No publicity is bad publicity.
If that’s true, the no-handshake fracas between India and Pakistan at the Asia Cup has been great for the tournament where the quality of the cricket on display hasn’t been anything to write home about. People have at least found something to talk about.
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan have had their moments in international cricket – some more than others – but it’s evident that the Asia Cup is little more than an excuse to have as many fixtures as possible between the two hostile neighbours, who have long ceased to play any bilateral series between them.
Before every India-Pakistan match, there is this manufactured drama over whether the game should go ahead or not. It became tiresome long ago. It prompted the International Cricket Council (ICC) to rule that the two teams will not travel to each other’s countries to play, at least for the next few years.
Common sense would dictate that one way to deal with this predicament would be to ensure that India and Pakistan are not drawn against each other unless necessitated by the vagaries of the draw. But sometimes, commerce and broadcasters’ interests come in the way of common sense. So, the two teams have to come face to face in every multilateral tournament, and may do so as many as three times – on successive Sundays – at the Asia Cup.
This is despite the fact that the so-called rivalry has been monotonous and one-sided over the last several years. Last Sunday’s game in Dubai made less news for what took place during the match than the handshakes that never took place.
Coming to the specific issues before that game, there was a lot of feeling in India against the match taking place at all, in light of the Pahalgam terror attack and the subsequent Operation Sindoor. A Legends game between players of the two countries was also cancelled after the Indian side refused to take the field.
Players left to themselves
But when the Indian government and the cricket board decided to go ahead with the games, in the name of honouring the Olympic Charter and having no option for the sake of India’s bid for the 2036 Olympic Games, it was akin to throwing the players under the bus. Especially as social media chatter had stirred the pot further.
The players had to be seen to be taking a stand. Merely winning the match was never going to be enough, as the gulf in class between the two teams has been quite evident of late. Hence, the decision to not shake hands, and dedicate the win to the Pahalgam victims, their families and the Indian armed forces.
This decision about the handshake – a sporting convention and not a rule – could have been communicated beforehand to all concerned parties, the Pakistan team and the match officials, and not kept as a last-minute surprise. In the bigger scheme of things, it hardly achieved anything other than rubbing salt into the opposition’s wounds. Maybe that was the objective from the start.
But when Pakistan brought up the nebulous Spirit of Cricket into the debate, match referee Andy Pycroft and the venue manager became collateral damage.
What followed was a game of brinkmanship with the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) asking for Pycroft’s removal, and the ICC – headed by JAY Shah, the son of the Indian home minister – snubbing them. But when talk veered towards a possible boycott and the resultant loss of revenue due to peeved broadcasters, there emerged an urgent need to find a solution acceptable to both parties.
During the shenanigans, the notion repeatedly touted was that sport should be kept away from politics. With national teams facing each other under their respective national flags, with national anthems being played before matches, it automatically becomes a political event. ‘We play for the country,’ players are known to say, blurring the lines between sport and politics further. At the end of the game, it’s said ‘India won’ or ‘India lost’, leaving no one in doubt. Top posts in the various cricket boards – at least in the subcontinent – are invariably political appointments.
No big deal
Hence, it’s a bit rich on PCB’s part to be crying that sports and politics should not be mixed. Their chairman happens to be Mohsin Naqvi, the country’s interior minister, and his political instincts should have warned him that a cricket match with India just four months after the two countries went to a brief war couldn’t be business as usual.
Not shaking hands – truth be told – isn’t such a big deal. Ukrainian athletes, in various sports, refuse to shake hands with Russian and Belarusian opponents over the ongoing conflict, but it has done little to bring peace to the region.
Naqvi also heads the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) which organises the Asia Cup, and pulling his own team out of his own tournament would have been akin to cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face.
So what can we expect when the two teams enter the field today for the second instalment of the ‘rivalry’?
After the refusal to shake hands last Sunday, Indians are unlikely to change their stance. Pakistan, after making a big deal of a non-event, will be keen to make a statement of their own. Their players would be better advised to do so by reversing the result from a week ago, but that would require them to raise their game by a couple of notches and India to have a less than perfect day. In the first game, the Pakistani players seemed like deer in the headlights, as if they themselves didn’t believe that they had a fighting chance against the T20 World Champions.
Before a ball was bowled, the Asia Cup was said to be a significant preparatory tournament heading towards next year’s T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka. All that is virtually missing from the current news cycle, as is the performance of the other teams in fray in the UAE. Such is the power and impact of a hand that was never offered.