Playing to the Gallery

Pride 1-0 Civility

Some weeks ago, Jarrod Kimber - journalist, YouTuber, podcaster, a man for all digital seasons - posted a video titled “India is winning the T20 space race.” The Indian men’s team have reached the moon, he said, while the others are wondering if it’s made of cheese.

Since New Year's Day, 2023, India have won 44 out of 57 T20 matches. At the 2024 World Cup, they won every game. In a format designed for chaos, where momentum shifts with the wind and the difference between victory and defeat can be one perfect yorker, such a record is absurd. It should tell you something that when Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma walked away, the mood wasn’t as much loss as it was excitement about a new, post-IPL generation, and the ceilings they could break.

This past week, India played three T20 matches at the Asia Cup. In the first match, they dismantled UAE for 57. In the second, they had Pakistan reeling at 64-6, before they punched and clawed their way to 127. Against this Indian batting lineup, blessed with power, technique, and depth, that score was never going to trigger sweat. Either way, Abhishek Sharma, Shubman Gill, and Suryakumar Yadav made light work of it.

With 3 runs to win and an eternity left to get them in, Surya heaved Sufiyan Muqeem for a six, removed his helmet, and walked off the turf - all in one fluid motion. The rest of the India squad, sat in the dressing room, shook hands amongst themselves and closed the door behind their captain. It was almost as if they were playing against a virtual opponent. Nevermind shaking hands, the Indian team didn’t even acknowledge their Pakistani counterparts once the game was formally over.

A handshake is more than ritual or protocol. It’s the gesture that says: for three hours we tried to defeat each other, and now we acknowledge the effort. It separates sport, with all its seriousness, from war - this ability to inflict defeat without demanding blood. It suffixes an evening of tension with a final note of grace.

In the post-match interviews, Suryakumar Yadav was keen to stress that some things are beyond cricket, that when those things involve bullets and blood, grace loses its meaning. This victory was dedicated to the victims of Pahalgam and the bravehearts who keep the country safe, he said. A similar caption went on the social media posts many others from the team uploaded.

This sequence - planned, choreographed - poured permanent ink on the narrative of this match. Kuldeep’s craft and Abhishek’s audacity should’ve been the stories to write essays about. Instead, they have been blurred from vision, pushed to the footnotes.

And there was more.

The Pakistan cricket team, stung and insulted, responded by not showing up at the post-match press conference. One day later, they accused match referee Andy Pycroft of triggering the whole drama, alleging that he had instructed both teams to avoid handshakes. They threatened to abandon their match against UAE unless Pycroft was replaced.

As it turned out, Pycroft was told by the venue manager that the BCCI had communicated to them - with the Indian government’s approval, of course - that Suryakumar Yadav will not be shaking hands with Salman Ali Agha. Pakistan extracted an apology from Pycroft, filmed it in a restricted area, and now face ICC’s ire for their misstep.

I wonder if cricket could ever feel less cricket than this.

For decades, an India vs Pakistan game gets hyped up as this gladiatorial battle that makes the world stop. Mike Marqusee saw the hysteria during the 1996 World Cup. In the lead-up to the quarter-final in Bangalore, he noted, “Newspapers in both countries spared no hyperbole in building up the game. It was the ‘match of the decade’, ‘the real final’, ‘a high-voltage contest’, ‘battle royal’, ‘an epic war around the corner’, ‘the mother of all cricket battles.’”

I’ll admit, there was once a charm to an India vs Pakistan game. While my generation was growing up, India and Pakistan did not play very often. Between 1989 and 1996, there was no bilateral cricket. They tried. In 1991, Shiv Sena workers vandalised the pitch at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium weeks before Pakistan’s tour of India. Two subsequent tours were also cancelled in 1993 and 1994. When Pakistan finally came over in 1999, for a full spring of cricket, the Shiv Sena workers gathered once more for a cardio workout, this time vandalising the Ferozeshah Kotla pitch in Delhi, trying to force another cancellation. Thankfully, the tour went through. It took five more years for India to make the trip across the border. In between, there were tensely-fought World Cup games, a few years of white-clothed ODI cricket in Toronto, and the occasional meeting at Sharjah or the Asia Cup.

So when the rare game came along, it was something to clear your schedule for. I remember evenings where the game brought with it friends, biryani, and kebabs. Others, once I was a bit older, where kebabs were washed down with beer. These rooms were dense with tension, because you desperately wanted to beat the noisy neighbours, but there was an innate celebration of cricket. When Inzamam scored that century in Karachi, threatening to take a game Pakistan had no business winning, there was an echo of “he’s too good”.

