Prasar Bharati wants matches involving Pak, Aus, Eng as well!

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Indian Express reports: Prasar queers pitch; wants matches involving Pak, Australia

In a hilarious statement today Prasar Bharati's CEO KS Sarma has told FE that "We will only push to include cricket tournaments held in countries like Pakistan, Australia, England and Sri Lanka as events of national importance. We don’t want smaller tournaments."

The attempt, as you can clearly see, is to include other matches which may also generate some money and thereby completely obliterate private channels.

In other news, which is not entirely relevant for the main issue at hand, Delhi High Court has restrained BCCI from disposing of any further rights.

When BCCI put its four year rights last year up for tender, ESPN Star Sports and Zee were the front runners. Zee won it, BCCI (Read: Dalmiya) didn't like this and did all in his powers to bring ESPN back in. Zee went to court. The drama was too complex. Supreme court had to examine whether power of writ could be applied against BCCI, whether BCCI is a 'state' body or private body and so on. Then concluded that a fresh re-bid had to happen. BCCI then rigged the bids so that Zee will be automatically disqualified. But in between there has been a few events whose rights were awarded to Prasar Bharati as a stop-gap arrangement, on a tour by tour basis.

Now, with uncertainty on the Prasar Bharati rights issue brought in by the govt., Zee and ESPN will have to think hard on what to do next. They would have to fight the Govt. on one side and the shady politics of BCCI on the other.

BCCI itself is involved in its own mess - its own internal elections. So BCCI is not even reacting to the Govt. policies whereas it should be up in arms against the current draft policy.

Sad, sad, sad situation.

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