There are moments in life that are too difficult to put into words. Print isn’t enough to hold them. India’s women cricketers winning their ODI semi final against the mighty, seemingly invincible Australians was that moment for me.1 I knew we would win the world cup now. And I knew how much was about to change.
Later, on November 2, 2025, old heartbreaks from 2005 and 2017 had no place on the sofa with me as India walked out in blue, one more time, with one more chance not to be a beautiful tragedy. This time the World Cup was not in distant England or New Zealand; it was in our messy, noisy backyard, under floodlights that bounced off the Arabian Sea, and losing the toss was just par for the course now, not a death knell for dreams.2
Every fan carries a private pantheon. Let’s talk about some of mine: women who did not wait for the world to be ready for them.
Earlier There is Mithali Raj, who spent two decades carrying Indian batting on her back, walking in that day not as a story in progress but as a living archive. She did not give speeches about revolution; she just kept showing up, year after year, with a straight drive that made time slow down: her 409 runs in 2017 stood as India’s World Cup record until Smriti broke it in 2025.3456 In my mind, she is the one who quietly set the table so that others could feast.
There is Jhulan Goswami, the long run‑up that felt like a pilgrimage and the wrist that could still snap a ball past the best batters in the world. Watching her in 201778 was like watching a bridge between eras: one foot in the days when women’s cricket hardly existed on TV, the other in an era she would not fully get to enjoy but had made possible. In a 20-year international career she took a record 255 ODI wickets for India.910
Long ago Shantha Rangaswamy captained India’s first women’s Test side in the 1970s,1112 scoring 613 Test fifties and a hundred while also opening the bowling (21 Test wickets),13 and later became the first woman to receive the Arjuna Award for cricket.11
Diana Edulji learned her craft bowling at boys in Badhwar Park,14 then became India’s slow left‑arm heartbeat for nearly two decades, captaining the side and taking 63 official Test wickets—still the most by any Indian woman—and 46 ODI wickets.15 She also fought equally hard off the field, using her long Railways career and later her role in the BCCI’s Committee of Administrators to push for jobs, contracts, and dignity for women cricketers.161718
There are so many others who have built the spine of women’s cricket in this country vertebrate by vertebrate: Shubhangi Kulkarni, leg‑spinner and administrator, keeping the game alive in committee rooms;19 Sandhya Agarwal20 and Anju Jain,21 scoring in forgotten World Cups; Purnima Rau2223 and Neetu David,24 taking wickets and then quietly building the teams that would come after them; Anjum Chopra, captaining in the lean years and then talking women’s cricket into Indian living rooms.25
Now26272829 But this tournament had others now- Deepti, Smriti, Amanjot, Richa, Shafali, Pratika, Jemima.
If Deepti was the tournament’s quiet star with 215 runs and 22 wickets, Smriti was the metronome- India’s highest run getter with 434 and multiple catches. Both determinedly carrying this country, up the massive Everest of a home world cup.
Shafali made 199 in just the two matches she played, with that 87 in the final… but my favourite Shafali moment has to be how she was grinning already while anticipating Sune Luus’ catch.
Pratika’s 308 runs, the second‑highest tally for India constantly helped us open (hehe) doors into the match, and who knows how many the poor kid may have had if she hadn’t been injured right at the precipice of the Cup itself?
Jemi made 292 runs, including an unbeaten 127 in the semi‑final vs Australia… in many ways she’s the one who won us the tournament. Her self belief through that match, her bravery through the tournament and even in the press conferences, constantly belied by her jolly nature… Perhaps she’s opened another door for us: talking so openly about mental health in cricket, for cricketers.30
235 runs, with 12 sixes, the most by an Indian in the tournament: Richa Ghosh, keeper-bat par excellence.
Amanjot’s World Cup began with crisis. In the opener against Sri Lanka, India slid from 120 for 2 to 124 for 6, and a quiet stadium in Guwahati felt like it was reliving every old nightmare. On debut, she walked in next to Deepti and hit 57 off 56 – her maiden ODI fifty – in a 103‑run stand that yanked India to safety,3132 and later, in the final against SA, Wolvardt’s outrageous, tumbling catch that essentially won us the match and the Cup… you know the one.33 Those are what I remember.
