Jaipur: In an embarrassing situation, India’s Test vice-captain and Rajasthan Royals captain Ajinkya Rahane was made to wait outside a locked Sawai Man Singh Stadium due to an alleged feud between Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) and the State Sports Council.
Rahane and a few Rajatshan Royals players, who had come for training found the SMS gates locked by the sports council employees for close to half an hour before they could enter after the intervention from franchise officials.
The Sawai Man Singh Stadium is under Rajasthan State Sports Council (RSSC) and normally it is the RCA that has pay for its upkeep. “There has always been an issue of pending payments between RCA and RSSC since the time Lalit Modi was in charge of state cricket. However during the time of IPL, all payments are done by the franchise,” a senior RCA official said.
The official further said that it was more about state sports council officials trying to put pressure for freebies like complimentary passes for the matches.
“Today’s incident was surprising since Royals have recently made a substantial payment for the maintenance of the stadium. Whenever there is IPL, the state sports council officials do these things forcing RCA to shell out more passes,” he said.
When RCA joint secretary Mahendra Nahar was contacted, he cited security concerns. “It is true that the players, who had come for training, had to wait for 15-20 minutes, but it was because of some security issues,” said Nahar.
“Yesterday, some outsiders reached the practice session and created some problems. The RSSC had to take such an action after ‘some of the locals went inside the dressing room. The security officers wanted to set things in order before opening the gates,” he added.
However the answer seemed to be far from convincing as the stadium authorities as per protocol at all venues are well informed in advance about the movement team on training as well as match days. There was no official comment from the Royals.