The Day Meghalaya Cricket Turned: An Unbeaten XI Was Replaced, Then a Court Called It 'Illegal' — A Ground Report

I was standing at the edge of the ground with a scorecard in my hand, and one thing made no sense. Meghalaya were unbeaten in three matches — a draw against Sikkim, a draw against Mizoram, a win over Manipur — and then, in the very next match, all eleven changed. That does not happen in cricket. Nobody breaks a team that is in form. In the BCCI domestic circuit, two or three names change for injury or rotation; not the whole XI. In thirty-six years of notebooks, I have that recorded only once, and that too from the 1884-85 Ashes, when players themselves refused to play. Here the players did nothing. Something was done to them.

This report begins with that anomaly, and I should say at the outset: most of what I know about this Meghalaya Cricket Association (MCA) affair reached me through the reporting of The Highland Post, a local paper, and that must be kept in mind throughout — every major claim in this story has passed through a single local source, and its strongest link, the two separate elevens that took the field, has still not been matched against the original scorecards. I will explain why that matters.

First, the scene that stung most. During the match against Nagaland — reportedly played by a new side put together by the faction of MCA president James P.K. Sangma — the eleven players of the old team stood outside the ground and waited. These were not benched players; this was an entire XI that had been put on the field until yesterday and was now made to stand outside and watch. The team's coach, Nitesh Sharma, put it this way: "We are being called illegal, but this is a failure of administration, not the fault of the children." That sentence made the paper, and I want you to read it twice, because it hides something that usually gets lost: the label "illegal" here is not stamped on the players' eligibility. It is stamped on the process that selected them.

To understand how this is possible, you have to understand the system of domestic cricket in which it happens. Domestic tournaments in India — the Ranji Trophy, the Syed Mushtaq Ali, even the under-23 and women's competitions — are run by state associations affiliated with the BCCI. The BCCI's rule is plain: a state association's recognition rests on its internal elections and governance process. When there is an internal dispute in a state association — among office-bearers, over elections, or over financial control — the BCCI has two routes: either suspend the association, or appoint an administrator. Meanwhile, if the matter goes to court, the court can determine which body can validly select a team.

What happened in Meghalaya is a product of this system. The MCA's Apex Council — the association's supreme executive committee — selected a team, and the BCCI reportedly recognised it. That team played three matches and remained unbeaten. Then a dispute arose within the Apex Council — over what, this report does not say, and that is the biggest gap in the whole story, because until you know what the dispute was about, you cannot determine which side was in the right. The matter went to the Meghalaya High Court, and the court, as The Highland Post reported, termed the team selected by the Apex Council "illegal" or "invalid." Sangma's faction formed a new team and fielded it against Nagaland. The old team's players stood outside.

Now I want to pause and clarify something, because it matters for the reporting and readers routinely miss it. The word "illegal" has here fallen victim to cross-border translation and transcription. Indian high courts in sports-association matters generally pass two kinds of orders: either they quash a resolution of the association — invalidating a selection process or catching a body acting beyond its power — or they grant an interim order restraining a team from representing the association. In neither case does the court say the players are "illegal." When a court says a team is illegal, it means the process of selecting or authorising that team was illegal. The case is against those who made the decision, not those who executed it on the field. This is why coach Sharma's anger is justified, and why a headline saying "illegal team," without clarifying the word, is a serious reporting lapse — because it aims the blame at the players who were merely selected.

There is another thread running through this story that The Highland Post, as I understand it, did not pick up. Sangma said, "The selection committee picks the players; I will not interfere." But the report also says the new team came from Sangma's faction. These two statements cannot both be true unless "his faction" and "an independent selection committee" are treated as the same thing — which is the central question of this whole story. If the selection committee was independent, then a team linked to Sangma's faction being picked by that same committee is a coincidence; if the selection committee was influenced, then Sangma's statement is pure public relations. One direct question could have settled the direction of this entire dispute, and it was not asked.