Sneh’s most talked‑about spell came against Pakistan, in a game that could easily have become sticky. She bowled eight overs for just two wickets on paper, but the control was the real story: a chokehold that kept the chase at arm’s length.
Radha had to wait, watching the first six matches from the bench while everyone discussed India’s “settled XI”. When she finally got her chance against Bangladesh, she made it impossible to ignore her again: 3 for 30, plus a brilliant direct‑hit run‑out. That performance is what pushed her name back into the semi‑final conversation and reminded everyone that India’s spin depth now extends all the way to the dugout.
Renuka’s World Cup was all about the early overs. Even when she went wicketless, like against Pakistan and England, she strangled the run rate – 2.9 an over in one match, 4.6 in another – so that chases never got to breathe. Her new‑ball spell against New Zealand, where she combined discipline with two top‑order wickets, set up the very platform from which Smriti and Pratika later tore the game away.
Harleen, who once went viral for that impossible boundary catch in England,34 spent this World Cup doing the unglamorous versions of the same thing – sharp stops in the ring, calm hands on the rope, and those 20‑run cameos in the middle order that stop an innings from fraying.
Arundhati’s spells were often shorter, sharper: two‑ and three‑over bursts in the middle that changed the mood of an innings more than the scorecard, the kind of work you only notice when it’s missing. But her contribution often also came as that player who wasn’t in the XI, and still carried the team’s attitude. So brilliant.
Sree became one of those quiet tournament stories that suddenly erupts into view at the end. The 21‑year‑old left‑arm spinner from Kadapa took 14 wickets across the World Cup, leading India’s spin tally and being welcomed home to Andhra Pradesh like a local folk hero- as she should be.
Kranti’s World Cup became a small‑town fairy tale written in seam. Already known for a 6 for 52 against England earlier in the year,35 she arrived at the tournament as a young quick with raw menace and left it as one of India’s biggest match‑winners. Her 3 for 20 against Pakistan in the group stage, sharing the new ball with Renuka, smashed the chase early and earned her a Player‑of‑the‑Match award that felt like a coming‑of‑age ceremony.
While Yastika’s job this time, was mostly to wait – pads on, gloves ready, rehearsing every scenario in her head in case anything happened to Richa, Uma showed us what the future looks like. A galaxy of stars awaits.
Harmanpreet Kaur went into this tournament as the oldest player in our XI, one day younger than me, and carrying at least ten extra years of history. She had seen 2005 from afar, 2017 from the middle, and every year since then from inside the weight room, the nets, the press conferences where she was asked about the word “chokers” without anyone quite using it. When my girl lifted the trophy, with the Bhangra and her team waiting for her, It’s difficult to explain the joy. Sometimes things can just be felt.
After the world cup, what struck me most was how lightly they wore their victory. No chest-thumping, no proclamations of dominance. Just gratitude, relief, and a deep, unmistakable sense of togetherness. Even Australia, knocked out in the semi‑final absorbed the defeat like a bruise, not a scar. And South Africa, losing the most important match of their life, were still gracious enough to accept hugs.
Women’s cricket, at its best, feels like the game stripped back to its point: the joy of being allowed to play. The records matter. The trophies matter. But they feel like by‑products of something more important: the right to take up space on a cricket field.
So when I call these women immortal, I don’t mean that highlights of Shafali’s 87 or Deepti’s 5 for 39 will live forever on some server farm in Dubai. I mean that a girl somewhere in the tiniest, dustiest, and possibly even the most gender-backward, village possible, balancing a taped tennis ball on her fingers, will one day hear these names and believe that the world will not need to be ready for her either.
Why did Ishan Kishan come out swinging at 6/2 chasing 209 instead of playing it safe? Why did Pat Cummins bowl first in the 2023 World Cup final despite everyone expecting him to bat? Why did Harmanpreet Kaur throw the ball to part-time bowler Shafali Verma in the 2025 Women’s World Cup final when India desperately needed wickets?
