MUMBAI:
Cricket icons
Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar are among the eight former international cricketers who are “ineligible” to vote in the elections of the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) on October 20 as they haven’t submitted their MCA voter’s identity card before the polls.
On Friday, election officer JS Saharia posted a list of eight former international cricketers — Tendulkar, Gavaskar, Agarkar, Manjrekar, Paras Mhambrey, Wasim Jaffer, Vinod Kambli and Avishkar Salvi — stating that “Following former international cricketers have not submitted the voter’s Identity Card, so hereby declared ineligible to vote.” “It’s very unfortunate,” former India batsman Sandeep Patil, who’s contesting for the MCA president’s post from the Mumbai Cricket group, told TOI.
“(Before he left for Australia to commentate on TV for the T20 World Cup), Sunil had even filled up the registration form for former India cricketers, but you also need to prepare a Voter’s ID card, for which he and some of the others (going to Australia) didn’t have the time, since they were told at the last-minute (about it),” Patil informed.
“Yes, it’s not been made. I couldn’t vote anyway as I’m not in India. I’ll make it for future reference,” Jaffer, who is currently the batting consultant of the Bangladesh Under-19 and Bangladesh’s high-performance team (‘A’ side), told this paper from Dhaka.
Patil, who has been canvassing for votes from former India cricketers, had requested the MCA election officer if Gavaskar and other former cricketers who would be busy with international assignments could vote online in the elections, but that request was turned down.
“It was too short a notice for them to do so. They need to amend the election rules for that,” said Patil. Overall, 43 former internationals-25 male and 16 female-have been deemed to be eligible to vote in this much talked about MCA elections by Saharia.