Cricket abhorrence

The ICC's decision to confirm the hybrid model for the 2025 Men's Champions Trophy.

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Partisanship has once again triumphed over sportsmanship. India's myopic attitude of looking at sports through the jaundiced prism of hate and political polarisation has undermined the spirit of the gentleman's game, cricket. The ICC's decision to appease New Delhi by confirming the upcoming Men's Champions Trophy 2025 on a hybrid model is a great setback to the lovers of sports, who wanted to see India play in Pakistan and vice versa. It has simply reaffirmed that rules of the game can be bent back and forth as a template of power politics.

While India has nursed paranoid reasons not to engage with Pakistan in any of the interactions from sports to culture, the ICC – as a global cricket-governing impartial body - should have prevailed over it and made it fall in the official line of decorum. The fact that the ICC for reasons of better fortune and clout got on its knees to opt for the hybrid model is unfortunate and casts a stigma of capitulation.

Pakistan, on its part, was well within its rights to not only host the tournament but also to reap the benefits of gainful commercialism. But India with its hegemonic intentions in the region also looks at sports through the same lens. Yet, Pakistan Cricket Board exhibited not only astuteness and courage as it refused to give in for the tournament scheduled to kick off on its soil on February 19, it also made other sporting teams register that it's politics for India at the end of the day. The ICC's new nomenclature to hold all its tournaments to be hosted by India over the next two years on hybrid pattern comes as a slap for the abhorrent BCCI, something it had asked for.

The question is what stops India from not playing in Pakistan? Isn't it a member of international sports, and a sovereign state? Is law and order only Pakistan's issue and not of any other country in the world? The point is that India prefers domestic political point-scoring even over its image abroad, and the ICC and the likes by succumbing to it go on to cement a regime of fascism.