Cricket Under Siege in India
The recent tragic events in India are casting their pall over India’s most beloved sporting pastime – cricket. An article on BBC Sport today explains that England’s cricket squad may not continue on with their Test series tour of India. For now, the plan is to fly the team to a holding camp in Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates while a security report is prepared and a decision is made as to whether the safety of the English players could be insured in the forthcoming two-Test series.↵↵At this point, it seems doubtful. Though the English Cricket Board’s director, Hugh Morris, has said that he would absolutely send the team back to India once the situation was deemed safe and secure, the players may balk at that idea. Writing in Sunday’s News of the World, England’s captain Kevin Pietersen wrote, “Every time I see the TV footage of the carnage in the Indian city, I realize how close we were to death.”↵
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↵Easy there, Kevin. You weren’t that bloody close. A good 800 miles or so, actually, a nice enough buffer from the front lines. Nevertheless, one can certainly understand why Pietersen and crew are not exactly chomping at the bit to waltz back into such a seemingly unstable situation to compete in a sport that arouses the Indian blood like no other. ↵
↵↵While the future of the England/India Test series remains uncertain, the future of the India/Pakistan series scheduled for January is all but scotched. India was scheduled to tour Pakistan in January of ’09, but given the situation between the two nations after the attacks in Mumbai, and also given the historically combustible passions that surround cricket in both countries, such a tour now is all but impossible. When you consider that prior to 2004 the Indian cricket squad did not tour Pakistan for 15 years due to political tensions, you realize that for these two nations cricket is much more than sport. Increasingly it’s veering into almost unprecedented territory -- an international athletic rivalry that cannot risk actual competition because the real-world implications are simply too dire. ↵
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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