Someone bring back the partisan passion, combustible energy in India-Pakistan cricketing encounters please. The zing is long gone. As both sides face off in the Champions Trophy on Sunday, the excitement quotient is pretty low. Pakistan has slid a lot, India has leaped from strength to strength. Pakistan has stopped producing greats of the game, India has an assembly line of them. The former has moved closer to Bangladesh, the latter to Australia. The gap is just too wide now to evoke memories of a great subcontinental rivalry.
Shaheen Shah Afridi is no Wasim Akram, Naseem Shah is no Waqar Younis and Haris Rauf is no Shoaib Akhtar. Babar Azam and the rest in the batting order are not comparable to Younis Khan or Inzamam-ul-Haq. We are not going back to the generation of Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Shoaib Malik, Saeed Anwar or Abdul Qadir. That will be too far away from our young readers. Pakistan, inconsistent always, had the ability to torment the best of teams on their day. With the potential at their command, they were never taken lightly by even the strongest of opponents.That is hardly the case now.
That kills the joy of a clash between the sides.
What’s a match between India and Pakistan match if it’s not dense with tension, full of nervous anxiety and that additional dash of competitive energy? To bring in the cliché, with so much emotion invested it is not simply cricket, it’s war. It’s war of the primitive kind, announced by loud drum beats of nationalist pride, the cacophony of partisan passion and driven by the sole motive to decimate and humiliate the enemy.
The troubled history between the sub-continental neighbours spiced up every cricketing contest and turned into an event worth waiting for. For people on both sides of the fence the result was more than just winning or losing a match; it was about affirmation of national strength and confirmation of superiority over the other. Frequent matches meant the cycle of revenge and redemption moved faster, every match became a grudge match. The cast of characters in terms of players changed, but the passion driving India-Pakistan matches never waned. The matches were never between two teams, those were between two nations.
The older generations were fortunate to experience the energy- and anticipation-laden atmospherics in an India-Pakistan match, be it in Lahore or Eden Gardens. Without that energy India-Pak matches are nothing. You watch these with no sense of expectation. And the celebration or sense of foreboding with each twist in the match is never the same. You watch the proceedings with certain disinterest and don’t put your emotions behind the team.
If Pakistan defeats India it would be termed an upset. That says it all.
(By arrangement with Perspective Bytes)
