Cricket In Mumbai Is Now All About Arithmetic Not Merit

Cricket in Mumbai once ran on a simple fuel: merit. Runs, wickets, temperament, and the instinctive understanding of the game were the passports to selection. But over the years, a slow-moving fog has settled over the system. It isn’t the romantic mist of early-morning nets at Azad Maidan; it’s the dense, airless haze of cosy clubs, vote banks, and transactional loyalties. The game hasn’t lost its soul, but it is certainly negotiating with forces that don’t speak its language.

The ecosystem today resembles a series of interlocking circles—each guarding its own turf, each expecting favours in return for favours already rendered. These are the “cozy clubs”: not formal institutions, but unwritten networks that thrive in dark corners of cricket administration. Decisions are made not with the curiosity of discovering the next prodigy, but with the calculation of who owes whom, and how the ledger must be balanced. It is a barter system masquerading as governance.

Voter blocs, once meant to represent stakeholders, have mutated into instruments of appeasement. Administrators court them with the desperation of candidates chasing the last swing constituency. The language is no longer cricket; it’s arithmetic. Numbers replace judgement, influence replaces insight. And in this barter of conveniences, the game becomes a prop—held up for slogans but rarely protected with intent.

What makes this more alarming is the quiet normalisation of it all. Newly elected officials seek blessings from political patrons like pilgrims approaching a shrine, forgetting—or ignoring—that cricket’s gods have always been runs scored and wickets taken. The symbolic handshake becomes more important than the developmental roadmap. A photograph with a politician outranks the report of a selection committee. These gestures signal allegiance, not accountability.

Inside this maze, genuine talent can find itself stranded. When administrators are busy scratching each other’s backs, no one’s hands remain free to lift a young player upward. When loyalty to a voter group becomes more valuable than loyalty to the sport, the pipeline gets clogged. The system doesn’t collapse dramatically; it decays quietly, season by season, while everyone involved pretends the structure is intact.

And yet, cricket survives—because the game is bigger than the gatekeepers. But unless the cosy clubs loosen their grip and the vote-bank arithmetic steps aside for cricketing judgement, Mumbai risks watching its own legacy rust in slow motion.