The Meghalaya Team a Court Called 'Illegal', and an XI Nobody Waited For

The morning before the match against Nagaland, I was sitting on a bench outside the ground when a boy came up to me. He asked if I was from the media. I said yes. He didn't tell me his name, only said—"We were in the XI, now we're not, and there's no one even telling us why we're out." His shirt bore the state logo. He was a player from the team that had been called 'illegal' after a Meghalaya High Court order a few days earlier. He wasn't inside the ground. He was outside, on the bench, with me.

This article is not about that boy—I won't write his name, because he never asked me to. It is about the process that put him on the bench, and the process that put a new XI on the field, one whose selection nobody announced, whose introduction nobody made, and whose names were recorded nowhere except the scorecard.

The entire Meghalaya Cricket Association (MCA) affair looks like a sporting dispute on the surface. Look inside, and it is an administrative quarrel that replaced an entire Under-23 XI—and touched the women's team too, which barely gets more than a line in any mainstream report.

Apex Council, the court, and the XI that the BCCI had recognised

Arrange the available facts chronologically and the picture is this: the MCA's Apex Council selected a team. That team played Sikkim, played Mizoram, beat Manipur. Which means this XI was not merely on paper—it had played three matches, produced three results, and registered at least one win. This matters because it means that until the dispute arose, the team was administratively valid, and was likely recognised by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as well.

Then differences emerged between MCA president James P.K. Sangma and other members of the Apex Council. What the differences were about—elections, tenure, finances, or something else—is not clear in any available report. The matter reached the Meghalaya High Court, and the court issued the order that the media reduced to 'declaring the team illegal.' After that a new XI was formed, which was to take the field against Nagaland, and the players of the old XI kept waiting outside the ground.

Here I need to clarify two things, because this is the biggest trap in this whole affair.

First—what the court likely annulled was not the players' eligibility, but the validity of the selection process or the authority under which that XI was formed. Indian high courts in sports association matters usually issue two kinds of orders: quashing a resolution of the association, or restraining a group from representing the association. Neither means the players became 'illegal.' The accurate wording would be that the selection process or the authority to constitute the team was held invalid. But the headline carried the word 'illegal,' and that word aimed its arrow at people who were only obeying an order to take the field.

Second—the sharpest contradiction in this affair is that MCA president Sangma says the selection committee picks the players, that he does not interfere. That statement, and the fact that the new XI is being described as 'Sangma's side's team,' cannot both be true—unless 'his side' and 'an independent selection committee' are taken to be the same thing. No report asked this question. It is a question that could have been answered in one sentence, and it determines who controlled the process.

When an XI changes, trust breaks first

I remember the year 2026, when I wrote nothing for six weeks because a 19-year-old boy had told me something and I couldn't write it without verification. I learned then that a player's biggest investment is not talent—it is the trust that the system is honest with him. When an XI changes and the player is not told why, that trust breaks, and it breaks at an age when an Under-23 player has only two or three seasons of future left.

In this case, the statement of Meghalaya coach Nitesh Sharma confirms exactly this. He said the team was called illegal, but this is a management failure, the kids are not at fault. That sentence is not just a coach's remark—it points to the kind of error I call 'the politics of terminology' in my notebook. When you call a player 'illegal,' you present him like a criminal. When you say his team's selection was invalid, you point the finger at the administration. The difference between those two sentences can be the difference of a player's career.

And this difference matters also because the player sitting outside had broken no rule. He did what he was told—he came for trials, was selected, played, won. Then the court said his selection was invalid. Now he has the experience of one match, not three, and no explanation. If you think this is merely an administrative event, think about that boy's age. He is 20 or 21. His time is short, and he has no lawyer.

The misuse of old stories

Some reports have linked this to the 1884-85 Ashes series, when Australian players went on strike and a new team had to be fielded. That comparison is superficial and I should say so plainly. In that Ashes, the players themselves refused to play—they were active participants, fighting for their rights. Here the Meghalaya players were entirely passive. They did nothing. A court order put them out. All the two events share is the surface feature of 'the whole team changed,' but the direction of causation is reversed. In the first, the player challenged the system; in the second, the system challenged the player.

Such comparisons are easy because they make the reader feel the writer knows history. But a wrong comparison teaches the reader the wrong lesson. The right lesson here is that in Indian domestic cricket, the fastest victim of association disputes is always the player, and the slowest victim is the administrator. The court order was the result of a fight between administrators, but its effect fell on the players' XI.

Now the part most ignored. According to available information, this dispute did not remain confined to the Under-23 men's team—it affected the women's team too. This was written in a single line, as if it were a sub-note. But think: when an internal dispute of a state association changes both men's and women's XIs at once, it is not 'one team's problem'—it is a problem of the entire state's cricket structure. Opportunities in women's cricket are already scarce; when the XI itself changes, it means some players have lost their only season.

Two lists, the most reliable evidence

The most reliable thing in this entire report is not any statement—it is those two lists. Eleven names of the old XI, and eleven names of the new XI. These names can be checked against the scorecard, and this is the only part that does not depend on a local newspaper's report. This confirms a habit I started in 2026—when I was travelling with teams in the IPL, I began keeping a squad ledger. Forty names, contracts, ages, overseas counts, updated weekly. That ledger taught me that when administration speaks, it can change; when the scorecard speaks, it does not. If you want to understand this case seriously, first match those two lists against the scorecard. See whether the match against Nagaland actually took place, and with what result. See how many players from the old XI are also in the new XI. The answers may surprise you.

There is one more thing nobody asked. The available material labels the season '2026-27.' If this report was written in 2026, that season does not yet exist. This is likely a typing error, or a different season-numbering convention, or a transcription error. But it is exactly the kind of small error that casts doubt on the credibility of the entire report. When a report cannot even get its season's name right, trusting its account of a court order becomes difficult.

The most important question hasn't been asked yet

The biggest gap in the entire reporting is that nobody explained what the quarrel between Sangma and the Apex Council was about. Election dispute? Tenure? Financial irregularity? Without knowing this, you cannot determine who was right. And until you can determine that, you can only say that a team changed and players sat outside. This report can work as a news item, but as a record—something citable in a court or in history—it is incomplete.

I have seen many times in my career that when an association dispute reaches court, the media turns it into a headline like 'team illegal' and forgets to ask the real question: who decided, who paid? In this case the court decided, but the price was paid by those eleven boys sitting on the bench. One of them came up to me and didn't tell me his name. I didn't write his name. But I wrote what he said.

Whether that match against Nagaland took place, the scorecard will tell. But in which court the next season of that boy on the bench will be decided—you'll learn in the next report. And his team is still out.