Mumbai : NCP chief Sharad Pawar was on Wednesday re-elected as the President of Mumbai Cricket Association after he trounced Vijay Patil by a margin of 34 votes at the biennial elections held here.
Pawar defeated Patil by 176-142 votes in a straight contest in the highly politicised poll; with that he keeps the reins of the association that he headed for 10 years from 2001-2010.
Pawar’s re-election means a politician remains at the helm of the MCA — an association that has produced more than 60 Test cricketers — for more than two decades, barring a brief period when Ravi Savant became its president following the untimely demise of then MCA chief Vilasrao Deshmukh.
The Pawar-Bal Mahaddalkar panel also captured all the office bearers’ posts, barring the surprise election of Unmesh Khanvilkar as joint secretary from Patil-headed Cricket First Group, along with P V Shetty who retained his post as the second joint secretary. Ravi Sawant was a surprise loser having been the head of the association in the past and was also the former vice-president of the BCCI when N Srinivasan was at the helm. He had contested the joint secretary’s post.
Also elected were former skipper Dilip Vengsarkar as one of the vice-presidents along with another Pawar Mahaddalkar panelist and BJP MLA Ashish Shelar. Two other former Test cricketers, Lalchand Rajput and Abey Kuruvilla, who contested from Patil’s panel, however, bit the dust. Kuruvilla contested for the vice-president’s post while Rajput was vying for the position of joint secy.
