Lalit Modi will have discussions with the owners of the Cricketer magazine this week, fuelling speculation that the maverick founder of the Indian Premier League may be planning to use it as a platform to step up his attack on Giles Clarke and the English cricketing establishment.
Modi has already tweeted his interest in Test Match Sofa, the online radio commentary service which was bought by the Cricketer in 2012. “I’m happy to look at it,” he said on Saturday when contacted by the Observer. “I would want to understand the reach of the magazine and how it was distributed. I am seeing them next week.”
The Cricketer was established in 1921 by Sir Pelham Warner, the former England captain, and is now owned by a company headed by two long-standing adversaries of Clarke’s – Neil Davidson, the former Leicestershire chairman, and Lord Marland, the Tory peer who tried to challenge Clarke for the ECB chairmanship in early 2009 in the wake of the Stanford debacle.
The current edition carries an interview with Modi in which he claims to be “switching targets” from N Srinivasan, with whom he has feuded since being ousted as IPL commissioner in 2010, to Clarke. “Giles Clarke has to be removed from his position and that is all I’m focusing on,” says Modi.
Clarke and Srinivasan have been the two driving forces, with Australia’s Wally Edwards, in the restructuring of the International Cricket Council which has caused so much controversy, with Srinivasan cleared last week to take over as chairman next month.
The Cricketer is in a state of flux after the three-man editorial team led by Andrew Miller were recently informed of plans for a major restructure which could lead to the departure of all three. Test Match Sofa has not broadcast since the end of the Ashes series in January.
Modi is based in London, having been banned for life from any involvement in Indian cricket last September at a Special General Meeting of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) of which Srinivasan was then president, although he was ordered to step down from that position by the Supreme Court in March while investigations continued into allegations of corruption at the Chennai Super Kings IPL franchise.