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Oriental cunning once introduced the leg glance to cricket. Today it has contributed to making the game Ranji embellished into a chartered accountant's paradise. On Saturday, September 14, business conglomerate Sahara India announced it was withdrawing its sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. In effect, it tore up a June 2001 contract that guaranteed the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) Rs 100 crore over three years.

Sahara's decision ended a drama as farcical as it was confusing. At its root was the battle between the official sponsors of the International Cricket Council (ICC)-controlled World Cup and biennial Champions Trophy and competingsitting pretty: Tendulkar's endorsement contracts are worth about Rs 25 crore a year companies endorsed by national teams or individual cricketers (see "Patriot Games"). Earlier this summer, while touring England, Sourav Ganguly's Indian team took on the ICC and the BCCI on just these grounds. Then came the Sahara affair.

Since Sahara runs an airline, South African Airways-one of the four main sponsors of the 2003 World Cup-wanted its logo dropped from the Indian players' shirts. As Sahara's Director Amar Singh-also a Samajwadi Party MP-explained to India Today, the group made painstaking efforts to save the match. A Sahara team visited South Africa a month ago. Options like "Sahara Parabanking", "Sahara Lake City" and "Sahara Estate" were offered. So was a logo inscribed in the Devnagari script.

Finally, Sahara changed the team sponsor's name to "Subrata", after Subrata Roy, the man behind the group. The "emotional decision", Singh clarifies, drew from the premise that, "If 'Louis Vuitton' and 'Gianni Versace' can appear on shirts, why not 'Subrata'?"

South African Airways still didn't agree, pointing out the "A" in "Subrata" was shaped the way the letter was in the "Sahara" logo. Further, the wings that were part of the monogram, and followed the colour pattern of the Indian flag, indicated flight. At this point, Sahara walked out, calling South African Airways' veto "a foreign onslaught on the national colours".

This meant that the BCCI, the world's richest cricket body, was left without a team sponsor, with the series against the West Indies due to begin on October 6. Logically, BCCI President Jagmohan Dalmiya-who, while all this was happening, quietly got himself re-elected at the mid-week annual general meeting in Kolkata-should have been worried. As it happened, it was sports marketing agency IMG that was left carrying the can (see graphic).

SITTING PRETTY: Tendulkar's endorsement contracts are worth about Rs 25 crore a year

Engrossing as they are, cricket's commercial and conspiracy theories are sometimes as difficult to decipher as Shane Warne's flipper. Sahara left in its wake a deluge of speculation. There was the perception that Dalmiya was happy to see it go since it had been brought in by his predecessor and arch-rival, A.C. Muthiah. Also, he didn't want to deal with the BCCI's sponsors through a series of intermediaries (see graphic). It was further whispered the Anglo-Australian clique that still calls the shots in the ICC was glad to get old adversary Dalmiya and the BCCI into a spot.

Neither was the cricket establishment pleased with Sahara. Having come on board as a finance company, it soon began a "fly to the World Cup" campaign for its airline. This got South African Airways' back up. The players felt Sahara's advertisements focused too much on individual stars rather than the team as a collective. "In effect, Sahara was getting a Sachin Tendulkar ad on the cheap," says an insider.

In the end, the Indian team is certain to find a sponsor-though the price of Rs 32 crore a year may be difficult to get and though alleged front runner Hero Honda has denied it is interested. More piquant is the gossipy business that is Indian cricket. The controversy arose, after all, because of money, because India dominates the cricket economy. It contributes, for instance, nearly 50 per cent of the television rights revenue for the ICC's global cricket events (see "Stump Vision").

There are other telling examples. Early in 2002, India toured the West Indies for five Tests and five one-day matches. Fifty per cent of the signage-those advertisements you see just beyond the boundary line-was reserved for local sponsors. The rest was bought out by a British company for $2,50,000 (Rs 1.21 crore) and resold to Gameplan, an Indian firm, for $4,00,000.

It was still a profitable venture. Indian advertisers eventually coughed up close to $5,00,000 (Rs 2.42 crore) to get their names into Caribbean grounds. What would the space have earned the West Indies cricket authorities if, say, Australia or Pakistan had been touring? "Barely a tenth I guess," laughs a marketing man in the know.

How large is India's cricket economy? Between them major Indian television networks spend $98 million (Rs 475 crore) a year to buy telecast rights of matches played here or abroad. Cricket-related advertising is put at another $60 million. Endorsement contracts for the top players net at least $12 million-Sachin Tendulkar alone getting almost half. Add to that gate money, spin-offs for tourism, in-stadia advertising, team and series sponsorship deals and an estimate of $200 million a year is easy to reach.

It is a bewildering world of middlemen, sweetheart deals, notoriously opaque administrative bodies and players eager to monetise the few years of fame their talent allows them. For an industry so large, cricket makes a robber baron economy look organised. Yet it can only grow and the 2003 World Cup is estimated to push up advertising revenue alone by 30 per cent. Deserted by Sahara, an oasis still beckons.