S Sreesanth seeks Vinod Rai's support over life-ban; likely to drag BCCI to court if attempt fails

New Delhi: Tainted Indian pacer S. Sreesanth, who has publicly criticizing the BCCI over their attitude towards him, has written to former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai, who heads the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (COA) of the Indian cricket board, seeking justice as he has lost four crucial years of his cricketing career.

In 2015, a Delhi court exonerated Sreesanth and two other players in the case registered by the Delhi Police which invoked the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) after he was arrested for spot fixing in the 2013 edition of the Indian Premier League .

With a change in the guard at the BCCI and Rai, an IAS officer who served in Kerala for long, Sreesanth expects that he will be able to persuade Rai on the injustice meted out to him.

Sreesanth is determined that if this attempt also fails, he will have no other alternative but to seek judicial intervention for lifting the ban on him.

Sreesanth’s associate Eddie Gibbs was quoted saying by the Deccan Chronicle on the matter.

"Sreesanth has also kept his legal options open for dragging the BCCI/ICC to the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS),” Gibbs said.

"We are in talks with the sports specialist lawyers Harper Macleod LLP,” he added.

Gibbs was the one who invited the Kerala seamer to play for Scotland Cricket League but the Indian board even decided against issuing NOC to the bowler for that as well.

On account of the life ban, the speedster cannot play even league cricket nor get access even for practice to any of the cricket grounds where the BCCI or the State Cricket Associations have a stake.

It was the BCCI Disciplinary Committee headed by the present Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley that slapped a life ban on Sreesanth.

Sreesanth was expecting a favourable stand from the BCCI which was headed by BJP lawmaker Anurag Thakur after he contested the May 2016 Kerala Assembly elections on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket from the prestigious Thiruvananthapuram seat and finished third, but things did not go the way he wished for.

Sreesanth is just the second Keralite to represent the country. The 34-year-old has played in 27 Tests taking 87 wickets, and picked up 75 scalps from 53 One-day Internationals (ODIs) and seven wickets from 10 Twenty20 Internationals (T20Is).

(With IANS inputs)