On Sunday, June 18, 2017, much of India
mourned a stunning cricket defeat at the hands of bitter rivals, Pakistan. The
latter beat the home team by 180 runs in the finals of the ICC Champions
Trophy, 2017, in what was Pakistan’s first global 50-over title since the 1992
World Cup.
Meanwhile, another game unfolded in the
same city (London), between the same rival nations, on the same day. The Indian
men’s hockey team simultaneously took on their Pakistani counterparts in a
Hockey World League semi-final match, going on to beat them 7-1 in the process;
a game which went widely unnoticed in the shadow of its ‘bigger sporting
brother’.
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Some may say that this is perhaps an
exaggeration of the events. However, let’s look at the bizarre facts that
surround the scenario. It took a simple Google search of ‘India vs Pakistan’ to
yield absolutely no results, for three pages, before finding (buried on the
fourth page of the search results) a post from thequint.com, dated June 16, 2017, titled, ‘India vs
Pakistan Super Sunday, Not Just Cricket But in Hockey Too’. If you hit the
‘news’ tab in Google, there are seven results listed above a hockey-related
article, including one that talks about how Bollywood felt about India’s
cricket defeat; and even then, the hockey related piece starts with how Team
India may have failed to triumph at the Oval, but their stick wielding
counterparts did rather well.
One can’t help but wonder then, what the
status really is, of what is considered to be the national sport, and whether
the ‘rivalry’ only extends to cricket.
We have to blame this on the media, the
broadcasters, the hockey federation and cricket fans. Who else is remaining?
Basically a lot of people are one dimensional and cannot get their heads out of
cricket. Rivalry is a beautiful essence in sports, but Indians are very
orthodox in supporting them.
Girish Prabhu, Account Manager
India Pakistan rivalry matters in any
form of sport. Cricket is no doubt a bigger sport in India, and hence more
widely covered. However, the singular cricket focus has led to our decay in
other sports, including hockey. Improving that, to me, is more important than
either cricket or hockey rivalries, in both of which India lags behind Pakistan
in head to head records.
Vishal Singh, Entrepreneur
