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A travelling goon is what the new zealand media has termed the Indian team manager, Niranjan Shah as. Shah, according to me, stands as a face of the BCCI, and if he can be termed as a goon by the press, then one shudders to think what cricket board of india would be thought of as. Well, the reasons are the usual. BCCI’s power-wielding tactics to disallow cricketers, whether former, current or future, to come as much as ten feet from those involved with the rival league, Indian Cricket League has meant that Craig McMillan’s entry into the commentary box to ‘rub shoulders’ with Ravi Shastri has met with strong resistance from the who’s who of the Indian board. No, the man is not a leper. Nor does he suffer from any contagious or viral disease that can be transmitted through touch, air or water. What probably worries BCCI is that McMillan will be an influential enough entity to force Shastri into joining the ‘rebels’ in some or the other capacity. Otherwise, it is one thing to not recognise the league, but quite another to behave in a manner that is as puerile as Rakhee Sawant’s shenanigans every time a television camera is switched on. What I fear is that it will take one strong-willed individual to take on the BCCI and a battalion may follow next, making their position rather untenable. It may happen today, or it may take some time, but history has had enough examples in store where the arrogance and pride has gone before fall, and then, these murmurs would have been converted into loud boos of disapproval. Which is not to say that one Mr. Steve Bucknor has the right to be too critical against the BCCI about his ouster from the Perth test match in 2008. Quite frankly, towards the end of his career – and that would be in the last ten years or so – his umpiring had been an absolute disgrace at best. If doling out pathetic decisions wasn’t bad enough, Bucknor’s track record against the Indians has been rather appalling, to say the least. The Rahul Dravid-lorenze incident had the player been reprimanded by the match referee and if that was not enough, this Jamaican umpire mocked the batsman by mimicking those actions. sachin tendulkar’s woes against many of the umpires have been exemplary, none worse than Bucknor. But, he goes back a long time, when as a rather younger umpire, he had shown an equal amount of stubbornness in not calling in for the third umpire in south africa, while the replays clearly showed that the batsman was a proverbial mile away from the crease. Clearly, nothing had changed even during Bucknor’s last series ‘against’ India, as he kept goofing up and blundering to an extent that it ceased to look like an error anymore. It seemed deliberate.