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| Pitched battle of a different kind | | | Ashok Malik | 2/14/2015 11:25:23 PM |
| With the start of the cricket World Cup, all eyes are on the India-Pakistan match and how the two teams fare as the tournament proceeds. Equally important is the changed geo-political shift among cricket-playing nations
India plays Pakistan in its opening match of the 2015 cricket
World Cup. To be held in Adelaide, the capital of South Aus
tralia, the match has evoked the usual interest that an India-Pakistan game does. Speaking in Delhi in November, the visiting Premier of South Australia said the tickets for the game had been sold out in 12 minutes. Part of the reason, of course, is that the Adelaide ground is a relatively small one - it seats 50,000 spectators - and that Indian and Pakistani expatriate communities in Australia don't get the overdose of sub-continental cricket that their cousins back home experience (or suffer).
More than the people at the ground, it will be the Sunday television audiences in India that cup organizers, sponsors and advertisers will be targeting. It is worth noting that in the first three world cups - 1975, 1979, 1983 and 1987 - India and Pakistan didn't play each other at all. The two teams have met in every subsequent World Cup, other than in 2007, when India got knocked out early. It would appear that organizers deliberately slot the sub-continental match to maximize revenue. Frankly, this has not been the case. At times, this clash has been unavoidable. The 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, for example, saw a league format that had every team playing the others, with the top four making it to the semi-finals. At times, this clash has been inconsequential, as it was in 1999 in England, when India won a pointless encounter but still went home with nothing, and Pakistan still reached the final. In 1992, India defeated Pakistan but Pakistan won the tournament, while India failed to go very far. It was a bit like the 1974 Fifa World Cup: West Germany won but lost an early game, which didn't really matter, to East Germany. Twice, India-Pakistan matches in the World Cup have really counted: In the quarter-final in Bangalore in 1996 and the semi-final in Mohali in 2011. The most pulsating game was perhaps the one in 2003, with Sachin Tendulkar playing a dazzling innings in which he took apart the Pakistani attack, including a rasping square cut (if it could be described as a classic square cut) off Shoaib Akhtar that went for six.
That was a dramatic March day in Centurion, South Africa. Mr Bill Clinton, due to speak at the India Today Conclave in Delhi that evening, was asked to postpone his speech and walk around waiting patiently till the cricket match got over. For a generation of Indian fans, Tendulkar's innings in 2003, and his magical six especially, exorcised the ghost of Javed Miandad's once-in-a-lifetime innings in Sharjah, 1986, in the final of the Australasia Cup, won and lost when a Chetan Sharma full toss was smashed over the boundary. The biggest India-Pakistan match on Australian soil was played on March 10, 1985. It was the final of the World Championship of Cricket, a one-off tournament hosted by the state of Victoria to mark the 150th anniversary of its founding. India and Pakistan had played each other earlier in the tournament, in a group encounter that India won. The final took place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. India didn't just defeat Pakistan, it walked all over it. Kapil Dev bowled a dream yorker to dismiss Qasim Omar. Pakistan was on the ropes, when Miandad and Imran Khan, helped by a dodgy umpiring decision that he admitted was wrong only years later, rescued the team somewhat. India made the winning score easily. So comprehensive was the Indian triumph that a leg spinner, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, bowled the final over of the Pakistani innings. At the time, it seemed an audacious move by a normally conservative Indian captain, Sunil Gavaskar. Thirty years later, it still seems audacious.
The game on March 10, 1985, was reported to have had the largest attendance in Australia for any cricket match not involving the home team. Having said that, memories from the telecast of the final clearly suggest vast open spaces in the sitting area and an MCG that was just about half full, if even that. A banner held up by a group of non-sub-continental spectators read: "Bus Drivers vs Tram Conductors". It was in poor taste. The Indian and Pakistani teams were clearly seen as intruders that had taken over somebody else's party. How times have changed and how the cricket economy has evolved. If the 2015 World Cup final on March 29 were to again feature India and Pakistan (or for that matter India and Anybody), the organisers and hosts would be exultant. The Victorian authorities would be calculating the benefits to the Melbourne tourism and leisure economy. Almost certainly the ground would be packed. Airlines connecting India to Australia would be looking to make a killing. Who knows, even the Indian Prime Minister may decide to fly down in case India makes it to the final. All this would not just be a reflection of the popularity of cricket in India - though, separately and on quite another note, that popularity may have peaked - or of recent growth in the Indian economy. The latter phenomenon has made outbound tourism from India a much sought after commodity in a series of traveller-friendly countries, including Australia, despite the challenges posed by long flight times and the surge in the Australian dollar's value over the past decade. More than cricket and commerce - and certainly both of those matter - the big change between how India and the Indian cricket team were perceived in 1985 (bus drivers or tram conductors, take your pick) and 2015 is how comfortable India and Australia have become with each other. Australian society has been transformed in this period and is much more integrated with Asia than it historically was. Indians and people of Indian origin are no longer odd faces in Australian cities but constitute a sizeable ethnic population: techies in IT facilities, doctors in hospitals, chefs in restaurants big and small and, yes, bus and taxi drivers as well. For the past few years, India has been the biggest contributor of migrants to Australia, supplanting China.
It is so different from the 1950s, when the Indian high commissioner in Canberra, General (later Field Marshal) KM Cariappa, was aghast to find the 'White Australia' policy was welcoming unskilled immigrants from Italy and Germany but turning away even educated residency-seekers from India (and presumably Pakistan). A veteran of World War II, it disturbed Cariappa that Australia was shutting its doors to allied people who had fought alongside its soldiers, even as it admitted migrants from the very countries the Allies had fought. He discussed his concerns with his friend, Field Marshal William Slim, then the Governor-General of Australia. Slim, who had served in the Indian Army and was an alumnus of the Staff College in Quetta, was as disturbed as Cariappa. Yet politics, perceptions of race and the Cold War were against them. On Sunday, the two old soldiers, wherever they are, will no doubt look upon the full house at the India-Pakistan match in Adelaide with satisfaction - and vindication.
( Courtesy@daily pioneer.com) |
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