Power has swung in India’s favour as 2015 World Cup plays host to cricket’s great rivalry

Osman Samiuddin looks at the fiercest rivalry in cricket ahead of their next instalment at the 2015 Cricket World Cup.

India, pictured, will play Pakistan in their first game of the 2015 Cricket World Cup on Saturday. Gareth Copley / Getty

I laughed when I saw the Indian broadcaster promo for the India-Pakistan game. For those who may have missed it, Google it. Here is a brief recap in any case:

Pakistani boy, on day of first World Cup match with India, in Sydney in 1992, gets ready to celebrate a win with fireworks.

Pakistan lose, boy despondent, stashes unused fireworks away. Repeat for every World Cup meeting since, with boy growing into man, into husband and father and the fireworks remaining unlit.

It ends with Mohali 2011, the protagonist asking “Kab phorenge?”, a smart catchphrase with dual effect: when will we blow our firecrackers, when will we blow India away?

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What is most appealing is that the promo gives the rivalry a lightness it has rarely had. It has somehow made a deeply complex, troubling contest less fraught, even if only fleetingly.

It is better for nations to poke fun at each other rather than missiles. If only, like Australia and England, advertising jousts were the furthest the rivalry between these two extended.

Some cricketing education can be gleaned as well. The brief video match clips the boy is shown watching are: Javed Miandad bowled by Javagal Srinath in Sydney; Aamer Sohail bowled by Venkatesh Prasad in Bangalore; Wasim Akram caught by Anil Kumble off Prasad at Old Trafford; and Indian fielders walking off in triumph in Mohali.

From those images emerges one significant and contrary truth. It is not that India have won every World Cup encounter between the sides no matter how strong or weak the teams have been, or what their form has been, it is that all but one of India’s wins has emerged from an inverted logic, reversing the traditional strengths that have defined both countries.

The separate stories of India and Pakistan, and the shared one of matches between them, is of the former’s batting and the latter’s bowling.

Yet India have won all those World Cup encounters, except 2003 at Centurion, because of their bowling, and that to Pakistanis – at a point below the overarching level for which any defeat to India is galling – is the most galling thing of all.

To have Venkatesh Prasad taking all these wickets – the man who is the unacknowledged punchline to all Pakistani jokes about Indian fast bowling, who is the exact antithesis of all Pakistani fast bowling – is some burn.

Those clips also tell another, bigger story. When Miandad was bowled, or Sohail, they were hurtful pricks to the great balloon of ego and bluster on which Pakistan cricket had ridden for years and years over India.

Pakistan’s cricketers held a peculiar fascination for many Indians – their bravado and chutzpah, their abrasiveness, the anti-establishment ways and the outrageous skill.

Moreover, in Mushtaq Mohammad, Pakistan had its own Sourav Ganguly moment more than two decades before India. They were, in other words, ahead of the curve.

The result was that Pakistan’s balloon slowly deflated, which had the effect of inflating India, so that, by the time Mohali came round, the existing order had been overturned.

Now it is India riding high over Pakistan – the IPL, Bollywood, its cricketers. Sometimes you look at Virat Kohli and wonder whether all the bluster that hissed out of Pakistan did not blow exclusively into his wiry body.

But look at the others: Ravi Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina, Shikhar Dhawan and Ravinder Jadeja. These are all types that Pakistan can identify with deeply.

Leading them is MS Dhoni, who for all his faults, lives in his own world, aloof and unknowable, as Imran Khan once did, except with the connectedness of Miandad.

In his delicate calculations to the end of chases, Dhoni is more Miandad than any Pakistani batsman.

This is the new equation, a Pakistan not weakened so much as meekened. That probably riles them more than anything, that this India are the old Pakistan.

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