Special Correspondent
On 24 April 2026, the Telangana High Court reconfirmed Justice (Retd.) P. Naveen Rao as the Single Member Committee overseeing the Hyderabad Cricket Association, and did more than renew a tenure — it sharpened one. The Court defined an eight-point scope of authority, directed the Apex Council to work in coordination with the SMC, and left no ambiguity about who was meant to be driving HCA’s administration. Five months on, a pattern has emerged that cuts across every front of HCA’s affairs: complaints get raised, questions get asked, and nothing visible follows. Selection bias, unpublished TG20 accounts, a three-year-old Supreme Court-mandated report still half-implemented — different issues, same outcome. An administration can survive individual controversies. What it cannot survive is a track record where raising a complaint has stopped producing results, because that is what convinces people that complaining isn’t worth the effort.
The complaint that goes nowhere, twice
Nowhere is this pattern sharper than in selections. Complaints have piled up across two consecutive seasons now — last year and this year — and not one of them has produced a visible consequence. No reversal, no inquiry made public, no official held to account, nothing that functions as a deterrent to whoever is gaming the process. The complaints get lodged, the season moves on, and the same patterns repeat with the next set of trials. An SMC empowered with an eight-point mandate and direct High Court backing has more authority to act decisively here than any HCA administration in years. The absence of even one visible deterrent action, two years running, is the clearest sign yet that authority on paper and authority exercised are not the same thing.
A crowded room, no clear driver
Part of why deterrence keeps failing is that HCA doesn’t have one centre of power; it has four, operating in parallel rather than in sequence. There is the Secretary’s office, running day-to-day administration. There is the Apex Council, whose relationship with the SMC the Court itself found necessary to clarify. There is a group aligned with a former minister, still influential regardless of its formal standing. And beneath all three sits the oldest and most durable power in Hyderabad cricket: the club secretaries, who control selection pipelines, ground access and voting blocs irrespective of who occupies the SMC’s chair.
Layered on top are two high-profile additions who answer, in practice, to no one but themselves. Ambati Rayudu runs his mandate — district academy development — largely on his own terms. Wasim Jaffer’s addition to an already top-heavy structure raises a fair question: does the SMC need more marquee names, or more direct execution? When no single centre owns the outcome, no single centre is answerable when a complaint is ignored.
A pyramid shaped like an oval
The selection failures aren’t abstract — they’re structural. HCA is playing more cricket than it has in years — leagues, super leagues, emerging structures — and the concept is sound: broaden the base, then narrow sharply toward the state team. What’s actually happening is the opposite. The funnel stays wide almost all the way up. More leagues should be sanctioned at the bottom, and only the genuine cream — two or three teams — should be contesting the final selection berths. Instead the structure looks like an oval: wide at entry, still wide near the top.
A published, credible selection system exists on paper. In practice, results on the HCA website tell a different story — consistent performers overlooked, convenient justifications for favourites, the same academy-and-agent dynamics that have dogged junior cricket here for years, just with different names attached. Boys who have earned selection on performance are watching others get picked on relationships, with no consequence yet seen for anyone responsible. That is the single fastest way to lose the trust of the next generation of players and their families — the people HCA exists to serve.
Money that hasn’t been shown, a report that hasn’t been finished
The same pattern holds off the field. TG20 was, by attendance and atmosphere, a genuine success. But months after its conclusion, HCA has not published accounts. That silence, combined with informal talk of budget overruns and discretionary spending, and one match still drawing question marks, is not proof of anything — but it is a demand HCA has not met, and no one has been asked to meet it.
Further back, the Justice Nageswara Rao Committee’s Supreme Court-mandated recommendations remain, three years on, only partially implemented — including basic items like the addition and removal of members, and resolution of the status of the 57-plus-16/20 clubs adjudicated by the Apex Council, and the municipal clubs question. Three years without full implementation, and no visible cost to anyone for the delay, is the same story as the selection complaints: authority that exists but isn’t being exercised.
A District Committee with fanfare and no footprint
The District Cricket Infrastructure Development Committee was constituted with genuine promise. So far, the visible output doesn’t match the ambition. The recently announced state teams include no district players, despite performances on record that warranted consideration — another gap between what was promised and what anyone has been held to.
Six months, under the Court’s eye
The elected body’s current tenure ends this October. Rather than handing administration back to an elected structure mid-drift, the SMC should be given full, direct control for a defined period — roughly six months — specifically to act, visibly, on selection complaints; execute the unfinished Nageswara Rao recommendations; and publish TG20’s accounts. At the end of that window, an elected body takes over an agenda that is already set, with progress reported to the Court at intervals it prescribes.
The Court gave Justice Naveen Rao the authority in April. What HCA needs now is not another committee or another marquee appointment — it is one visible, unambiguous consequence, on any front, for a complaint that has been raised and ignored. Miles to go before anyone in Hyderabad cricket sleeps easy. If the change doesn’t happen in this window, it is difficult to see when it will.
