The Indian cricket board could be in for a tough time for rejecting the controversial 'whereabouts' clause of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), as world's football governing body FIFA also was not granted any exemption from it.

WADA, however, insists that it is important to check the growing menace of doping as cheating athletes can go to any extent to flout rules. Also there are certain doping substances, traces of which cannot be found if not tested within a time frame and athletes take advantage of it. So the offenders can be caught if they are tested out-of-competition and without any prior information

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) can fight on the lines of cricket being a team sport and players have to be treated differently from the individual sport, but compliance to WADA norms is mandatory if cricket has to be part of multi-sport competitions like the Asian Games and Olympics.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has been conducting anti-doping tests at its events since 2002 but became a signatory of WADA in July 2006. The updated WADA code was unanimously approved last year by the ICC board.

The code mandates the establishment of an International Registered Testing Pool (IRTP) of players who are nominated for random testing based on their ICC rankings. Players from this pool have to inform the ICC at the beginning of every quarter of the year, a location and time that they will be available for an hour each day in that quarter for testing.

If the player is changing the schedule, he/she has to update the whereabouts information to the WADA officer online or through SMS.

But more than the privacy, it must be the security that players must be more concerned with.

Dhoni and Tendulkar have received security threats from terrorist organisations and a certain degree of security risk prevails in providing information about whereabouts in advance - though WADA claims that the information is kept strictly confidential.