Can we please not reduce cricket to WWF?

The focus of attention in Sunday’s India-Pakistan encounter in the Asia Cup will again be Sachin Tendulkar. Will the ageing idol, freed from his millstone, play this team game as it should be played? Because clearly in the match against Bangladesh he did not.

To go along at 4 or 5 an over on an easy batting track, where others scored at 6 or 7 on average, and to actually slow down instead of accelerating in the latter half of the Indian innings, when we had 8 or 9 wickets in hand, a batting powerplay to exploit, and minnows as rivals, was as brazen and selfish as a player can get, and it cost India the match.

Can an Aussie player get away with this, even if he is a Ricky Ponting? Not likely, because we know just how much of a rope the Aussie selectors gave Ponting.

Sachin’s post-match explanation was that the pitch was slow and the ball wasn’t coming on to the bat. So Suresh Raina must have been batting on some other planet, because he seemed to find no difficulty in hitting fours and sixes on his way to a quickfire fifty which was definitely more useful to the team than Sachin’s slow century.

For the sake of the Sachin fan club, we can only hope that their idol will now focus on the game and the team’s requirement more than his individual records which he claims he has never coveted. 

For, if it is only a Sachin century that matters, not the result of the game, then we might as well as shoot a Bollywood movie around it instead of going through the charade of such a lopsided cricket match.

But to get back to normal cricket, with the milestone out of the way, will not be easy, because there’s another joker in the pack to contend with on Sunday. This will be the first India-Pakistan encounter after their dubious World Cup semi-final which has come under a cloud following claims that all those suspicious dropped catches that allowed Sachin to lead a charmed life on his way to 85 were more by design than accident.

This is a great pity because time was when an India-Pakistan cricket match used to give people goosebumps. How rapidly this has been devalued, to the extent that the first thought that now comes to mind is fixing.

Right from the time South Africa’s Hansie Cronje blew the lid off fixing, there has been both circumstantial as well as direct evidence of what’s been going on behind-the-scenes. But cricket’s governing body has played hardly any role in exposing this.

On the contrary, the entire cricketing establishment and their friends in the media seem to come out in a chorus of “there’s no shred of evidence” each time there’s a question mark over a particular match or incident or player. Why this rush to deny fixing?

Why not investigate each of these claims because prima facie cricket is tainted? More importantly, why does it always have to be some tabloid in the UK - which is not even primarily into cricket - carrying out sting operations to expose the fixing? Why does the ICC not carry out its own sting operations? The inaction of the cricket boards is almost as if they don’t want anything to interrupt their money-making.

If that’s the case, it’s pretty myopic because the credibility of the game is fast eroding even for diehard fans. Now, each time you watch an ODI, especially one involving Pakistan, it’s as if you are expected to exercise a willing suspension of disbelief as you would with a work of fiction. And that gets harder to do with each new expose.

From the 1996 India-Pakistan World Cup game in Bangalore to the 2003 India-Pakistan World Cup semi-final in Mohali, Pakistan has been involved in one dubious game after another, including the one in England where a sting op resulted in the conviction of three players for deliberate no-balling.

So it is with some scepticism that we look ahead at the coming India-Pakistan clash in the Asia Cup, especially as Pakistan has already qualified for the final. Will the Pakistani fielders again drop sitters of catches and shake their heads vigorously to demonstrate their disappointment at the spills?  Will we willingly suspend our disbelief and put away the nagging thought that this is all maya, just like in a WWF bout with its flying body blows?