The greatest rivalries in sport – India v Pakistan

India's Arshdeep Singh celebrating the wicket of Pakistan captain Babar Azam during the 2022 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in Australia. Photo / Photosport

The Alternative Commentary Collective’s Agenda podcast is launching four special episodes under the “Versus” banner in which they examine some of the greatest ever sporting rivalries. This week we travel to the subcontinent to examine the most intense cricket rivalry on the planet. The ACC’s series is powered by Bonds Chaffe Off Undies.

Week one: Auckland vs Canterbury and the rugby rivalry that defined the 1980s

When India meet Pakistan in cricket it is more than a match. It is a happening — a happening defined by shared history, by partition, by religion, border disputes, famine, assassination, tragedy, geopolitics, terrorism, nuclear threats and, of course, a fervour for the game of cricket that is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

The Ashes might have more history and a dinky little trophy, but nobody is rioting on the streets of Wagga Wagga or Wiveliscombe when their team loses.

The story of cricket between Pakistan and India is the story of these two mighty nations writ large. From hopelessly deadlocked test series, to era-defining World Cup clashes, the rivalry has had it all and sometimes even a bit more.

Wrote Peter Oborne in the brilliant Wounded Tiger - A History of Cricket in Pakistan: “It was becoming evident that tests between Pakistan and India had developed a unique sensibility. Those who were normal became slightly mad. Those who were already troubled were temporarily blinded with a kind of insanity.”

One of the curiosities of this rivalry is that it is comparatively new. The Roses Match between Lancashire and Yorkshire was first played in 1855; India and Pakistan did not meet until close to 100 years later. There was a good reason for that: Pakistan did not exist.

It is, in fact, the difficult birth of that country that gives the rivalry such piquancy.

The history of British Raj — modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar — is long and complicated, but the critical element for this rivalry is that when India gained independence from Great Britain in 1947, Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin and last viceroy of India, determined that the formation of a separate Muslim state was the most expedient way to avoid civil war.

Known forever as ‘Partition’, crude lines were drawn on a map and Pakistan was born creating, in the stroke of a pen, millions upon millions of religious refugees. The violence was extraordinary as many of these refugees attempted to migrate, with at least one million deaths reported.

From the chaos emerged two distinct countries (actually, three when you consider that East Pakistan fought for and gained independence in 1971, becoming Bangladesh) — sworn enemies who fight over disputed regions and worship different prophets, yet remain so culturally connected.

Nowhere is that cultural connection more apparent than in cricket.

By at least one account, cricket was first played at Cambay (near Ahmedabad) in 1721. It became a beguiling way for East India Company employees to befriend wary locals. Cricket clubs sprang up in all the major centres. In India it is often said that the two biggest nation-builders were the railways and cricket.

Pakistan was admitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference (as the ICC was then known) in 1952 and a tour to India was scheduled for that year. The squad would include four who had previously played for India including captain Abdul Kardar, the Father of Pakistan Cricket.

In the fragile post-Partition days, cricket was seen as both a potential peacemaker and a way for each side of the divide to demonstrate their sporting superiority. Pretty soon it became evident that the latter part of that equation was most pressing.

That first tour would set the template for much of what was to follow over the next 30 years of intermittent contact. The first two tests were split, with the crowd in Lucknow making it very clear what they thought about the local side losing to the upstarts. India would save face by winning the next test… and that would be the last positive result either way in this fixture for 26 years.

Yes, you read that right.

Both teams became so terrified of losing the rivalry became infamous for “petrifyingly dull” cricket as Oborne described it. Diplomatic incidents, such as Kardar offending the Indian delegation during the after-match formalities in 1952, were more spicy than any of the on-field action. Between that third test of the inaugural series in India and the second test at Lahore on India’s 1978 tour to Pakistan, they squared off in 13 tests and drew them all. There was a little flurry of results following that, including a 3-0 Pakistan win when India toured for a six-test series in 1982-83, but there followed another dry patch, with just one positive result in the next 17, which also included a cancelled test in 1984 following the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.

In December, 2007, Pakistan and India met at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. India batted first and posted 626 on the shoulders of Sourav Ganguly’s 239. Pakistan replied with 537, Misbah-ul-Haq starring with an unbeaten 133. The match petered out to an inevitable draw.

And that was all she wrote.

In November of the following year, 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist militant organisation, carried out 12 shooting and bombing attacks over four days across iconic locations in Mumbai, including the Taj Hotel and Leopold Cafe, killing 166 innocents. In 2009, a bus carrying the Sri Lankan team in Lahore was attacked, with six police and two civilians killed. India has refused to entertain the idea of touring Pakistan since (a stance graphically illustrated during this year’s ICC Champions Trophy ostensibly hosted by Pakistan, although India played all their games, including the final, in Dubai), and test cricket between the two has ceased.

