Around the time global cricket’s balance of power was shifting from Lord’s to Eden Gardens with India agog with excitement about the 1987-8 World Cup it would host with Pakistan, something which Brian Glanville wrote popped up in an article which could be worth going back to now as the two Asian nations appear at odds with one another.

Glanville has written very little cricket, football and boxing having hardly allowed him a break, but the quoted paragraph has multi-purpose applicability. “It was George Orwell,” he says, “who once wrote, realistically, that international sport is an unfailing cause of ill will and the evidence is distressingly plentiful. But the fact is, chauvinism aside, modern sport was something initially invented by the British, for the British; that is to say for a kind of people who held in common a certain temperament and certain implicit attitudes.

Advertisement

These pastimes were called ‘sport’ because that is precisely what they were; it was assumed that they were not a matter of life and death.” Galling as the words may sound to an Asian, Glanville is a Jew from Dublin who doesn’t pound the drum of the Raj. And the Asia Cup kerfuffle shows how a shift in emphasis can wreak havoc. India kept quiet when the tournament was announced for Pakistan to host. It implied a goodish bundle of cash from the commercial deals around the show for the neighbouring country’s cricket board, smarting since long from being out of India’s tour schedules.

Pakistan, assuming India would show up there to the delight of television, bubbled in high hope. Everything seemed tickety-boo. That Jay Shah is the Asian Cricket Council’s chief stirred expectations that the external affairs ministry’s green light could be taken for granted. Then India said no. The Pakistan Cricket Board tried everything it could to ward off a disaster. It said India could play their matches out of Pakistan, calling it a hybrid model. But that fell through, with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh taking India’s side and a demand being voiced for the Asia Cup to be shifted from Pakistan for two reasons: first, a two-host competition will be prohibitively expensive and, secondly, the third team in a cluster which includes the hosts and their arch-rivals would have to move about a lot.

Cricket, of course, isn’t watching every penny it spends and India and Pakistan can be in two different groups to spare another team the rigours of air travel and five-star leisure but the collective, collusive concern now may be to wipe the floor with the No. 1 team in the One-Day International rankings. Pakistan did speak of a tit-for-tat pull-out from the World Cup India would host. To that extent, marginalising intrigues and, perhaps, a little bit of jiggery-pokery was a dare: can the PCB act up to its threat? Probably not, because it’s always about money, “a matter of life and death,” as