These aren’t random decisions. They follow patterns that psychologists and economists have studied for decades. Three frameworks help us understand these three cricket choices:
Expected Utility Theory – How perfectly rational people should make decisions (decision making for robots)
Prospect Theory – How people actually make decisions when facing risk, or when they feel like they are winning or losing
Behavioral Economics – The mental shortcuts and biases that affect our choices
Expected Utility Theory1 Expected Utility Theory assumes people make decisions by calculating the average outcome of their choices. They think about the all the possible outcomes, try to understand how likely each outcome is, and how much they would like or dislike it if any of these outcomes happened. Then pick the option where this calculation works out best.
Expected Utility Theory assumes three things:
People can calculate probabilities accurately
They will pick the option with the best average outcome
They make decisions based on pure logic, not emotions
This theory is useful because it gives us a standard for what “rational” decision-making looks like. It’s like the baseline or the “correct answer” against which we can compare real human behavior.
But here’s the problem: people don’t actually follow this framework, because we are not always rational beings.
Prospect Theory2 Developed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky,3 Prospect Theory says that people behave in predictable but “irrational” ways. The central insight of the theory is that Losses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains feel good,4 and that outcomes are evaluated based on the current position of the person evaluating them- not on absolute values of satisfaction.
Here are two examples:
Scenario 1: Gain Frame
Option A: You’re guaranteed to get $450
Option B: Flip a coin—50% chance you get $1,000, 50% chance you get nothing
Expected Utility Theory says: Both options have the same expected value ($500- the value you would get on average if the coin is flipped many times), so you should be indifferent.
But Prospect Theory predicts: Most people choose Option A (the guaranteed $450). Why? Because the certainty of a gain feels good, even if it’s smaller.
Scenario 2: Loss Frame
Option A: You’re guaranteed to lose $450
Option B: Flip a coin—50% chance you lose $1,000, 50% chance you lose nothing
Expected Utility Theory says: Both have the same average loss, so again you should be indifferent.
But Prospect Theory predicts: Most people choose Option B (the coin flip). Why? Because they’ll take a gamble to avoid a certain loss. The possibility of losing nothing appeals to them.
Behavioral Economics5 While Expected Utility Theory focuses on rationality and Prospect Theory focuses on how we evaluate gains vs. losses, Behavioral Economics is the broader field studying all the ways our brains take shortcuts that lead us astray. It’s the study of cognitive biases.
Anchoring Bias: We get too attached to the first piece of information we hear, even if it’s wrong or irrelevant.
Status Quo Bias: We prefer to keep things as they are, even if alternatives are better (“We’ve Always Done It This Way”).
Confirmation Bias: We seek out information that confirms what we already believe, and ignore contradictory evidence.
Availability heuristic: Overweighting recent memorable incidents while discounting regular events. A heuristic is a mental short cut, like a rule of thumb. For example, my dad just wears whatever my mom takes out for him to wear. If he has to make a decision, his heuristic is to wear whatever is at the top of the pile of clothes in his cupboard.
Recency Bias: We overweight recent events when making decisions, ignoring longer-term patterns.
Sunk Cost Bias: We make decisions based on money we’ve already spent, even though that money is gone and shouldn’t affect future decisions.
These biases often work together to distort decisions:
Anchoring + Confirmation bias = You anchor on an initial belief, then only see evidence confirming it
Recency bias + Availability heuristic = Recent vivid events feel more common than they are
Status quo bias + Sunk cost bias = You stick with current choices because of what you’ve already invested, even if better alternatives exist
Kishan7 Now back to cricket. Ishan Kishan walked in and launched an all-out assault—76 runs off just 32 balls at a strike rate of 237.5. He reached his fifty in 21 balls, the fastest by any Indian against New Zealand. Together with Suryakumar Yadav, he added 122 runs in just 49 balls. India won with 28 balls remaining.