The legal side drew most of my attention. The report says the court declared the team "illegal," but I found no case number, no date of the ruling, no name of the judge, and no reference to the specific administrative order that was quashed. There is a basic rule of journalism: when a report rests on a court ruling, it must have the documentary basis for that ruling — a case number, a copy of the order, a court date. That basis is absent here. It is fair to say that the heaviest claim in this entire story — the court's ruling — rests on its weakest link. All we have is one newspaper, which is itself citing a court ruling, and no second media outlet has verified it. I stress this because if I were to quote this report on the basis that "the court said it was illegal," I would be repeating the very error that serious analysis must avoid.

But there is a second side. The most useful part of the report is not what the court said, but what can be independently checked — the two elevens. An old team, a new team, and five fixed matches. I have been in cricket for thirty-six years, and I have learned that when a dispute surfaces, the most reliable things are the scorecard and the list of both teams' names. If these lists match the original match records, the story no longer needs to rest on a court ruling; we can simply say that one association fielded two different teams in a single tournament, which is itself a huge administrative event. That is the part The Highland Post supplied and that the report left unsourced (None) — meaning it must be matched against the original scorecard.

You may ask: why does an internal squabble in one state association matter? The answer is that it is not confined to Meghalaya's senior team. The report says the same thing happened to the under-23 men's team and the women's team as well. This detail is buried in a short paragraph and losing it there would be the greatest injustice to the story. If one administrative dispute ensnares the senior men, the under-23 and the women's teams all at once, this is not a matter of one team; it is the paralysis of a whole state's cricket system. And this is where my old concern returns: we chase elite academies and big tournaments so hard that we forget how many players in the lower system lose a whole season to a single administrative order, a single court stay. The under-23 players will not be this age next year. If the women's team's match was stopped, nobody remembered it. This is not a notice item; it is the drying of an entire pipeline.

Now the part where I believe the conventional conclusion is wrong. When such news breaks, the standard reaction is "this shows state associations need a cleanup" or "the BCCI should crack down." I do not dismiss that debate, but believing the problem is administrative disputes is an easy explanation that hides the real problem — the real problem is that team selection in our domestic cricket has become a process with no public, verifiable record. Until the selection record is open, every side can tell its own story, and even a court will rule only on the documents placed before it — which usually come from the association. In this case we have no minutes of the selection committee meeting, no public letter of BCCI recognition, no court ruling. When the basic records do not exist, the question is not who was right. The question is that in this system there is no place to keep the proof of being right.

And here I must test my own argument, because I too was pulled toward weaving a neat, closed story: "association dispute → court → team replaced → players victimised." That story is very clean, and perhaps dangerous for it. If I am honest, I must also say I know nothing about what the dispute between Sangma and the Apex Council was over — was it electoral, financial, tenure-related; the report does not say. And until that is known, "the players are victims" is an emotional conclusion, not a factual one. It may be that the Apex Council did something the court upheld, and that Sangma's new team was actually violating process. It may be the reverse. My point is not that the conclusion is wrong; my point is that we do not yet have the material to prove it right. And as a journalist I must admit that this is the biggest shortcoming of the whole report — the story's emotion is clear, its foundation is not.

So I have decided to read this news not as a whole story but as a signal that must be verified over the coming weeks. In my notebook is a list of three questions. First: the court's order — the case number, the date, and what exactly was quashed. Second: the two elevens and the scorecard of the Nagaland match — did the match finish normally, did the new team play, who won. Third: the BCCI's position — did it recognise the Apex Council's team, and did it issue any public statement on the whole dispute. If these three are answered, this news will turn from an administrative notice into a bigger system story. If not, it will remain a piece we read, heard and forgot — while the eleven players standing outside the ground are still waiting for their next match.

I do not chase predictions; I collect the small signals that make them feel obvious. The signal here is: if Meghalaya's team changes again in the next match, understand that this is not a cricket decision but an administrative one — and on that day we must ask who holds the authority for that change.