It was a different time, and I don’t say that with the sepia tint of nostalgia for its own sake. It was genuinely a different world to what we inhabit today. Wasim Akram brought a gift for Sachin Tendulkar’s new baby; Chennai gave Akram’s Pakistan a standing ovation after a heartbreaking loss. India played Pakistan in a World Cup game a month after the Kargil War, and not a single broadcaster or commentator reached for the war drum. There was decency, on the field and in the narration of the sport.

Happier times. Photo credit: CricTracker

Moreover, both teams were filled to the brim with game-changing talent. Akram, Tendulkar, Waqar, Kumble, Saqlain, Dravid, Anwar, Ganguly, Inzamam, Sehwag, Shoaib - these are just a short selection from a longlist of superstars. The uncertainty and jeopardy made the games irresistible. Often, the match would remain on a knife’s edge even after three quarters of its way through.

It was a unique rivalry in cricket, maybe in all of sport. No two superpowers share borders, language, music, and a history of scars and bloodshed. No rivalry has such a heritage of competition and gunpowder. Even at its most sublime, India vs Pakistan could never exist in a bubble as a spectacular sporting contest.

It didn’t take long for the suits to grasp the financial worth of that tension. The numbers verified what they always knew - this one match was pulling in more money and viewership than entire tournaments. So, sometime in 2007, the ICC signed off on a genius plan: India and Pakistan must play each other at World Cups and all other major tournaments. Groupings, draws be damned; just put them in the same pool, get them to meet on a weekend, and hear the air go kaching! The brazenness was unprecedented. In seventy years of football World Cups, no one, not even Brazil vs Argentina had been given that kind of disproportionate privilege.

It started with one tournament, then another, and has now become a ritual. A few years back, India played Pakistan thrice in one Asia Cup. New stages were invented just to get these teams to land up across each other. The knockout thrill of a semi-final was sacrificed for ‘Super Fours’. Somewhere along the way, a good thing began losing its edge.

The remaining fizz was flattened by a Pakistan team slowly becoming a shadow of their old selves. They still produced eye-watering talent - a Junaid Khan here, a Shaheen there, Fakhar, Babar, Shadab - but the system around them perpetually imploded, their board committed to self-destruction. Broadcasters and organisers keep reading from the old script, announcing the arrival of a titanic clash, but everyone knows deep down that these teams are playing different versions of the sport. In the last decade, India have won 14 out of their 18 games against Pakistan, across both the limited over formats. Of course, they don’t play Test cricket, else I wonder if that record would’ve looked even more lopsided.

This Asia Cup followed that script too. Same group, Sunday game, with a high chance of multiple meetings. Except, this isn’t like other tournaments. Not in 2025, when the Indian cricket team is seen as an extension of its national identity, when the BCCI holds its meetings at the residence of India’s home minister, and streaming platforms overflow with military content featuring a singular, common antagonist.

Most crucially, this was India’s first multi-nation tournament since the Pahalgam terror attack. In the aftermath, Indian and Pakistani armies had sent jets and missiles towards each other. The Indian army launched multiple operations, some of which wiped out well-known terrorist hideouts on Pakistani soil. The Pakistani Air Force claimed victory in the skies. If it wasn’t technically a war, it wasn’t too far from one either.

India’s digital footsoldiers, perpetually braced to fire at their favourite enemy, joined the battle through boycotts. First, they cancelled flight tickets to Turkey, en masse, because Turkey had lent their support to Pakistan. We are bad students of history. Like Prem Panicker observed here, it was as if Pakistan could order Turkish drones through Swiggy. The trending hashtag on Twitter that week was #BoycottTurkey. I am glad India doesn’t have a population of turkeys.

Then, on popular demand, began the absolute boycott of Pakistan. The Indian government banned all Pakistani content from our airwaves, depriving us of Ali Sethi’s voice and Shoaib Akhtar’s bluster. Neeraj Chopra ran into trouble for including Paris Olympics gold medallist Arshad Nadeem for a javelin meet in Bengaluru - an event scheduled well before those four gunmen walked into the Baisaran Valley. Not only was Neeraj forced to axe Nadeem from the lineup, but he had to prove his patriotism by publishing a statement of ultimate support to the national sentiment.

The prospect of sharing oxygen with anyone wearing Pakistani colours had become intolerable.

