India vs Pakistan – remembering the rivalry
Let's get this out of the way. I used to support the Indian cricket team growing up.
I'm talking about the mid 2000s, Bangladesh were rotting in the pits of cricketing irrelevance, making and then breaking records for losing streaks. If you wanted to watch cricket of the highest order, you had to tune in to Australia, but then that was boring. They literally won all the games, unless they scored 434 in the first innings of an ODI, but that's a story for a different day.
If you wanted proper, competitive cricket, played toe-to-toe for the entirety of the game, you watched India play Pakistan. For a period of 5 years before political tensions rose, India and Pakistan played a number of bilateral series from 2003 to 2008.
Watching these games on TV, on good ol' Neo Cricket for those who remember, where you could almost feel the heat of the bright hot Chennai sun or the warm breeze blowing across the open expanse of Lahore's Gaddafi stadium, these are some of my earliest memories of cricket. This intense period in the India-Pakistan rivalry coincided with my childhood, and after many years of complicated mental gymnastics, I feel good about it.
Why wouldn't I? The list of players who graced this era, and those who disgraced it, goes on and on. The pace attack of Shoaib Akhtar and the ageing duo of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, before the deceptively quick Mohammad Sami and the unplayable Mohammad Asif made their marks. Let's not forget Umar Gul, who hadn't peaked during this time but was around. To complement this attack of lethal pacemen, you had the leg spin of Danish Kaneria. Saqlain Mushtaq was ageing and declining by that time, but I somehow remember everyone wanting his haircut.
India's answer to this was to develop the best batting order ever seen in cricket, before or after. When you open with Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag, then have Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Yuvraj Singh, and Mohammad Kaif following up, you have your bases covered. By the time Dhoni came around, this batting lineup was insane, and it was a lot of fun to watch.
Pakistan boasted a batting lineup of legends too. Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mohammad Yousuf (or Yousuf Youhana, as he was known for a while), and Younis Khan tried their best, but often came second best to India's batting, while Shahid Afridi was always at his unpredictable worst. It felt like they should've done better though, because India's bowling during this time was a patchwork of names everyone remembers without much fondness.
RP Singh, Murali Karthik, Ramesh Powar, Ashish Nehra, Lakshmipathy Balaji, Munaf Patel – I remember these names but I don't really know why. Irfan Pathan was always fun to watch, and it'll forever remain a mystery to me how he could swing the ball so much at 125 kph. Sourav Ganguly opening the bowling didn't make sense to me then, it doesn't make sense to me now. It'll be hard to forget the loose cannon that was Sreesanth, and the fact that he took the catch that won India the 2007 World T20.
Since then, as Bangladesh got better at cricket, I started feeling like I didn't need to support another team anymore. Supporting Pakistan was never a possibility, and India seemed less and less familiar as the old players retired and a breed of new overachievers took over. For a while, Pakistani cricket was in disarray, and while there was a feeling of schadenfreude attached to watching them suffer, the dwindling out of the India-Pakistan rivalry was not as desirable.
Today's match is one of the rare Asia Cup and World Cup encounters where India and Pakistan can now face each other, and funnily enough, after all that has gone on, it's still a mouth watering encounter. India, still the better side, are somehow underperforming once again. Pakistan has a crop of new cricketers who are beyond good, almost amazing, but a bunch of them are injured right now, in classic Pakistan fashion.
It's a shame that these two countries can't get along and the cricket sufferers as a result, but the memories I hold from back in the day make me wish it was all different. Hopefully it will be some day, until then, I guess we cherish the games we get.