Foreign Correspondence #4

Reports from cricket's front and rear lines

The Indo Pak Cricket War Moves to the Women’s World Cup

Nashra Sandhu celebrates after the match against South Africa

The India-Pakistan conflict takes to the cricket field again this Sunday, with the front line moving from the Asia Cup to the ICC Women’s World Cup and little indication things will be much different.

Sushant Singh’s analysis of the unseemly scenes during the men’s tournament, published by Cricket Et Al during the week, was the best thing I’ve read on the situation. The lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale University and consulting editor with The Caravan magazine bemoaned the “subordination of sport to political propaganda”.

Gideon and I were both in Ahmedabad in 2023 when the Indian PM, Narendra Modi, hijacked a Test match for his political purposes and took the Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, along for the ride. Sushant wonders if Albo now understands how ill-advised it was to be Modi’s passenger on the day.

When cricket becomes a war metaphor, when sporting victories are treated as military triumphs, humanity itself suffers. Sport’s power lies in its ability to transcend political divisions, to create shared joy across artificial boundaries. Modi’s tweet destroyed that possibility, turning cricket into another weapon in his ethno-nationalist arsenal. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should now understand what he participated in when he rode a chariot with Modi around a stadium bearing the Indian leader’s name. That wasn’t innocent cricket diplomacy. It was legitimising authoritarian nationalism on the world stage.

Mike Atherton was so unimpressed by the scenes during the Asia Cup he’s suggested in The Times that it is time the ICC stopped its practice of pitting the two sides against each other at every event.

If cricket was once the vehicle for diplomacy, it is now, clearly, a proxy for broader tensions and for propaganda. There is little justification, in any case, for a serious sport to arrange tournament fixtures to suit its economic needs and now that the rivalry is being exploited in other ways, there is even less justification for it. For the next broadcast rights cycle, the fixture draw before ICC events should be transparent and if the two teams do not meet every time, so be it.