December 3rd, 2007
New Delhi, Dec. 3: The Board of control for Cricket in India (BCCI) today said that the chairman of the national cricket selection committee, Dilip Vengsarkar, was free to quit if he wanted to.
BCCI Vice-President Rajiv Shukla said, As a BCCI representative, I would like to suggest that it is totally Vengsarkars decision, and he is free to quit.
Vengsarkar had spoken to BCCI President Sharad Pawar and expressed his willingness to step down, Shukla added.
The Board on Sunday night decided not to consider Vengsarkar’s request to be compensated for not writing his columns and made it clear that it will not bow to his threat of stepping down from his post.
The Board said Vengsarkar should focus on his job rather than worry about personal issues. Shukla said that the BCCIs view is that we have a meeting of the selection committee to pick the squad for the Australia tour on December 5, which is more important than personal issues.
The BCCI had threatened to issue a show cause notice to Vengsarkar last month after his columns appeared in the Marathi paper, Sakal, and the Hindi daily, Amar Ujala. He also gave an interview to the Bombay Times, a Mumbai-based newspaper.
“There are certain issues on which he has got a different point of view like the guidelines which have been issued about not writing the column and about the selectors going to watch the matches,” Shukla said.
The former cricketer was upset with BCCIs decision which barred him from writing columns in newspapers.
