Anurag Thakur and Ajay Shirke may well rue the opportunity missed by them later in their lives. In trying to be the face of the resistance campaign on behalf of the BCCI, they ended up sacrificing their own positions as BCCI President and BCCI Secretary respectively. At some level this is exactly what the duo had been hoping for because they wanted to be seen as martyrs.
Hence, despite repeated reminders they kept hiding behind a ‘members’ call and tried to deflect the whole issue for close to seven months. For every other issue, the duo managed to get the members of the BCCI to fall in line, except when it came to accepting all the Lodha panel recommendations.
Instead, what they indulged in was a series of PR exercises to enhance their image, motivated campaigns against certain members of the Lodha panel. The result was a number of stories fed to the media to show themselves as the messiahs of Indian cricket.
But what they all missed was the fact that the 18 July order of the Supreme Court asking the BCCI to accept the Lodha panel reforms was full and final.