This is a history of men taking sides. India and Pakistan have been playing cricket against each other for more than 50 years, 51 to be exact. The first Test was played at Delhi in October 1952. Half a century is a good round number, favoured by historians, but a deceptive one in this instance; for nearly half this time the two countries have pointedly not played cricket with each other.
After a decade of tense but mainly tedious Test matches (12 of which were drawn), India and Pakistan did not meet for 17 years between 1961 and 1978. Then, after 21 years of normal cricketing relations, India retired to its tent after the World Cup in 1999, refusing to do battle on the cricket pitch with a country that, they thought, covertly sponsored war and bloody militancy across the border in Kashmir. Since then the two countries have played no Tests and no one-day matches on home soil, though they have played each other at the shorter version of the game in the World Cup and there has recently been an announcement that the two countries will resume playing Tests against each other in the spring of 2004.
The reason India-Pakistan matches are different is because they are fuelled by an old-fashioned dispute between sovereign nations over land. The whiff of grapeshot that attends these encounters has a 19th-century smell: blood debts, blood lust and revanchism. Serbia playing Bosnia or Croatia at football might raise feelings that parallel the India-Pakistan encounter. Perhaps one way of grasping the intensity of feeling that informs matches between India and Pakistan is to think of them as Balkan contests on a subcontinental scale. Partition pogroms (conservatively a million dead), wars and a vicious dispute over Kashmir make every match between the countries a way of settling other, bloodier scores.
The way India-Pakistan matches are followed and supported is interesting. No one under the age of 50 in India (and India’s cricket fans are mostly under 50) has first-hand memories of the first period of India-Pakistan cricket between 1952 and 1961. They were too young to have followed those tours and, when they were old enough, there were no India-Pakistan Tests to follow. The Indians and Pakistanis who gather round their television sets now might be familiar with the great names of that time – Kardar, Fazal Mahmood, Hanif Mohammad, Hazare, Manjrekar, Mankad – but those names stir no nostalgia, no childhood images of mornings spent queuing to watch these great men play. The fans who follow India-Pakistan cricket watch it in a state of frenzy, their partisanship unleavened by the affection that memory usually brings.
The matches India and Pakistan played from 1978 onwards, were, thanks to television, transformed into national spectacles. For the first time in the subcontinent’s cricket history millions of people with no interest in cricket but a vested interest in seeing the old enemy humbled by their champions were drawn into watching on black-and-white television sets.
When in 1978-79 the Indian team led by Bishan Bedi was comfortably beaten 2–0 by Mushtaq Mohammad’s Pakistan, it could be properly described as a national humiliation because for the first time there was a nation watching. When Pakistan toured a year later, and Imran Khan did his hamstring early in the second Test, the Indian audience exhaled in relief. Thanks partly to Imran’s limited availability for the rest of the tour, the Indian team won the series and the nation was avenged. Years later during the Calcutta Test in 1998-99, when Tendulkar was run out at the bowler’s end after colliding with the bowler, Shoaib Akhtar, millions of Indians sulked alongside Tendulkar, then watched helplessly as Pakistan went on to win and take the series in front of an empty Eden Gardens, cleared of its rowdy, rioting crowd.
The most traumatic single moment in the history of Indian cricket as registered by its fans, did not occur during some memorable Test match. It was not contained in the great Madras Test of 1998-99 where, despite Tendulkar’s heroic century, India fell 12 runs short; nor was it framed by that earlier defeat in Bangalore in 1986-87 at the hands of Imran’s men, when Sunil Gavaskar fell in the 90s after a great innings on a vicious turner. No; India’s supremely awful moment, seared into every cricket-watching Indian’s eyeballs, was the last-ball six hit by Javed Miandad off Chetan Sharma in 1985-86 when Pakistan needed four to win a tournament, indistinguishable from the dozens of series that Sharjah hosted year after year.
It was the repeated defeats in Sharjah that paved the way for India’s refusal to play Pakistan. Darkly implying that the dice at Sharjah were loaded in favour of the Pakistanis, India stopped playing there and, as relations declined during the 1990s, cricket tours became rarer, increasingly hostage to reasons of state. Thaws in India-Pakistan diplomacy are accompanied by a resumption of cricket relations whereas frostier periods lead to disengagement. This latest restoration of cricket ties again follows a flurry of conciliatory gestures made by the governments of India and Pakistan in order to persuade the world that the other country is the warmongering aggressor, deaf to the needs of peace.
- This was my last review since I cant post 2 review on this topis in
just adding on.
INDIA vs PAKISTAN an honest comparison
test matches results.
Host Tests IND PAK Draw Tie
Total in India 27 5 4 18 0
Total in Pakistan 20 0 5 15 0
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Grand Total 47 5 9 33 0
The records show that India has never won a test match on Pakistani Soil but Pakistan have done it four times and obviously they have a well prompted edge over Indians in this form of cricket.
Now lets check the ODI records of the games played b/w Ind & Pak
Host ODIs IND PAK Tie NR
Total in India 14 4 10 0 0
Total in Pakistan 15 3 10 0 2
Total at neutral 57 23 32 0 2
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Grand Total 86 30 52 0 4
These results show a complete supremacy of pakistan over India in this form of cricket no matter where they played in India or Pakistan or some neutral venue. The only spa where India has outclassed Pakistan is those four world cup games where India has never lost yet. Overall these records sujest that Pakistan is a much better team then Indian and keeping in mind that Pakistan started its cricket almost a decade after India did I think Pakistani Cricket team deserves some real appreciation of their achievement.
What do u think???Do let me know.
With a hope of reformation of cricketing ties b/w the two contries for sake of the game of cricket........... Ali