It was hard to miss the glee in the voice and glint in the eye of Lalit Modi on Tuesday as he addressed the media in South Africa after the country had been chosen over England to host the Indian Premier League cricket matches this year. Among the things that would accrue to South Africa for staging IPL 2.0, the consummate salesman who happens to be the IPL commissioner and BCCI vice-president listed, is the financial windfall from the 30,000 room-nights that the tournament would utilise, the dozens of flights players, officials and fans would take, and so on and so forth. For the government back home, it was a bouncer hard to duck, even though the bowler had overstepped.

A day earlier Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram — who incidentally was the first to raise the red flag of security over the IPL after the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore — went on the front foot and hit out at the cricket board after it announced its decision to move IPL out of the country, and more specifically, slammed its supporters, such as BJP leaders Arun Jaitley and Narendra Modi, seeking to score political debating points.

It may not be naïve to believe that the knowledgeable home minister, the shrewd IPL commissioner or the many other worthies involved with cricket and political administration in the country do not perhaps realise the import of what they have just achieved. It is not just cricket that has become the victim of, on the one hand, the paranoia triggered by Lahore and, on the other, the blind muscle-flexing of a cricket board drunk on the power of the millions it has made from the game in the post-liberalisation era.

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