When Yuvraj Singh, the Indian all-rounder with balls and bravado, ice-cold chaser and hot-flush finisher, announced his retirement last week, there was a flood of love on social media. Not only from his brothers in blue, Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli, but his cousins the other side of the great partition: Shoaib Malik and Shoaib Akhtar.
Yuvraj, whose career included India’s world T20 win in 2007 and their 2011 World Cup victory, as well as a cancer diagnosis and a subsequent recovery, made all of his three Test centuries against Pakistan, one in Lahore, one in Karachi and one on home soil in Bengaluru. And of his 304 one-day games, 38 were against them, 12 actually in Pakistan.
As contrast, Virat Kohli has never played a Test against Pakistan and India’s captain has pulled on his pads for only 13 of his 230 ODIs against them – four of those took place in England, including Sunday’s clash at Old Trafford, but not one in Pakistan.
The terrorist attack against the Sri Lanka team bus 10 years ago kiboshed international cricket in Pakistan until very recently, and when a hands of friendship World XI team toured in 2017 under the leadership of Faf du Plessis for three T20 internationals, seven countries were represented, but not a single Indian was a member of the party.
An unofficial Indian government decree against Test matches between the two nations has kept Kohli from measuring himself against his neighbours in the form of cricket he loves the most – the teams have not met in a Test since December 2007 and India v Pakistan is not part of the Test Championship – whereas hockey and other sports can comfortably carry on across country lines.
In the biggest, brashest tournament of them all – the IPL – bromances have blossomed between individuals as unlikely as Jonny Bairstow and David Warner. The Royal Challengers Bangalore teammates Moeen Ali and Kohli have shared pictures of them on a plane together landing in Mohali – Kohli’s neatly trimmed 2019 uber‑beard comparing nicely with Moeen’s bushy flow. Yet no Pakistan players are allowed anywhere near the auction. Eleven played in IPL edition one in 2008 but the Pakistan government pulled them out of the 2009 auction and they’ve not been since seen.
The unofficial ban – which is weak enough to allow Wasim Akram to have been a bowling coach for Kolkata Knight Riders – has kept Pakistan’s top players in the waiting room. Even if the ban was lifted, what franchise would be prepared to take the risk, could they guarantee protection for players from an extremist with a grudge?
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Super League is developing nicely, but no Indian player has pulled on the gloves. The BCCI likes to keep Indian male players’ powder dry for the IPL, though they have just permitted their female players to play in Australia’s Big Bash. This could be one reason why Yuvraj Singh has retired, so he is free to ply his trade around the globe.
This physical distance between the two teams has created an emotional distance too. There is still a shared language, a shared cuisine, a shared culture of sorts, but over the last five years the two sides have disappeared up and down into two different stratospheres.
Whereas once they would hang out together in private at Sufi music concerts, that has slowly slipped away. The players are cordial, but the old ties, the friendship that comes with spending hours and days together during a tour, has gone. A leading Indian commentator suggested it was like “having close neighbours who are nothing like you”.
At the 2017 Champions Trophy, the Pakistan wicketkeeper Sarfaraz Ahmed wanted to get some tips from MS Dhoni but a meeting couldn’t be arranged – not because of any mutual dislike but because life has become too complicated. Once upon a time, they would have just wandered into each others’ dressing rooms.
The India team have become a supernova, world superstars whose fame has grown so large that it is easier for them to live, eat, breathe and play in a bubble – with PlayStations in their rooms, sporting identikit beards and tattoos.
Whereas there used to be more than a handful of Punjabis in the India team, now there are only two – Shikhar Dhawan and Kohli, and Kohli has moved away from his roots, existing on a different plane altogether, a Bollywood-Mumbai life, with the reclusiveness that comes with the super-famous.
As for Pakistan, their mere existence as a team that can on their most golden of days sock it to the best – see their exhilarating defeat of England at Trent Bridge – is a small miracle. They are underfunded, underprepared, without a proper home and doing it all with a wink, a wing and prayer. The haal of Pakistan is as real as it is intangible, but it could probably do with a little more money every now and again.
Perhaps what links the players from the two teams most of all in 2019 is the shared experience that comes from playing a match weighed down with more cultural and political significance than any other game in the world, ready and waiting to be hijacked by those with an agenda. A game watched by more than a billion people worldwide, to a stadium full of passion: a celebration, a rivalry, a pressure, that only 22 people can understand.
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