Don’t rob Peter; just manage Paul

How sporting and political apartheid can derail the 2025 Champions Trophy and future India Pakistan games.

Cliches have an uncanny way of expressing Catch-22 situations, poetically and prophetically. It also does not matter who Peter or Paul is in this situation and in the Champions Trophy 2025 saga. India and Pakistan, the two dramatis personae, caught in this catch-22 sporting situation of a major global cricket event, are waiting to see who will blink first. A sporting intransigence with political hues now squats on a prickly pole from where climbing down gets trickier and treacherous with every passing day.

It perhaps all started when the game’s global governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), awarded the hosting rights of the 2025 Champions Trophy to Pakistan back in November 2021 with eyes open and perhaps mindful of the then geo-political undercurrents of the region.

The ICC probably intuitively reflected more on hopes and less on fears. Pakistan had last hosted an ICC global event in 1996, ironically with India as a co-host.

With international cricket returning slowly to Pakistan around 2018-19 after an unfortunate forced hibernation, the ICC, in its well established rotational policy of awarding global marquee events, must have backed faith in choosing Pakistan as a host nation after three decades.

The ICC’s Participating Members' contracts for such global events include its standard “force majeure” clause empowering a member nation to avoid touring to the host nation if its government prohibits it from traveling there. That clause in the form of a red herring has once again come to bite ICC in the wrong place, and it now finds itself at an avoidable crossroads from which collateral damage is inevitable.

Less than 90 days before the event's opening game on February 19th, 2025, the schedule is yet to be released, and venues are unknown, creating nervous friction in the ICC headquarters. The possibility of the event being annulled because of the current standoff has only muddied the waters further.

India, a top-ranked team and a significant draw in all ICC events, is firm that it won’t travel to Pakistan and wants all its matches in a neutral location, which is unacceptable to Pakistan. Caught in this deadly crossfire are the sponsors, event partners, and, of course, the forgotten fans nobody cares about. The broadcasters carrying the cross of an ICC event’s eventual financial success are now beginning to panic.

Fate is the echo of our choices and conscience

India has strong political, economic, and social reasons for not playing in Pakistan. Its stated position on terrorism is unequivocal. On the other hand, Pakistan is in anger and denial, outraged with India’s stance, expecting unconditional reciprocity for having visited India multiple times for various ICC events since the bilateral sporting ties were abolished. Call it aspirational naivety or political chauvinism, their hopes were raised for an India visit to Pakistan in February 2025 after playing all its matches in India during the 2023 World Cup, allegedly much without a murmur.

Hosting an ICC tournament of this magnitude in Pakistan and having India, the superpower of world cricket, visit them and play on their soil has naturally been its long-term wish.

It would inevitably bring socio-economic windfalls, not to mention global political leverage, something Pakistan has been desperate for decades until India’s decision not to tour hit them like a thunderbolt.?

Sporting Apartheid and Political Apartheid have a very nebulous boundary and can be dangerous policy doppelgangers.? The problem for the ICC is that an India-Pakistan encounter is the show-stopper and the biggest draw regarding viewership and revenues. Three of the five cricket matches viewed the most in ICC event history have involved India and Pakistan. But that charm is also slowly fading.

Therefore, the high-value global broadcasting rights ( USD 3 Billion + for this cycle) often come with caveats that there will be at least one, if not more, India- Pakistan game in every ICC event of that cycle. Commercial hawks are clear on this fiat, placing a premium on these games before everything else. A super-hyped India – Pakistan clash preceded by a high-decibel advertising blitz months before the match date is par for the course, and that clash is therefore predetermined. It ushers unreal commercial expectations, setting newer benchmarks, and therein lies the problem.

A crown of thorns and a rocky road ahead

Obduracy is contagious, creating an impasse that is not one-time, one-sided, superficial, or easily skirted.

India is hosting multiple major ICC global events till the 2031 cycle ends: the 2026 T20 World Cup, the 2029 Champions Trophy, and the 2031 ODI World Cup. It will also host the T20I Asia Cup in 2027. With this latest impasse, it is now certain that Pakistan will be equally obdurate and will not tour India in the near future and that a hybrid model ( where they both play each other only in a neutral country) will be the only way forward. Unless the respective governments reach a political consensus that allows the teams to travel to each other’s country.

The ICC is caught between a rock and a hard place. Given the chequered history between these two nations, much of this situation is being laid at the ICC leadership’s doorstep, and questions are being asked about whether they should have been more prescient and proactive.

Those questions are more easily asked than answered. But one thing is palpably evident in hindsight. There is a desperate need to develop a new robust ICC protocol for managing India – Pakistan cricket clashes in future ICC tournaments so that the stakeholders and fans are not kept in limbo.

Playing in neutral territories could be the starting step when the hosts are India or Pakistan, but it must be defined early and not left at the last stage. If either team qualifies for the semi-final or the finals, demanding a neutral venue will again become fait accompli with further complexities of the unimagined kind. There is no immediate answer, but it must be thought through, and schedules for ICC marquee global tournaments with such riders must be released with full transparency and clarity.

Given that India will host as many as three major ICC tournaments in the next few years, the time to start discussing and planning is now. A new hosting protocol involving India and Pakistan must be professionally renegotiated, sealed, and delivered at least 12 months before these events begin with severe consequences of dishonoring.

The de facto assumption is that all India-centric ICC events involving an India–Pakistan clash would default to a hybrid model and be played at a neutral venue until an alternate acceptable solution is found that either party cannot rescind. The game must trump commerce and everything else.

Fate whispers in the uncomfortable silence of our choices.

Through an ironic twist of the same fate, it was an ex-Pakistan Cricket Board Chairman who pioneered the hybrid model in his bid to save the 2023 Asia Cup from being hosted out of Pakistan when faced with a similar standoff situation with India. History had then been a harsh judge, or it would seem so now. He would unwittingly become Asian cricket’s Nostradamus. His model, already a grim political reality, will continue to haunt both countries in the coming months unless something better happens unexpectedly.

Meanwhile, the fate of the Champions trophy hangs precariously while the ICC waits to intervene.

In the Circular Logic of War, it doesn’t make an iota of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead. The ICC could well be pondering this logic first and its verdict afterward.