Captain Suryakumar later said: “I’ve never seen anyone bat at 6/2 in that manner and still end the powerplay around 67 or 70”.8
From a pure Expected Utility perspective, when chasing very high totals in T20 cricket, the mathematics often favor immediate aggression because conservative batting creates an impossible required run rate in later overs.9Studies using dynamic programming and, more recently, advanced machine learning techniques to analyse Twenty20 (T20) cricket suggest that, when facing high targets, chasing teams are often more successful when they adopt an aggressive approach from the beginning, which inherently requires accepting elevated risk.10
In Prospect Theory terms:
Reference point: The current losing position (6/2, massive target)
Frame: Loss domain (already behind, likely heading toward defeat)
Predicted behavior: Risk-seeking to escape the loss domain
Research on sports shows11 that athletes in trailing positions consistently take more risks: higher shot volumes in basketball, more aggressive substitutions in football, elevated foul rates. Trailing teams recognise that maintaining the status quo (playing safe) guarantees defeat, so they escalate risk dramatically.
Kishan’s aggressive batting aligns perfectly with Prospect Theory’s prediction: when facing almost certain defeat through conventional cricket, players become willing to take massive risks for a chance at victory. The post-match quote captures this psychology: “I asked myself, can I do it again? I had a very clear answer”.8 This suggests Kishan mentally framed the situation as an opportunity (a chance to produce something extraordinary) rather than a threat (protecting his wicket).
The partnership transformed what looked like a losing position into a comfortable victory. India reached the target with 28 balls to spare. Kishan’s risk-seeking behavior in a loss frame achieved precisely what conservative cricket might not have done—a pathway to victory from an apparently losing position.
Cummins12 In the 2023 CWC final, Pat Cummins won the toss and chose to field. Conventional wisdom… indeed old Australian wisdom certainly suggested batting first and setting a target,13 but against an unbeaten India playing at home, his instincts were unfortunately proven correct (Cummins admitted he was “unsure right until the toss”14).
Cummins articulated this logic: “Not getting it right with the bat first would be fatal in a way not doing so with the ball wouldn’t”.14 This is sophisticated risk assessment—recognising that different choices carry different consequences even if probabilities are similar. Besides, research on toss decisions shows that in modern ODI cricket, there’s no consistent advantage to batting first.15The decision was called “one of the bravest in Australian sport history”, because if it failed, criticism would be merciless.16 The “safe” choice (bat first) protects reputation even if suboptimal. Cummins accepted the reputational risk to make what he calculated as the statistically better decision. Rare leadership.
Abhishek Sharma, India’s incandescent T20 opener later spoke with his IPL team mate Travis Head to understand Head’s mindset during Australia’s chase. Abhishek says Head told him, “when I asked him about his mindset in the World Cup, he told me that we only had the batter’s meeting. And in the batter’s meeting, we only thought about how to make 400 today”.17
Now think from an Indian batter’s perspective. The pressure of playing a home world cup final in front of thousands of fans vociferously supporting your team… I would have thought it would let them express themselves openly, but the opposite happened.
Why did the pressure of a home World Cup final constrain Indian batters instead of liberating them? The answer might sit at the intersection of Prospect Theory, loss aversion, and reputational risk.
Prospect Theory tells us that people in a gain frame become risk-averse. After winning every match before the final and spreading true joy through the nation, every wicket that fell in the final may have felt like a loss from a guaranteed future, not a normal match event. Loss aversion might have kicked in hard here: the pain of being the one who throws it away may have felt far greater than the joy of being the hero. This is textbook loss aversion: the psychological weight of potential failure exceeded the psychological reward of potential glory.
So Indian batters subconsciously optimised for:
Minimising blame
Preserving wickets
Maintaining respectability
Not maximising runs.
Contrast this with Ishan Kishan whacking the skin off the cricket ball earlier this week… the contrast is clear, isn’t it? Note here that Kishan had earlier been dropped and treated poorly by the BCCI after making a double hundred,18 plus he had failed in the previous match. He still backed himself and chose the (objectively) riskiest option.
Elite cricket decisions are clearly less about skill or courage and more about how players psychologically locate themselves on the gain–loss spectrum. In all three moments—Kishan’s assault, Cummins’ toss call, and India’s batting freeze—the decisive factor wasn’t talent or tactics, but where each decision-maker placed their psychological reference point. None of these decisions become correct because they succeeded or failed. They become understandable because the theory predicts them before the outcome is known. Human beings behave differently under different frames—and elite sport amplifies those tendencies.
