It is after 41 years that India and Pakistan are meeting each other today in Dubai for the finals of the Asia Cup.The tournament is played against an uneasy backdrop of posturing and one-upmanship with on-field action being overshadowed by off-field developments that have brought geopolitical tensions into sharp focus and intensified the pressure and unreasonable weight of expectations on players from both teams.
Not even Pakistan will contest the reality that India have comfortably been the strongest team of the tournament. Their perfect 6-0 record amply illustrates their dominance, even if they chose the scenic route home against Sri Lanka on Friday night. They have swatted Pakistan aside on two successive Sundays at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, by seven and six wickets respectively. Ominously for their opponents, India have yet to produce the perfect, complete game.
Heavily reliant on the exuberant stroke-making at the top of the tree of Abhishek Sharma and the magic of left-arm spinner Varun Chakravarthy, India have lived up to their status as the defending World Cup champions and the top-ranked T20I side in the universe. Despite being short of their best – some of it certainly has to do with not having played together for seven months before the start of this competition – they have found ways to breach the tape whenever they have been pushed into a corner, which, truth to tell, hasn’t been that often. Sri Lanka were within one run of arresting a seven-match winning streak, but like champion sides invariably do, India dug deep and came up trumps even though both their frontline pacers were unavailable and there was a touch of the ragged to the reserve quicks.
Pakistan have historically been a bowling-heavy outfit, and it’s no different this time. Shaheen Shah Afridi has shown signs of returning to his best at the tournament’s climax, Haris Rauf is starting to channel his angst constructively, and spinners Abrar Ahmed and Saim Ayub, who have had four ducks in six innings, have controlled the middle overs quite well against most teams. But India aren’t ‘most teams’; despite everything that’s gone on around them, including a visit for under-achieving skipper Suryakumar Yadav to match referee Richie Richardson’s chamber for a hearing into a code of conduct breach of which he has been found guilty, the Indians have retained concentration, invoking the tunnel vision that has helped them ignore events beyond their control.
Cricket is more than religion and politics between India and Pakistan now. It is an ideology, with angry words and barbs traded back and forth as they have met twice in the wake of the Pahalgam attacks and Operation Sindoor. True, matches between these two teams should not be ignored as these matches take place. However, things are a little different when it comes to a final: with a trophy on the line, the cricket itself comes into hyper focus, about who can do what to get the result on the field.
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