If most Indians do not know Greg Barclay from Adam, nor would they claim any encyclopaedic, or rudimentary knowledge about Imran Khwaja.

But the fact that the former, a New Zealander, has recently become the chairman of the International Cricket Council at the expense of the latter, who is from Singapore, is a bit of all right where the Board of Control for Cricket in India is concerned as it never really wanted the outvoted candidate to pull it off.

If Barclay has made it supposedly with the blessings of the game’s major powers – India being the principal one – simply because he will prioritise bilateral contests, or so it is said, over annually organised global tournaments, Khwaja reportedly represented the school of thought within the ICC which looked upon multi-nation, glitzy competitions as the way forward.

India was said to have seen a threat implicit in the idea of annual extravaganzas to, among other things, its summer show of a franchise based Twenty20 tournament which matters more to it than virtually anything else, given its Arabian Nights scale of opulence, even when it is not required to be taken to West Asia.

If the Indian Premier League was to be exposed to a competition for the market’s munificence, the going would surely have been harder, which explained our putative electoral preference.

The contradictory point of view stressed further consolidation of the game’s globally controlled funds, with money made anywhere finding its way to Dubai. The amusing thing about the tussle was that each side focused monomaniacally on raking it in in the midst of a worldwide pandemic which had disrupted the game at all levels, including, crucially, the elementary ones.

It was as if the combatants had shut their eyes to everything other than the cashbox, their chief preoccupation being to make a killing before a cataclysmic conclusion with the coronavirus wreaking havoc. It, if anything, indicated a crisis of leadership.

Most of the world’s spectator sport had been commercialised when cricket began taking only baby steps in that direction but Covid-19 called for a unified response that should have reckoned with certain matters including player safety.

Today, as bio-secure bubbles are contrived everywhere for fresh series and domestic cricket, when the world is being advised to stay at home for safety, the ICC has given itself the role of the acquiescent accomplice deemed toothless by its own constituent units.

There is a raging debate within the game about the psychological damage being inflicted on cricketers in the claustrophobic isolation of the bubble which will surely be looked back on years from now as man’s inhumanity to man, but the ICC, with all its bureaucratic trappings, looks on without breathing a word. And, of course, the ills that preceded cricket’s defiance in the time of the coronavirus would continue to plague the game.