The excitement is palpable – it’s an India-Pakistan cricket clash after all. But is the forced jingoism aggravated by the unhealthy political climate adding to the fervour or is the hype really worth it? Sarah Waris sees both sides.

Let’s cut to the chase. If two randomly picked-out teams had played the kind of snoozefests that India and Pakistan have in the last decade, the matches would have been tucked into a deep corner of our memory, and would never have been mentioned again. They have been that boring. Ever since the last bilateral series between India and Pakistan in 2012/13, the two sides have met each other 12 times across formats with India winning on nine occasions.

The lop-sided ledger in India’s favour is not the only talking point here. The margins of defeats have nothing to suggest the games were memorable either. India have won their matches against Pakistan by eight wickets, seven wickets, 76 runs, five wickets, six wickets, 124 runs, eight wickets, nine wickets and 89 runs. Two of the three Pakistan wins have been easy victories too: by 180 runs in the 2017 Champions Trophy final and by 10 wickets in the T20 World Cup last year. The only time the two sides played out a close game was in the 2014 Asia Cup, when Pakistan won a last-over thriller by one wicket, chasing 246.

It’s hard to pinpoint why the games have been so monotonously one-sided, though. Both teams have boasted some of their greatest white-ball players. Why has playing against their arch-rivals not driven both sides to new heights? Perhaps it is an inability to live up to pressure – suggesting that the very real hype gets to the players – or maybe it’s just an unfortunate instance of either one of the two teams having an off-day in the match that is long anticipated. Whatever the reason, the on-field rivalry has scarcely matched the off-field build-up for the longest time.

Are fans losing interest in the action itself? Do they instead remember the infamous yawn of Sarfaraz Ahmed in 2019, recall the 2017 final mostly for the Jasprit Bumrah no-ball memes, associate the 2018 Asia Cup clash with Hardik Pandya’s injury that derailed his career more than the happenings of the bat and ball?

But, it’s still India and Pakistan. It’s still an ego battle with so much history that has been fed to us right from our school days. It’s still India v Pakistan where even an age-group game of Gulli-danda will have supporters rooting for their respective countries. And that is why, despite the long list of one-sided cricket matches between the two sides, the moments of brilliance are latched on to all the same. It might not have been the case if two randomly picked-out teams were participants instead, but with the blue and the green, it’s just not the same.

There was Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s brilliant new-ball spell in 2013 at Birmingham, and even though he picked up 2-19, the way his swing troubled Nasir Jamshed remains etched in the mind. There is of course Virat Kohli, and his litany of classics – his World Cup century in 2015, his mesmeric, Amir-defying 46 in the 2016 Asia Cup and then his fifty in the T20 World Cup that year – further establishing him as a great. The 2017 Champions Trophy started off with Rohit Sharma’s fine 91 and ended with an even better hundred by Fakhar Zaman in the final. It was all about Bhuvneshwar yet again in the league game of the 2018 Asia Cup, his 3-15 bowling Pakistan all out for 162, and Shaheen Afridi was a class apart last year.

He has troubled the best of batters in his short career and has won the ICC Men’s Cricketer of 2021 as well. However he goes from hereon, that spell will never leave his side, and will be talked with awe and horror for years to come. We are all nostalgia merchants, scooping out the extraordinary even from the commonness.

On the flip side, is the commonness appreciated even more because of scarcity? Is every game being treated like a carnival because the deprived cricket lovers can’t pick and choose the moments they wish to remember? Fans live on emotions, connect with the opposition like it’s a personal war, take the head-to-head stats seriously, and shower performers with love like they are their own. There is no doubting the heated emotions during the India-Pakistan clashes, with television sets broken in anger on the one hand, and the victorious soldiers, on the borders, tuning in and celebrating the victory with ecstasy on the other. It is the greatest rivalry, right from 1947.

You want more, but there’s only so much you can get. And you make the most of what does come your way by latching onto every small moment of success that would otherwise not even find a mention on the smallest columns of the newspaper.

The Future Tours Programme for 2023/27 was released recently, and expectedly there are no bilaterals between India and Pakistan, leaving the two teams to only face off in multi-nation events. And even while the hype has remained the same, the lack of any series has made it tougher to build a cricketing narrative around India-Pakistan clashes: the extended battles between two players for four weeks, the story of comebacks where a side can be 36 all out and still go on to breach the Gabba and complete a series win for the ages. Here, an off-day can only be rectified months or years later when the two sides meet again.

When they do the matches are marketed to the hilt and tickets are sold out within seconds. You almost wonder if that would have been the case had games been more frequent, the novelty not as great. The ICC too have been unabashed, placing the two sides in the same group ever since tours stopped between them.

While matches with Pakistan are scarce, on the other hand, India will play 20 of their 38 Tests against either Australia or England in the next FTP. The ‘Big Three’ have produced equally contested matches of a high quality at a rate surpassing what India and Pakistan have managed, but with so many matches played between the three, they have arguably begun to lose their lustre. How well do you remember England’s 3-2 and 2-1 series defeats to India in early 2021, filled with high-octane performances and yet now fading into obscurity. Even India’s twin series wins in England last month feel less vibrant now than the defeat to Pakistan last winter. Will a sense of boredom creep in further, and will attention spans fluctuate because of too-muchness? It happened when India and Sri Lanka would faced off so frequently in the early part of the decade, despite the presence of legends on both sides.

And, that is why, till normalcy returns and India and Pakistan have to starve to play against each other, the excitement around their battles will continue growing. It might not live up to the billing, as it so often has failed to, and it might remain overhyped, but the world will watch, the fans of the victorious team will celebrate more than they would normally, and players will either be elevated to demi-gods for the smallest feat or torn apart for the slightest error. It doesn’t make sense but that’s just India-Pakistan for you.

Whenever Kohli and Babar are within hundred metres of each other, it dominates the front pages. Whenever Rishabh Pant, in his inimitable manner, chuckles at something alongside Shaheen Afridi, it becomes a source of conversation for weeks. There’s a reason this happens. India and Pakistan, based on the quality, should not really be THE game that matters. But because it is India and Pakistan, it is THE game that still matters. So much so that you sort of get why the hype is what it is. And no matter how many cricketing reasons you try to find, nothing will ever explain it.