Just weeks ago, in the Legends League - where an assortment of ex-cricketers play 20-over cricket to sell nostalgia as a commodity - India reached the semi-final, only to forfeit the game because their opponents were Pakistan. Shikhar Dhawan wouldn’t speak to Pakistani journalists.

The Asia Cup, long scheduled, was next in the crosshairs. When it became clear that India had given their green light, the online temperature started touching a fever pitch. And when the schedule was made public, confirming India’s placement in the same group as Pakistan, that anger boiled over to delirium. News anchors with a deep expertise in testing the sound barrier lost their marbles.

At places, the debate turned personal too. On one Twitter group, members questioned the morality of those who were still choosing to watch the game. How could you? Can’t you forsake one game for the sake of the poor families who lost their children in Pahalgam?

On the days leading up to the Asia Cup game, the cacophony turned into a screech. Former cricketers and film stars were cornered into declarations. Politicians, the coarser the better, eagerly played along. The questions went to just about everyone except those who hold influence within cricket. And a fixture soaked in the grimiest kind of jingoism got a fresh coat of poison.

The match happened, as matches do, because contracts had been signed and advertisements sold. There’s another one this Sunday, September 21st.

Credit: CricketGully

Ah, yes, about the boycott. The same news channels that spent the week manufacturing outrage sold advertising slots at premium rates. Patriotism at 7:30 PM, raking in the dollars at 8. The viewers who swore they wouldn’t watch found ways to keep track of Kuldeep Yadav’s mesmerising spell. We are now a nation that boycotts with one hand while clicking ‘watch now’ with the other.

And what of the cricketers? Twenty-two young men who’d grown up watching Wasim and Sachin were now asked to be soldiers in a war they hadn’t enlisted for. Suryakumar Yadav had to perfect his nationalism. The Pakistani boys were caught between trying to be a half-decent team and nursing their wounded national pride.

That said, the moral question - Should India play Pakistan at all? - doesn’t come with an easy, objectively-true answer. To be honest, your answer will depend on how you see sport’s role in society.

I see sport as a reflection of our best selves. The athletes, already honed to the edge of physical limits, share, in my naive imagination, an unspoken kinship with everyone else who’s reached these heights - regardless of flag or jersey.

In the year 2000, Wasim Akram approached an Indian cricketer he knew well, and said, “Woh jo naya ladka hai na? Usko bhejo mere paas.” That new guy in your team, send him to me. Wasim was near the end of his career, and he saw great promise in young Zaheer Khan. One of the greatest to have held a cricket ball wanted to pass on a few secrets to this 22-year-old kid wearing the rival’s colours. Cricketers from multiple countries have spoken about Virat Kohli’s generosity with bats and time. He’ll share everything he knows without hesitation. At the 2022 Women’s World Cup, the entire Indian team hung out with Pakistan all-rounder Bismah Mahroof and her baby, clicking solo pictures and full-team selfies.

This, for me, is the version of sport worth believing in. Where, even as flares burn at the Derby della Madonnina, Rui Costa and Marco Materazzi can stand shoulder to shoulder, united by the simple, stubborn dignity of sport.

So, yes, I hold my naivete and biases close. I believe that an opportunity for Indians and Pakistanis to share a space cannot be sacrificed to the bonfire of digital media outrage. Such occasions are chances to send rare messages of respect and friendship. To me, it’s the only route to reconciliation.

That said, I recognise the other perspective. After a years of cross-border incursions, after the latest attack on innocent tourists, you have perfectly sound reasons to think India cannot be playing sport with Pakistan. Not now, when the wounds are so fresh. Cricket, we can both agree, is a national symbol in our part of the world. And as long as Pakistan’s military administration refuses to clean up their house, engaging with them in a friendly manner becomes complicated. I get it.

But, whether we see sport as a bridge or battleground, civility need not be another casualty. I think we can shake hands on that, can’t we? You can refuse to mingle with Pakistani players without orchestrating theatrical snubs. You can object to the fixture without turning cricketers into props for your nationalism. You can even boycott, if conscience demands, without demanding everyone else perform their patriotism to your composition.

What happened in Dubai was neither protest nor principle. It was pantomime. The planned non-handshake, the coordinated social media captions, the dressing room door shut with perfect timing - this wasn’t about Pahalgam or its grief. This was about being seen to care in the loudest possible register. It was about playing to a specific, volatile corner of the gallery.