All told, the most heated rivalry in cricket has seen just 59 tests in the 78 years of Pakistan’s existence. Unless the cricket gods contrive to pit them in a World Test Championship final on neutral soil, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where they play each other again anytime soon in the red-ball format.

This was a rivalry that needed limited overs cricket like a fire needs oxygen. It was one-dayers that reignited the rivalry and T20 cricket that reshaped it for the next generations.

The modern rivalry can be telescoped into two epic matches.

The initial flashpoint was Sharjah, 1986, in the little-remembered, unless you’re a Pakistani, Austral-Asia Cup. These types of tournaments in Sharjah would later become a hotbed of match-fixing, but in the early days the Emirate was described by the New Indian Express as cricket’s “El Dorado”. Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bukhatir, an Arab schooled in Pakistan, fell in love with the game and saw an opportunity to build events around the Indo-Pak rivalry.

In this tournament they met in the final in front of a packed house of mostly expat labourers in the oil industry. India scored 245, considered a big total in those days, with their top three of Kris Srikkanth, Sunil Gavaskar and Dilip Vengsarkar all passing 50. The Pakistan chase faltered badly, and when their talisman Imran Khan was the sixth man out at 209 with the overs fast ticking away, the game was as good as gone.

The bloke at the other end, however, had other ideas. Javed Miandad, the moustachioed and self-styled street fighter from Karachi, had an eye for drama. Somehow he conjured up a century and found himself on strike with four needed to win off the final Chetan Sharma delivery. Sharma went for the yorker and instead dealt a knee-high full toss that Miandad put into the stands. Cue, mayhem.

When Miandad is asked to recall the match, which is often (it was the subject of a documentary in Pakistan), he makes no attempt to understate his genius.

“I always prayed that I would do something big. I used to tell myself, even if I die in the field, I don’t care. It’s like a soldier dying on duty. It is shahadat (martyrdom). That innings was like a gift to me. I didn’t play cricket like that, ever. That match, it was like a film. When I dream, it was like a film whose story has been written and now the film is being made… This is a gift. To describe it is impossible. This was a gift from God.”

Pakistan fans during the 2022 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup between India and Pakistan. Photo / Photosport

Pakistanis describe this match as the starting point of their dominance that would end with the World Cup title in 1992, a title that should have ended in the semifinals when New Zealand dominated for all but the final 15 of the 100 overs, when a young Inzamam-ul-Haq combined with that man again, Miandad, to break the hearts of the home team.

If Sharjah was important for Pakistan, then another clash between the two reshaped the entire sport. The stage was The Wanderers, Johannesburg, and the occasion was the final of the inaugural World T20 — The Match That Changed Cricket Forever. To that point, T20’s place in cricket’s portfolio was unclear. In particular India, who, with a burgeoning, TV-buying middle class were rapidly emerging as the game’s financial powerhouse, seemed nonplussed by the format.

On this day, however, the country was gripped as they successfully defended a middling 157. With six runs needed off four balls and just one wicket left, Pakistan’s Misbah attempted a scoop, the catch was taken and the touchpaper was lit. Unlike Miandad’s hyperbole following Sharjah, the impact of this final is impossible to overstate.

Within a year, Brendon McCullum was electrifying the Bangalore crowd with 158 not out in the inaugural Indian Premier League match and cricket has never been the same since.

It has also changed the dynamics of the rivalry.

Indian cricket’s board of control, the BCCI, has no financial imperative to play Pakistan. It owns the IPL, which in less than 20 years has established itself as one of the world’s richest sports leagues. The ICC, the global game’s governing body, on the other hand needs the rivalry to help sell the media and sponsorship packages to their showpiece tournaments (about 80% of the ICC’s revenue comes from the Indian market), because advertisers love nothing better than the prospect of hundreds of millions of eyeballs fixed on them when these two nations meet.

To an extent, the rivalry has been taken outside the continent. The South Asian diaspora fuels it. One report stated there were two million applications for 17,000 available tickets to a World T20 clash between the two teams in Long Island last year.

Where once there was a dark side to it, whether it was corruption or outbreaks of violence following defeats, nowadays the scarcity means it is usually a good-natured celebration of the sport. This is of course still a political element that hangs over every exchange between those countries, but if anything cricket has become a way to celebrate their shared culture, rather than an exacerbation of their differences.

It’s still a happening though, the biggest, most valuable happening in cricket.

– Words by Dylan Cleaver