Stakes sky-high as Asia’s great rivals clash
India and Pakistan players put political issues aside Birmingham community relishing cup encounter
So here we are, then. Again. Ever since the International Cricket Council admitted last year that it habitually doctors draws to ensure India and Pakistan always meet, matches between the two have taken on a certain inevitability: as much a part of the tournament furniture as native drumming, trophy tours and Simon Doull’s excitable commentary.
This is the seventh consecutive ICC event at which they have mysteriously found themselves in the same group, which, if nothing else, proves that even Lady Luck enjoys the smell of money.
Often you will hear India v Pakistan referred to as ‘more than a game’, a term that touches on all sorts of mildly ridiculous motifs: age-old religious feuds, geopolitical sabre-rattling, border incursions, nuclear Armageddon.
None of which, you suspect, will be all that relevant when Shikhar Dhawan nudges Wahab Riaz’s first ball down to fine leg at Edgbaston today, but then in many ways the hyperbole is the point. India v Pakistan is one of those fixtures that people want to mean more than it does.
And yet, in an increasingly saturated international calendar, there is something about it that remains pristine. For regrettable political reasons, India and Pakistan have not met in a Test series for almost a decade, or in a bilateral series of any kind in more than four years. At a pure sporting level, then, the sight of these two continental rivals duking it out – on our turf – still raises the pulse.
This will be the fifth time India and Pakistan have played each other in England – and in Birmingham, where 20 per cent of the population are of Indian or Pakistani descent, there is a strong case for anointing this as the city’s biggest sporting event of the year. It is worth an estimated £5 million to the local economy and is a central plank of the city’s bid to host the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
“Operationally, it’s probably one of the biggest games that we deal with,” says tournament organiser Steve Elworthy. “The focus it gets is pretty incredible. In a city like Birmingham, with its ethnic diversity, it just brings the entire place to life. You can just feel the excitement.
“We always try and look at the demographics of the city, see where the strongholds are. Having said that, you could probably take this game anywhere and sell it out.”
While English cricket administrators have spent decades toiling – largely in vain – to engage this country’s vast Asian diaspora, it turns out that all you need is the star wattage of Virat Kohli, Azhar Ali and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. An estimated 40 per cent of all Champions Trophy tickets have been sold to the British Asian community, and such was the sea of Bangladesh flags at the Kia Oval on Thursday that England could have been forgiven for thinking it was an away game.
“At the opening game, the number of Bangladeshis in the ground, and the noise they made, was incredible,” Elworthy says. “We’ve got Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan in this tournament. It’s a fantastic opportunity to engage the Asian community.”
So while Edgbaston heaves under the weight of a crowd that Warwickshire chief executive Neil Snowball claims they could have sold out six times over, around 8,000 people are expected to gather at the fan park in Victoria Square to watch the game on big screens.
Of course, none of this should be overly surprising. The West Midlands has long been one of the whirring hubs of the British Asian cricket scene, long before the likes of Vikram Solanki and Moeen Ali emerged from its scruffy fields to earn England honours.
The famous Parks League, where Indians and Pakistanis play alongside and against each other every week, has been going for decades. And though the relationship between the two countries is often portrayed as antagonistic, any Parks League cricketer will tell you that the central theme is harmony: cricket as unifying force.
Naturally, security will be heightened at Edgbaston this morning.
This, really, is only common sense. Ever since a 1999 World Cup game at Old Trafford that descended into minor scuffles and a pitch invasion, India v Pakistan is one of those fixtures where the potential for trouble invariably exceeds the reality.
“If you ask a common man in India or Pakistan, ‘Would you like to see the other team visit your country?’, you would get 99 per cent who want to see it,” former Pakistan captain Asif Iqbal told the BBC. “The other one per cent would be the politicians.”
On the field, both sides are – entirely convincingly – treating this like any other fixture. The ongoing absence of Pakistani players from the Indian Premier League is a minor bone of contention between the two countries, but at a personal level the teams are said to get on well. And India’s dominant record over Pakistan in global tournaments – 11 wins out of 14 – has helped to defuse a little of the tension over the years.
“There’s a little bit of hype,” said the Pakistan coach, Mickey Arthur, at Edgbaston yesterday. “But every game in this competition is massive. We can’t think, ‘Oh it’s India, we have to lift ourselves’. We lift ourselves for every game.
“Nothing different, to be honest,” Kohli said. “I know it sounds pretty boring, but this is exactly what we feel as cricketers. In a tournament like this, you can’t pick and choose. We take the same mindset into every game that we play for India.”
And you can bet that when Kohli and Sarfraz Ahmed stroll out for the toss this morning, nuclear arsenals and the Kashmir border dispute will be the last thing on their minds.
Sure, the noise will be deafening, the stakes sky-high, the global audience enormous. But more than sport? No, just sport. And all the more potent for that.