Kaur And now to something joyful. Remember when Harmanpreet Kaur threw the ball in the final to Shafali Verma?19 Me too! Shafali is a specialist batter who had bowled only 14 overs in 30 ODIs with just 1 wicket.20 Shafali took 2 wickets in her first over (Sune Luus caught and bowled, Marizanne Kapp).19
From a rational Expected Utility perspective, Harmanpreet’s decision seems questionable. Pure EUT would favour specialist bowlers with known probabilities and track records over using an untested part-timer who could get whacked for a 30 run over on a bad day. But Shafali was having a good day, and Harman trusted that. Shafali’s ongoing frame of mind was of confidence. and Prospect Theory says people evaluate their options based on their current position. Shafali also represented an unexpected variation that South African batters hadn’t prepared for.
Harman successfully overcame several behavioural biases to toss the ball to Shafali that night:
Status Quo Bias Overcome: The “safe” choice was continuing with regular bowlers—what teams typically do. Harman broke this pattern. Research shows captains typically exhibit strong status quo bias, especially in high-pressure situations. Harman went against this natural tendency.
Sunk Cost Fallacy Avoided: Teams often persist with established bowlers because they’re “supposed to be” the specialists—they’ve been selected for this role, practiced extensively, etc. Harman didn’t fall into this trap. The fact that Shafali wasn’t a specialist shouldn’t matter if the situation calls for something different.
Availability Heuristic Countered: The most “available” option mentally was the regular bowlers—they’re the specialists, they’ve bowled throughout the match. But Harman looked beyond the obvious choice.
She later explained, “When Laura and Sune were batting, they were looking really good, and I just saw Shafali standing there. The way she was batting today, I knew today’s her day. She was doing something special today, and I just thought I have to go with my gut feeling”.20 This represents what researchers call “recognition-primed decision making”—experienced decision-makers recognising patterns and trusting intuition developed through years of experience.21 MS Dhoni’s captaincy showed similar intuitive leaps: giving the last over to Joginder Sharma in the 2007 T20 World Cup final, promoting himself ahead of Yuvraj in 2011.22 Neither Kaur nor MS South African captain Laura Wolvaardt later admitted: “Shafali’s bowling was the surprise factor, frustrating that we didn’t expect it”.23
In all,
Ishan was risk-seeking because he perceived himself in a loss frame.
Indian batters became risk-averse because they perceived themselves in a gain frame.
Cummins accepted reputational risk to avoid catastrophic match risk.
Harman overrode status quo bias by compressing experience into instinct.
Ultimately, none of these choices were brave because they succeeded; they were brave because they resisted the gravitational pull of risk aversion, reputation, and habit. Under pressure, cricket strips decision-making down to its psychological core: how afraid are you? Elite sport doesn’t reward those who merely minimise mistakes. It rewards those who understand when the cost of caution is greater than the cost of failure — and who are willing to act accordingly. The moments we celebrate are not triumphs of bravery so much as triumphs over instinct—reminders that greatness often lives in decisions that feel unsafe.
TL;DR, because this is not a post for cricket casuals:
Fog in North India in December, heat waves in April, election clashes, and security disruptions are predictable risks, not bad luck.
Indian cricket continues to treat these as isolated incidents rather than as interconnected system-level risks that cascade across scheduling, logistics, player welfare, and revenue.
The BCCI now runs a ₹20,000-crore ecosystem, yet lacks a transparent, enterprise-wide risk management framework appropriate to that scale.
Global sports bodies manage similar uncertainties using formal risk frameworks (e.g., ISO 31000) to decide what risks to avoid, mitigate, insure, or accept.
Applying ISO 31000 to Indian cricket shows that systematic risk management would cost far less than repeated disruptions, cancellations, and credibility damage.
At this scale, ad-hoc risk management is not neutral—it is value-destructive.
And now onto the post.
