Dylan Cleaver: 'Rebel' group must love India's absurd contortions

India - great team, shame about the board they're representing.

It's one thing to pull two players out of a festival match in case they're contaminated by ex-ICL bacterium Hamish Marshall.

It's two things to have New Zealand Cricket general manager of cricket Geoff Allott ring ICL virus Daryl Tuffey to ask him to withdraw from a State Championship match. But it's a truly absurd thing to flex their muscles in the commentary box for fear that Ravi Shastri (IPL) and Craig McMillan (ICL) might accidentally exchange bodily fluids that could eventually infect all the right-thinking people of the cricketing world.

The BCCI's travelling goon, Niranjan Shah, managed to keep a straight face when he told TV3: "As far as we are concerned any commentator or somebody involved with an unauthorised tournament declared by the BCCI, our people will not take part in it."

Good grief. You can only laugh at their logic, though denying anybody the right to earn a living is ultimately not that funny.

On the one hand they go out of their way to say they don't recognise the ICL while at the same time recognising any and everybody that has ever had anything to do with the "rebel" league.

If they'd played a smarter game from the start the ICL would no doubt have been quietly assimilated by now and would have passed by as one of the more insignificant footnotes in cricket's rich history. Instead, Subhash Chandra must be laughing at the amount of free publicity his tournament and his Essel Group has gained.

But that's the BCCI's business and as flawed as their methods might seem from here, who are we to dictate to them.

What's not their business is to dictate to another board, or television network, how to run their business.

The only thing worse would be if the board or network in question bowed to the pressure.