Cricket can lower the pitch

NEW DELHI: Five years ago a joint Indo-Pak cricket team played an exhibition match in Colombo. They wanted to allay the apprehensions of the Australian and the West Indian teams after they had refused to play their 1996 World Cup matches in the island nation following a bomb blast prior to the start of the event. Today the two teams can''t even visit each other.Nor can they play a cricket match in a third country! So much for sportsmanship, sports diplomacy, a sporting spirit... Gujarat''s killer quake may have thawed the ice between the traditional rivals. But only in the political arena. Ironically, the cricket pitch continues to be infested with mistrust, suspicion and a big `No'' to any attempts at rapproachment between Indian and Pakistani cricket. This, in a year when sports (soccer) has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize and when two bitter enemies - Bosnia and Serbia - exchanged shirts on the Indian soccer fields, just a few weeks ago. So much for people-to-people contact the two nations profess from time to time. Should Indian and Pakistani cricket teams play in a third country or should they insist on visiting each other. The debate will start all over again with the cancellation of India''s trip to Sharjah to play Pakistan for raising funds for the Gujarat earthquake victims. The government''s argument in refusing permission to the Indian team going to Sharjah could as well be that when it rejects a third party intervention in Indo-Pak relations, why allow a neutral venue to make profits through an Indo-Pak face-off on the cricket field. The solution? Find ways to encourage the teams of the two countries to play more in each other''s backyard. Maybe, as starters, India and Pakistan should field combined teams and play in the subcontinent against international sides, till the two countries realise their fans are mature enough to view it as a sport and not a war. The hockey teams too should do the same. A decade ago, former secretary of the Pakistan Cricket Board Arif Abbasi first mooted the idea of India and Pakistan finding neutral venues to play as he feared that the strained relations between the two countries might not allow them to visit each other at regular intervals. Now it is time to crack the myth. For cricket is sports, not politics. And cricket could bind, unlike politics. External affairs minister Jaswant Singh once remarked that the future of Indo-Pak relations would be determined by the synergy of small steps and one of the steps was to allow over a thousand Pakistanis to visit Mohali to watch the two teams play in 1999. They were all from the other side of the Punjab. A pity, only cricket tours seemed to be adversely affected, whereas other delegations of the two countries keep visiting each other regularly. Officials of the two cricket boards seem to have absolutely no problem visiting each other to chalk out itineraries. Only, the players can''t cross the border. Post-quake diplomacy, it''s now time for cricket diplomacy.