This post has been inspired by watching the BCCI schedule summer matches in tropical South India, and winter season matches in our smoggy chilled North. Watching Indian cricketers roam about in Lucknow against South Africa while wearing pollution masks while broadcasters told us match was delayed due to low visibility conditions made me wonder what other risks BCCI could just avoid, or at least manage better.
These risks are predictable. FogSmog in North India in December isn’t a surprise. Heat waves in April aren’t black swans. Even geopolitical and security disruptions, while unpredictable, follow recognisable patterns. Yet Indian cricket continues to treat these as isolated “incidents” rather than as interconnected risks that can be anticipated, priced, and managed.
This is not about fog or heat. It’s about running a ₹20,000-crore system without an enterprise risk framework. So I’m doing an ISO 31000 evaluation for the BCCI. FOR FREE. Please someone share this with anyone influential in the BCCI.
Here’s a non-comprehensive list of some risk sources and events that can happen. You can skim through it if you like, I know it’s long, which already tells you lots:
Risk Category
Specific Risk
Example/Evidence
Risk Source
Impact Area
Geopolitical & Security
Cross-border conflict/military escalation
IPL 2025 suspension due to India-Pakistan tensions (May 2025)1
Political/regulatory external context
Tournament suspension, revenue loss, player safety concerns
Geopolitical & Security
Communal/religious tensions
Mustafizur Rahman threats from Ujjain religious leaders (Dec 2025);2
Social/political external context
Player threats, stadium disruptions, player unavailability
Negative sentiment from cancellations, perceived mismanagement
Communications/perception risk
Brand damage, sponsor pressure, fan retention loss
Health & Safety
Pandemic-related restrictions
COVID-like scenarios requiring lockdowns or capacity restrictions
Health emergency/external event
Match cancellation, venue capacity limits, player quarantine requirements
Health & Safety
Food/water safety incidents
Contaminated food/water affecting teams or spectators
Health/hygiene risk
Illness outbreaks, regulatory action, liability
Health & Safety
Air quality/pollution issues
High pollution affecting visibility, player respiratory health
Environmental hazard
Match visibility issues, player health concerns, match cancellation
Before diving into solutions, let’s define what we’re actually talking about. ISO 3107310 establishes the vocabulary for various terms used in ISO 31000,11 which is the ISO framework for risk management. According to the frameworks, risk is “the effect of uncertainty on objectives”. Here,
Objectives are whatever results the organisation wishes to achieve.
Effect means a deviation from the expected, whether the deviation is positive, negative, or both;
Uncertainty occurs from a deficit of information; and
Therefore, risk is a deviation from the aims that an entity is working towards caused due to lack of knowledge about the situations surrounding the objective. The deviation can have a positive or negative outcome, but the deviation means it is still a risk, and leads to risk consequences, or outcomes that affect the objectives.
Uncertainty can never be removed entirely. As we see in the normal distribution, risk events can happen even when we are 99.999% certain of our processes. This is called residual risk, or when a risk event occurs even when controls have been applied against the risk source. An event is the occurrence or change of circumstances (the bridge collapses, prices spike, new regulations take effect that can be the source of a risk. A risk source is an element with potential to give rise to risk (think: aging infrastructure, volatile commodity prices, regulatory change). Understanding residual risk is critical for determining whether further treatment is needed or whether the organisation should accept and monitor what remains. It is important to emphasise here that everyone perceives risk differently (risk perception): engineers might see technical risks as manageable; the public might see the same risks as terrifying. Effective risk communication requires understanding these perceptual differences.
The likelihood of an event, is a broad expression of the chance of something happening, and can be expressed qualitatively or quantitatively, but in the previous posts we have understood what a probability is, as expressed between 0 and 1 (here and here), and frequency, which is when we count the number of the type of events we are quantifying. understanding these basic terms helps us understand how vulnerable we are due to our exposure to a source of risk, as well as how to build resilience. Because we’re discussing a standard, these words have specific definitions:
Vulnerability refers to intrinsic properties creating susceptibility to risk sources.
Exposure measures the extent to which an organization is subject to an event.
Resilience captures adaptive capacity in complex, changing environments, so this isn’t about preventing events, it’s about how to recover from them.
