It is customary when India play Pakistan at cricket to dwell on the astonishing scale and sweep of the spectacle. The usual starting figure of half a billion global television viewers is expected for both teams’ opening Champions Trophy game on Sunday at Edgbaston. There will, of course, be the usual fascination beyond the sports pages, too, at a group-stage game of a moderately sized competition in a glitzed-up old colonial sport that can still feed out into a wider geopolitical obsession. Perhaps the notion of cricket diplomacy will once again be raised, the idea that playing one another at cricket might somehow act as a balm to an irreconcilably raw neighbourly partition.
In which case everyone involved had better get a shift on. The Kashmir border between these two nations remains one of the most dangerous places in the world, stage for a constant “dirty war”, with the shadow of scattered short-range nuclear weapons always lurking. For all the hands-across-the-boundary-rope noises around Edgbaston, India’s sports minister, Vijay Goel, announced only this week that there would be no return to bilateral relations, declaring that “cricket and terrorism can’t go hand in hand”.
With this in mind, it is easy to forget just how profoundly Pakistan and India have grown apart on a sporting level, too, with a decade of debilitating isolationism on one hand and a hothoused cricketing boom on the other. The English summer will see the 10-year anniversary of the jumping-off point for this, the 2007 World T20 final in Johannesburg, first in a series of events, sporting and otherwise, that have seen the cricket war swing irreversibly one way.
To an extent India’s players have even outgrown the current occasion. The spectaculars tend to come thick and fast in the year-round riches of franchise cricket. A billion sets of eyeballs also tuned in for this season’s IPL, a World Cup that India win every year, and from which Pakistani players and coaches have been excluded since 2008.
Twenty-five years ago Pakistan were one-day world champions and one half of what was then the most lucrative summer staged in England, that febrile 1992 tour that left Imran Khan declaring that no Pakistan team would ever visit England again. A quarter of a century on, Edgbaston will see a meeting between cricket’s new financial power and a shrunken, scattered Pakistan, nomadic, broke and eating off its knees in the scullery.
At which point the screen freezes, wind chimes tinkle and we’re back in September 2007 at The Wanderers. India had come into the first World T20 with little expectation but sailed into the final on an updraft of thrilling off-the-cuff cricket. Still Pakistan seemed to be in charge at the death, nine wickets down but with Misbah ul-Haq leading the chase and needing six runs from the last four balls. At which point Misbah ambled across his stumps and ballooned a horrible standing sweep into the hands of Sreesanth at short fine leg. India erupted. India hasn’t really stopped erupting since. And the rest is (Indian) history.
Cue instant ignition as board, government and corporate sponsors piled in. The India players were given an instant $3m cash bonus (Yuvraj got a quarter of a million dollars for hitting Stuart Broad for six sixes). Joginder Sharma, the bowler as Misbah cranked out that sweep, received $50,000 cash from a local government department. The civil aviation authority handed out years of free flights for all involved. Within four months the first IPL auction had been held. History was falling into place, that gleaming future lining itself up.
From that moment of playing parity in Johannesburg, Pakistan began to head off the other way almost instantly. Bruised by various gambling scandals, cast in shadow by the car bomb outside the New Zealand team hotel in 2002, it was the attack on Sri Lanka’s bus in Lahore in 2009 that signalled the start of Pakistani isolation. The spot-fixing affair of 2010 capped a sense of drift and debauchery within the team itself.
As the captain, Misbah offered stability and grace in the lost years. Pakistan were, briefly, Test cricket’s No1 team last year. The old, mad, damaging individualism has been reined in. But it is hard to avoid the obvious sense of drift. Despite a culture of vibrant, aggressive cricket apparently suited to the new white-ball world, Pakistan instead have been left behind, a skeleton team stuck on the wrong side of history.
There has been brilliance in Younis Khan’s batting and Yasir Shah’s Test-match bowling. But this is, out of necessity, a more pious, mannered, careful Pakistan, without the exoticism, the wildness, the urbane qualities of the years before the domestic ban. They are eighth in the official one-day international rankings and only just made the cut-off for this Champions Trophy. Fielding has been a problem for some time. The batsmen’s strike rates are noticeably down on modern trends, a startling development in itself for the heirs of Javed Miandad, Saeed Anwar and the great all-rounders.
And yet – as ever in a nation that sweats cricket out of every pore – there is still hope. The departure of Misbah and Younis was rightly mourned. Both had moved on from white-ball cricket but the old lions’ passing coincides with a wider sense of pruning back. Only two members of the team that lost to India at the 2015 World Cup are likely to play in Birmingham. Ties with the dreaded Akmals appear to have been severed, Umar Akmal failing a fitness test in Birmingham this month, having previously passed one under the aegis of the renowned fitness fanatic Inzamam-ul-Haq. Shahid Afridi really does seem to have suffered his final silver-bullet retirement, nailed down at last inside his casket.
New talent is emerging. Sadly the bullish Sharjeel Khan is missing, touched by the Pakistan Super League spot-fixing scandal. But Sarfraz Ahmed is both a fine attacking bat and an interesting captain in this format. Shadab Khan is a prodigious leg-spinner who rips the ball and is exactly half as old as his team-mate, the enduring Mohammad Hafeez. In the warm-up against Bangladesh Faheem Ashraf, a seam-bowling all-rounder, spanked 60 from 34 balls to win the game.
Best of all Mohammad Amir, the superstar that might have been, shows signs of rediscovering his swing after working with Azhar Mahmood during the tour of the West Indies. Amir is a walking, breathing metaphor for Pakistan’s state of suspended animation, the most prodigious talent in cricket in 2010, brought low by his own weakness, but a bowler who has still played only 32 ODIs, eight years after his debut.
There could be no better time to rediscover not just Amir’s own world-class nip but that wider sense of Pakistan-issue aggression, the verve and skill that is so suited to modern white-ball cricket, but which has for the last decade been left to wither a little in the shadow of an all-conquering neighbour.
