India and Pakistan Do Not Play Cricket Together But Continue to Argue About It, Which Is Also a Kind of Sport

The World’s Greatest Cricket Rivalry That Happens Only in Neutral Venues Under Extraordinary Security Arrangements Continues to Be Extraordinary

Bohiney.com | The London Prat

NEW DELHI / LAHORE, India / Pakistan – India and Pakistan have not played a bilateral cricket series since 2013, a drought that spans more than a decade of one of sport’s most passionate rivalries and that both cricketing boards, their respective governments, and the International Cricket Council have been unable to resolve through any combination of diplomatic effort, commercial incentive, or appeals to the spirit of the game. They do play each other at major tournaments hosted in neutral countries – or in India when Pakistan is permitted to travel, and in countries where India is willing to travel when Pakistan hosts – a set of constraints that produces matches of extraordinary intensity watched by a combined television audience of close to a billion people, during which the two countries are briefly and violently united in mutual passionate attention before returning to not speaking.

The India-Pakistan cricket dynamic is one of the most studied phenomena in sports sociology, because it encapsulates the specific human contradiction of rivals who need each other more than they would prefer to admit. India-Pakistan matches at the ICC Cricket World Cup and T20 World Cup consistently generate the highest global television ratings of any bilateral cricket match, producing revenue that benefits both cricket boards through ICC distributions, creates commercial incentives for stadiums, broadcasters, and advertisers that dwarf those of almost any other cricket fixture, and demonstrates that the appetite for this specific rivalry is not diminished by the political freeze that prevents bilateral series. The rivalry is too commercially and culturally valuable to allow to fully atrophy. It is too politically complicated to be allowed to fully resume. The result is this: managed, occasional, intensely watched encounters in carefully chosen venues that allow both countries to have the cricket without the diplomacy.

The Diplomatic Absurdity

The specific mechanics of India-Pakistan cricket in 2026 require a level of diplomatic choreography that would be excessive for most international activities but that has become normalized for this one. Visa applications for Pakistani players traveling to India for ICC events require government clearance that is reviewed against the bilateral political relationship’s current temperature. Indian players traveling to tournaments hosted in Pakistan require similar clearances, with the additional complexity that India has not sent a full team to Pakistan since 2006. Neutral venues in the United Arab Emirates have served as the compromise location for multiple major tournaments, creating a situation in which two South Asian nations’ most significant cultural export is routinely experienced in the Gulf because the subcontinent cannot agree to host it in a way that both can attend.

The Hindustan Times and Dawn have both covered the cricket diplomacy question with the combination of sports enthusiasm and political realism that the situation requires, noting that there are periodic moments when the possibility of cricket resumption is discussed and that these discussions have consistently produced more discussion rather than matches. The BCCI, which is the richest cricket board in the world and whose commercial weight within the ICC gives it substantial leverage over the game’s governance, has maintained its position that bilateral cricket requires a political environment that the India-Pakistan relationship has not yet provided. The PCB, which has limited leverage but the world’s most motivated batsmen and bowlers for the India fixture, has argued that cricket should precede rather than follow political normalization. The ICC has expressed hope. The matches, when they occur, are magnificent. The situation, otherwise, is what it is.

What Would Change If They Played More

Sports diplomacy advocates argue that resuming bilateral India-Pakistan cricket would create regular contact between the two countries’ players, media, and publics that would build the kind of human connections that formal diplomacy cannot manufacture. This argument is made after every India-Pakistan tournament match produces moving scenes of players exchanging jerseys, sharing food, and demonstrating the mutual respect of competitors who understand each other’s game deeply. The counterargument is that cricket matches have not historically resolved the political disputes that prevent bilateral series, and that the emotional warmth of match day does not carry over into the ministerial discussions that are needed for real relationship change. Both arguments are true simultaneously, which is the characteristic condition of everything involving India and Pakistan, and which means the cricket situation will continue until something changes that is not the cricket, at which point the cricket will be one of the first things to resume and everyone will feel better immediately, temporarily, and sincerely.

The cricket also functions as a kind of thermometer for the bilateral relationship: when the diplomatic temperature drops sufficiently, the cricket goes first. The 2013 cessation of bilateral series is legible as a political decision made in a specific political environment, and the conditions for resumption would similarly be political rather than sporting. Cricket administrators on both sides understand this but cannot say it publicly because it would acknowledge that cricket is subordinate to politics, which everyone knows but which the ICC’s preferred framing of the sport as transcending politics requires everyone to pretend otherwise. The fiction is maintained because the alternative – openly acknowledging that one of sport’s greatest rivalries is a political hostage – is worse for everyone’s brand than the fiction. So the fiction continues, the matches happen in Dubai, the billions watch, and somewhere in Lahore and Mumbai, a generation of players who could have played a hundred Tests against each other has played a handful of tournament matches and called it rivalry, which it is, and called it enough, which it is not.

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