Jagmohan Dalmiya is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the friction as he wriggles around is painful to watch. His resignation from the ICC Contracts Committee should have taken place months ago, on a matter of principle. It has happened much too late, and as part of realpolitik. He is protesting against a contract he rightly terms as unlawful and unfair; the problem is that he is a signatory to this contract. How did all this happen? To begin with, ICC did something grossly irregular by not only giving event sponsors event rights – which it owns – but by also ceding it the commercial rights of the players for specified time periods before and after the event, which it does not own.

The BCCI, under Dalmiya, then actually signed the contract, thus taking the onus of delivering on ICC's promise upon itself. The problem was that it did not own the players' rights either, and had promised ICC, just as ICC had promised the event sponsors, something it did not own.

Dalmiya, when he realised this before the ICC Trophy held in Sri Lanka in September, arm-twisted and cajoled the Indian players and ICC into coming to a compromise deal for that event, under the assurance that the contract would be reviewed after the event. But that was never on the cards, as ICC refused to budge.

Here, the players turned the tables on Dalmiya. Initially, and somewhat short-sightedly, the players had fought the battle not in terms of principle but in terms of convenience. ICC had as much business selling the players' commercial rights as they would have to, say, sell Sachin Tendulkar's house in Bandra. Had they actually sold Tendulkar's house, he would have told them to go to hell, and that the house did not belong to them, so there. He would not have bargained over how many rooms ICC had a right to sell.

Instead, the players fought their battle in terms of bringing down the time-periods for which their commercial rights were imperilled, and compromised. For the World Cup however, they played harder to get. Were they to sign the contract, they would be contravening existing agreements with other sponsors. It would have put them in the same illegal position that the BCCI is now in.

Where Dalmiya's realpolitik will take him is uncertain. ICC's contract does amount to an unlawful restraint of trade but the BCCI is already a signatory to it. Can one dishonour a contract because one discovers irregularities in it after having signed it? If ICC committed a mistake, doesn't the BCCI's earlier ratification of that mistake make it equally culpable?

ICC is unlikely to blink first, as is Dalmiya. In a no-win situation, he has taken the option that will make him more popular in India by siding with the players. The dispute seems certain to end up in the courts, and ugly as the wrangling is, it will be for the best. The Packer dispute – in which also the courts ruled against cricket's authorities, citing "restraint of trade" – ultimately turned out to be good for cricket. Hopefully, the same will happen here.

Amit Varma is assistant editor of Wisden.com in India.

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