Understanding risk also helps organisations understand which risks to accept, and which to defend against. New Zealand’s sports sector adopted ISO 31000 in 2016; Australia’s sporting associations follow it; international sporting events apply it to pandemic preparedness. This is called Risk attitude- the organisation’s overall approach towards risk, and their tendency to pursue, avoid, or accept it. Attitudes towards risk always depend upon any entity’s risk appetite (the amount and type of risk they are willing to accept), and their risk tolerance, which looks at specific risks for each objective. An example of risk appetite is the willingness to invest in innovative technology, and that of risk tolerance is the amount of specific risk an organisation may accept for data breaches in particular.
ISO 31000 Framework for Indian Cricket While it may appear that these are all just the costs of doing business in India, I don’t think this is true. Also, other sports systems facing similar uncertainties—pandemics, extreme weather, terrorism, financial volatility—don’t operate this way. They use formal risk management frameworks to decide what to avoid, what to mitigate, what to insure, and what to accept. ISO 31000 is one such framework, and it’s suited to complex, multi-stakeholder systems like Indian cricket. Here it is applied to Indian cricket:
Venue operators: own stadium safety, crowd management, emergency response.
Communication & consultation
Regular briefings with teams, broadcasters, police, local authorities.
Clear public communication on cancellations, rescheduling, and safety decisions.
Monitoring
Track near‑misses (e.g. small crushes at gates, close calls with fog or heat).
Maintain dashboards: incidents per season, delays, injuries, corruption alerts.
5. Review & Continuous Improvement (What Did We Learn This Season?)
After each season / major incident:
Incident reviews
IPL suspension: What early warning signs did we miss? Could we have acted sooner?
Chinnaswamy stampede: Which design and process failures led to casualties?
Lucknow fog‑out: How should scheduling rules change for fog‑prone venues?
Mustafizur threats: How do we handle politically sensitive players and venues?
Effectiveness checks
Did our treatments reduce likelihood or consequence as expected?
Did any controls fail or create new risks (e.g. over‑policing crowds)?
Update the system
Revise risk criteria, appetite, and tolerances where needed.
Amend scheduling policies, venue standards, insurance terms, and contracts.
Feed lessons into next season’s planning: same framework, better parameters.
To-Do List If Indian cricket embraced systematic risk management, the BCCI would have:
A Risk Management Policy (BCCI document) establishing appetite and tolerance
A Risk Register (updated quarterly) tracking all relevant risk categories with assessed severity and treatment strategies
Incident Response Protocols that trigger automatically (e.g., if weather forecast shows fog, reserve dates activate; if geopolitical tension rises, security protocols engage)
Venue Certification requiring regular safety audits for all stadiums
Insurance covering defined scenarios with unambiguous language
Player Education on corruption risks, mental health impacts of uncertainty, safety protocols
Stakeholder Transparency (fans, sponsors, broadcasters informed about residual risks and mitigation strategies)
Continuous Learning (post-incident reviews feeding into policy updates)
Why bother? Risks are interconnected: geopolitics affects scheduling, which affects logistics, which affects player welfare, which affects performance, which affects revenue. One shock propagates through the entire system.
But the real argument is how all this affects BCCI’s income: In fiscal year 2024-25, the BCCI earned a total of ₹20,686 crore—double what it was five years earlier. But this income doesn’t flow uniformly. It comes from multiple sources, each vulnerable to different risks:
IPL: ₹5,761 crore (59.1% of FY 2024-25 BCCI revenue)12
International cricket (men’s): ₹361 crore (3.7%)12
Created cascading effects on domestic Ranji Trophy schedules
Disrupted team preparation windows for the Asia Cup (subsequently postponed)
When the IPL shut down due to the events that followed the Pahalgam terrorism, one risk event rippled across all BCCI’s operations. The ₹3,500-4,000 crore total ecosystem loss wasn’t borne by IPL alone—it distributed across broadcasters, sponsors, franchises, international teams visiting India, and state cricket associations that depend on BCCI’s distributions (approximately ₹100-125 crore in combined sponsorship, broadcast, and match-day revenue for 16 matches15 and the broadcaster JioCinema faced losses of ₹1,900-2,000 crore (35% of their ₹5,500 crore seasonal projection)17 While war is a systemic risk (read more here, scroll down to the risk sections), a stampede at a celebration event is not.
