A decade without India-Pakistan Test tour: How players and cricket fans are the biggest losers
Matches between the two countries have made stars out of players, but also mortals out of heroes.
If you are a Test cricket team from the Indian subcontinent, it’s not often you go to the cool climes of England for a tour and end up winning the first Test with the kind of dominance Pakistan displayed at Lord’s last fortnight. Even weak English Test teams, have always proved a handful for teams from the Indian subcontinent.
Pakistan is a team that has had the United Arab Emirates as its “home” venue for nearly a decade. Its players have no lucrative Indian Premier League contracts. Some of them are part of the lesser known Twenty20 franchises around the world. Only a handful of them have had county cricket experience. And yet, over the past five years, this team has performed exceedingly well on big-ticket tours and major coloured clothing white-ball cricketing tournaments.
Their Champions Trophy victory in England and Wales almost exactly one year ago, outclassing a strong England team in the semi-final and crushing India in the finals after having begun the tournament poorly and peaking gradually, had all the elements of the Imran Khan-led win in 1992, when Pakistan was almost out of the tournament midway through it. How does one explain such achievement and even randomness?
Indeed, over the course of the series in England, they went on to lose the second Test at Leeds badly, once more proving their mind-boggling inconsistency. With all due respect and empathy to their supporters, the unpredictability and the drama Pakistan’s cricket teams create are perhaps the reason they are the cricket spectator’s delight: No series which they play against any team is ever boring.
The two Test performances they gave against England were not unlike the two One Day International performances they gave against India in the Champions Trophy last year: Listless and hopeless in the round game and ineffably brilliant in the final. Such sporting schizophrenia is not unlike the likes of a South African cricket team that has a sad and regular history of “choking” in short-format cricket. Nonetheless, such whimsicality is part of the thrill palette of the sport and goes into the making of the popularity of a sport as an event, as theatre.
In the context of world Test cricket then, the value of team rivalry, team psyche and competitive history is vital in establishing value to the sport. For example, look at the unending, often meaningless, and context-less number of times Sri Lanka and India have played one another in the last ten years, across all formats of the game.
Barring an occasional thriller, these games have caused much ennui. In contrast, the times Pakistan and India have gone toe-to-toe in the same time period (across formats) have been few, but some of those games have been riveting and tight. The glut of games between Sri Lanka and India only attest to the dampening of intensity between unevenly matched teams at the moment.
Which is why, given all these reasons, it’s extremely sad (and saddening) to see that over a decade has passed since India and Pakistan have played a full bilateral Test series. A decade without red-ball white clothing cricket in its toughest form among the games’ greatest rivals (with all due respect to the Ashes and Australia-South Africa), cannot but be a substantial loss to the sport.
A whole generation of cricketers across both countries has grown up without the intensity and madness of a full Indo-Pak series. In the early part of their careers, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma did well in the odd games they played against Pakistan, and their careers turned a curve. (Remember an already-on-the-ascent Kohli’s century chasing against Pakistan in the Asia Cup at Dhaka in 2012 or Rohit Sharma’s half century in a round game in Karachi against Pakistan in the Asia Cup way back in 2008 when India last visited Pakistan).
Last year’s two Indo-Pak ODI games at the Champions Trophy were after they last met in the format at the ODI World Cup in 2015 at the Adelaide Oval in Australia. They also played in a tame game at the Asia Cup T20 in 2016 that India won. In effect, they only meet in multi-team tournaments and this means they don’t play each other often at all. (They meet like extended family members who only see each other when there is a family wedding or engagement.)
Even in those rare games, they have been able to produce new heroes: Wahab Riaz at the ODI World Cup semi-final in 2011; Kohli (already a star) at Dhaka in 2012, Fakhar Zaman at the Champions Trophy final in 2017. These games have also made mortals out of heroes, like Virat Kohli in the same Champions trophy final.
That two of the finest and most talented cricket sides in the world haven’t played one another properly in a full decade is a crying shame. The world of sport is all the poorer for it.