Pakistan’s Sahibzada Farhan performs a shot throughout their Asia Cup 2025 last in opposition to India on the Dubai Worldwide Stadium on September 28, 2025. — AFP
The Board of Management for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Tuesday dismissed solutions to keep away from Pakistan-India video games in Worldwide Cricket Council (ICC) tournaments.
Former England captain Michael Atherton had urged ICC to cease scheduling fixtures that guarantee India and Pakistan face one another in each main match.
“It’s easy to talk about all this, but will sponsors and broadcasters agree to it? In today’s situation, if any major team, not just India, withdraws from a tournament, it will be difficult to attract sponsors,” the report quoted the BCCI official as saying.
Atherton’s remarks got here within the wake of the stress and controversy that adopted final month’s T20 Asia Cup 2025, the place the 2 arch-rivals met 3 times, together with within the last.
The occasion was marred by heated exchanges, whereas India’s captain Suryakumar Yadav additionally refused to shake fingers along with his Pakistani counterpart, Salman Agha.
The animosity prolonged past the lads’s occasion, because the skippers of each ladies’s groups, Pakistan’s Fatima Sana and India’s Harmanpreet Kaur, additionally prevented shaking fingers after their ODI Girls’s World Cup match in Colombo on Sunday.
Writing in his column for The Instances (UK), Atherton acknowledged that the ICC’s determination to schedule India-Pakistan fixtures in world tournaments has robust business and diplomatic motivations.
The 2 groups have confronted one another within the group stage of all 11 ICC occasions held since 2013.
“Despite its rarity — or perhaps because of it — the fixture carries huge economic clout,” Atherton wrote.
“It is one of the main reasons why ICC tournament broadcast rights are valued so highly, around $3 billion for the 2023–27 cycle,” he added.
He additional famous that with bilateral cricket shedding monetary worth, ICC occasions have grown in significance, making the India-Pakistan conflict a vital issue for broadcasters and stakeholders.
Nonetheless, Atherton argued that the match has now develop into a platform for political and emotional show quite than sporting competitors.
“If cricket was once a vehicle for diplomacy, it has now clearly become a proxy for broader tensions and propaganda,” he said.
“There is little justification for a serious sport to manipulate tournament fixtures purely for economic benefit. Given how the rivalry is being exploited, there is even less reason to continue this practice.”
The 57-year-old concluded by urging the ICC to make sure transparency in future match attracts.
“For the next broadcast rights cycle, the fixture draw should be transparent — and if India and Pakistan don’t meet every time, so be it.”
