCCI he was talking about, it was Mr Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, the President of the Republic. He needed to go, but this was Feroz Shah Kotla: there was nowhere to go to!'

This is a democratic story: whether you're slumming it on the concrete terraces or sitting in the pavilion, the Feroz Shah Kotla treats you with equal contempt.