Rob Steen to present paper at Oxford Indian Society Symposium

Published 15 October 2012

Sport Journalism senior lecturer Rob Steen is looking forward with relish to his forthcoming encounter with Lalit Modi, the architect of the Indian Premier League and one of the most divisive and controversial figures in recent sporting history.

Steen will be presenting a paper at the Oxford Indian Society Symposium at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, on Saturday October 20, where Modi will be one of the guest panellists debating the question “Are the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s burgeoning revenues harming world cricket?”

Until he was sacked in 2010 over corruption charges relating to match-fixing and money laundering, Modi was the source of much of that revenue in his capacity as chairman of the IPL, the most successful start-up league in sporting history.

Earlier this year he was in the headlines for another unsavoury reason when he tweeted allegations of match-fixing against the New Zealander Chris Cairns. This resulted in him being ordered to pay $90,000 in damages: a crucial legal precedent in the struggle to regulate social media.

“I’m actually pleasantly surprised Mr Modi accepted the invitation. It’s quite brave of him, really, given that there will be plenty of people at St Antony’s who think he’s the next thing to the devil,” said Steen, an award-winning author and journalist who has spent nearly 30 years writing about cricket for titles ranging from The Sunday Times and The Guardian to India Today and Cricinfo, the Indian-based website for whom he has been a columnist for several years.

“At the same time, whatever one thinks of him, Mr Modi has been a major contributor, not just to the vast economic power now wielded by India but to global perceptions of the game there. Love it or loathe it, the IPL has caught the imagination of millions beyond India. I expect passions to run high.”