Now let’s do some hypothetical maths. Let’s say of BCCI’s total ₹20,686 crore exposure, 10% is under difficult-to-avoid-risk, and another 20% are things that could go wrong but if everything happened normally (planes flew on time, luggage was not lost, people had common sense, etc.) it would not go wrong. Now assume costs of mitigation to be between 10-20% of the cost of losses. This would be the breakdown of that exposure:
Risk Category
% of Total Exposure
Exposure Amount (₹ Crore)
Annual Loss Probability
Expected Annual Loss (₹ Crore)
Mitigation Cost (10-20% of loss)
Net Benefit if Mitigated
High Risk (Geopolitical, Corruption, Major Infrastructure)
10%
₹2,068.6
20-30%
₹414-620
₹41-124
₹290-579
Medium Risk (Weather, Logistics, Personnel, Sponsorship)
20%
₹4,137.2
30-40%
₹1,241-1,655
₹124-331
₹910-1,531
Low Risk (Normal operations)
70%
₹14,480.2
1-5%
₹145-724
₹15-145
₹130-709
TOTAL
100%
₹20,686
~15-20% aggregate
₹1,800-3,000
₹180-600
₹1,200-2,820
Now let’s do scenario analysis with ILLUSTRATIVE NUMBERS.
Scenario A – No Mitigation (Do Nothing)
Element
Amount (₹ Crore)
Notes
Reserves/ Bank Balance
₹20,686
Baseline
Expected Losses (unmitigated)
₹1,800-3,000
From Table 1
Insurance Recovery (40-50% of losses)
₹720-1,500
Partial coverage; war/corruption not covered
Net Loss After Insurance
₹1,080-2,280
Uninsured exposure
Effective Revenue After Losses
₹18,406-19,606
Revenue minus net loss
Annual Cost to Organization
₹0
No prevention investment
Net Outcome
₹18,406-19,606
Revenue minus losses
Scenario B – Full Mitigation (Invest in Risk Management)
Element
Amount (₹ Crore)
Notes
Reserves/ Bank Balance
₹20,686
Baseline (unchanged)
Mitigation Investment
₹180-600
Cost to prevent/reduce losses
Expected Losses (with mitigation)
₹450-900
Reduced by 60-75% through mitigation
Insurance Recovery (40-50%)
₹180-450
Still applicable, lower losses
Net Loss After Insurance & Mitigation
₹270-450
Dramatically reduced
Effective Revenue After Mitigation & Losses
₹20,236-20,416
Revenue minus mitigation cost and net loss
Annual Cost to Organization
₹180-600
Mitigation investment
Net Outcome
₹20,236-20,416
Much better than Scenario A
None of the above means that BCCI doesn’t do risk mitigation at all. They must do. Matches are insured, security is coordinated with state authorities, schedules are adjusted, and contingency plans exist. But much of this risk management remains reactive, fragmented, and event-specific, rather than systematic.
The scale of Indian cricket has outgrown this approach. What is now a ₹20,000-crore ecosystem operates across volatile geopolitics, increasingly extreme climate conditions, aging infrastructure, fragile logistics, and intense public scrutiny. In such an environment, risk does not arrive as isolated shocks. It propagates. A fog-out affects scheduling, which affects logistics, which affects player welfare, which affects performance, which ultimately affects revenue and credibility. Treating each disruption as an unfortunate exception misses the underlying structure of the problem.
Active risk management does not promise certainty, nor does it eliminate risk. What it offers is clarity: an explicit understanding of working to anticipate risks in our cricket system so that most can simply be prevented, and those that cannot be prevented are mitigated. The IPL did not need to be part of India’s war theatre. After the Pahalgam attacks those matches could have been shifted to lower risk areas, such as away from the border, and we wouldn’t have had Ricky Ponting trying to persuade foreigners to stay back and play.18
Chasing Tales 